Some time ago, I started my Attachment Insights series, in which I aim to provide examples of the most prevalent discussions surrounding attachment theory and science (and, increasingly, trauma), together with the most accurate and up-to-date explanations.
In my thirty-eighth and most recent post, I would like to have a closer look at a thought-provoking new paper by Kotler, Mannino, Fox and Friston (2026) with the deliberately provocative title “The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability.” One of its authors is Karl Friston, a leading figure in computational neuroscience and the originator of the free energy principle. Together, the authors revisit one of the most influential ideas in contemporary trauma discourse, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (2014), as part of what they call an “I find this an especially valuable contribution because it does what I try to do throughout my Attachment Insights series: it takes a widely embraced idea seriously, acknowledges what is genuinely useful about it, and only then carefully updates the underlying neurobiology in light of current science.
Let’s have a closer look!
Summary
For nearly a decade, the phrase “the body keeps the score” has shaped how the public and many clinicians understand trauma. It is an emotionally compelling metaphor, and it carries some real and important truths. But recent work in computational and systems neuroscience suggests that, taken literally, the image is biologically inaccurate.
The body proper does not store trauma in its tissues. Instead, the brain dynamically re-enacts it through maladaptive prediction. What endures after trauma is not a memory locked in flesh, but a loss of flexibility. A collapse of metastability, the brain’s ability to fluidly switch among semi-stable network states.
In what follows, I first want to honour what van der Kolk and the “body keeps the score” framework get right. Only then will I turn to where the metaphor misleads, and how a predictive, and crucially also a social, account of trauma offers a subtler and, I believe, more hopeful story.siliency? Let’s have a closer look!
Click on the link below to read the entire post on Substack.
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