Interesting example of theorising in paper by Kotler et al. (2026), “The body does not keep the score”. I haven’t read van der Kolk’s (2014) classic The Body Keeps the Score, which they critique, but I don’t think that critique is central to their claims. I also don’t think their analysis needs Friston’s “free energy principle”.
Key quotes:
“… trauma over-weights the precision of danger priors: the brain assigns excessive confidence to threat predictions, constraining inference based on the prior premise of enduring danger. The result is hypervigilance, flashbacks, and avoidance—symptoms of a system caught in self-confirming predictions.”
“Internal threat expectations dominate the search for—and attention to—sensory evidence of danger; unattenuated interoceptive signals (racing heart, tight chest, etc.) are interpreted as confirmation of danger rather than imprecise noise. The ‘score’ the body appears to keep is thus an artifact of circular inference: the brain predicts pain, senses arousal, and takes that arousal as proof that pain persists. The body participates in trauma, but as messenger, not archive.”
“If the old story held that ‘the body keeps the score,’ the emerging narrative elides somatic chauvinism. It’s subtler, and more hopeful. The body does not keep the score; the brain keeps predicting it. When prediction becomes too rigid, experience repeats itself, not because it is stored, but because it cannot yet be reinterpreted. Flow—and other states that expand metastability offer the nervous system a chance to update its model of the world, to reassign precision where it belongs, and to rediscover safety in uncertainty.”
Flow is often attributed to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, and is the name for the feeling of absorption in an activity that people tend to experience when they perceive that
“the environment contains high enough opportunities for action (or challenges), which are matched with the person’s own capacities to act (or skills). When both challenges and skills are high, the person is not only enjoying the moment, but is also stretching his or her capabilities with the likelihood of learning new skills and increasing self-esteem and personal complexity.” (Csíkszentmihályi & LeFevre, 1989, p. 816)
An example of when people frequently experience this flow state is when driving. There’s a lot to unpack in the “metastability” aspect of the theory. They describe this in terms of neural states, being able to “fluidly switch among semi-stable network states” (Kotler et al., 2026, p. 1), but their examples seem to signal that they mean being flexible in responses to situations, e.g., not only perceiving potential threats.
References
Csíkszentmihályi, M., & LeFevre, J. (1989). Optimal experience in work and leisure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 815–822.
Kotler, S., Mannino, M., Fox, G., & Friston, K. (2026). The body does not keep the score: Trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 20, 1812957. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking Press.