Does the Body Keep the Score, or Does the Brain Predict It? |
Take our Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Test
Find a therapist to heal from trauma.
The brain is not a passive sensory machine; it is a prediction machine.
A traumatised nervous system ignores brain prediction errors and fails to update when safety returns.
The felt sense of trauma in the body is circular: The brain predicts danger, then reads its arousal as proof.
“The body keeps the score” has become one of the most recognized phrases in trauma culture (1). It serves as the title for courses, continuing education programs for therapists, and lectures for the general public. The idea that the body keeps the score is especially compelling because many trauma survivors experience trauma in the body: clenched jaw, racing heart, frozen posture. The suffering is vivid, physical, and noticeable.
A recent paper by Kotler and colleagues in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience has challenged the familiar metaphor (2), proposing that trauma is more about prediction than physical storage. So how do we integrate this new understanding presented by Kotler and colleagues with the lived experiences of many trauma survivors? Does this paper invalidate their experiences?
The Brain Is a Prediction Machine
The brain is not a passive sensory machine, waiting for the world to activate it. It is a prediction machine. It uses prior experiences to anticipate what will happen next. Based on these predictions, the brain gets the body and the nervous system ready for the next moment. In predictive coding, the brain does not simply ask what is happening or wait for it to occur. It asks, “Given what I have lived through, what is most likely happening right now?” That prior expectation shapes perception before conscious........