04/20/2026
The Body Does Not Keep the Score: Trauma, Predictive Coding, and the Restoration of Metastability
“Functional imaging studies show this concretely: in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), neural networks become hypersynchronous, dominated by recurrent loops between the amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex. Signal variability drops, connectivity patterns harden, and the brain's dynamic repertoire shrinks.In computational terms, trauma overweights the precision of danger priors: the brain assigns excessive confidence to threat predictions, constraining inference based on the prior premise of enduring and ever present danger. The result is hypervigilance, flashbacks, and avoidance-symptoms of a system caught in self-confirming predictions.”
The Body Does Not Keep the Score: Trauma, Predictive Coding, and the Restoration of Metastability By Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox, Karl Friston ...
