Does the Body Keep the Score?

Some of you are going to read the neuroscience paper that I included at the bottom and immediately think: “Wait… hasn’t Rick been saying this for years?”

Yes. Yes I have. 😄

The paper was recently published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience and it is called The Body Does Not Keep the Score: Trauma, Predictive Coding, and the Restoration of Metastability.

I am attaching it below because I genuinely think it represents an important moment in the neuroscience conversation around trauma, prediction, and healing.

I know I am preaching to the choir a little bit here.

Many of you, who have been faithfully reading Neuro Notes, already know these ideas. You have heard me talk about predictive processing, nervous system flexibility, updating, energy, and behavior as prediction for a long time now.

But maybe sharing my work with other people didn’t always go the way you had hoped.

Maybe it sounded too abstract or too far outside the traditional trauma conversation.

Well, now some extremely smart people in neuroscience are publicly connecting these same dots.

So please share this widely. Because I genuinely think this conversation is critically important.

For a long time, much of the trauma conversation has centered around a powerful idea. That trauma is buried somewhere deep inside us. Stored, trapped, or held in the body.

And healing became about releasing it.

To be fair, the idea of “the body keeps the score” resonated with people for a reason. Many people do experience trauma physically. Tight chests, racing hearts, or chronic tension.

The body absolutely participates in trauma. But the title of this paper basically screams, “Hey… we may need to rethink some things.”

The authors argue that trauma may not be best understood as something physically stored in the body like an emotional fossil buried in tissue. Instead, they suggest trauma is better understood as a problem of prediction and flexibility.

Does that sound familiar?

See, I am not the only one who seems to find prediction at the center of almost every question.

If we think of trauma as pain that is trapped inside us, then healing becomes about finding it and letting it out.

Find the wound. Locate the hidden memory. Release the trapped emotion.

But if trauma is understood as a nervous system becoming rigid around predictions of danger, uncertainty, overwhelm, or energy loss, then healing starts looking very different.

Healing becomes less about digging deeper into pain and more about helping the nervous system move again.

The article repeatedly points toward this idea of flexibility. The authors describe trauma as a loss of “metastability,” meaning the brain loses some of its ability to move fluidly between states, interpretations, responses, and possibilities.

That language immediately caught my attention because it aligns so closely with what I have been trying to communicate for years.

Healthy nervous systems are flexible!

They loosen predictions when new information arrives.

Trauma often narrows and restricts that flexibility.

The brain becomes more and more convinced that danger is coming. It starts locking onto possible threats and paying less attention to signs of safety. Eventually, the nervous system starts preparing for bad outcomes before they even happen.

And eventually the system can lose flexibility.

That does not mean anything is wrong with the person. It means their brain is trying to make things feel more manageable.

That is a very different way of seeing things.

The article even states directly, “What endures after trauma is not a memory lodged in non-innervated tissue but a collapse of flexibility.”

I wanted to stand up and clap when I read that sentence.

Because this is the exact direction neuroscience has been pointing for a while now.

Behavior is not evidence of where someone has been hurt. It is evidence of what their brain is trying to prevent.

The brain is constantly trying to anticipate what will happen next while managing energy, uncertainty, and survival demands. Trauma changes those predictions. It changes how strongly the brain expects danger.

That means healing may not require “finding buried pain.”

It may require helping people learn that flexibility, confidence, and strong emotions can be safe.

In other words, helping the brain learn that not every future event has to look like a past event.

That should change how we think about interventions too.

The article explores how movement, meaningful challenges, and focused attention may help the brain and body become more adaptable and resilient.

Not because they “release trauma from the body.” But because they help the brain become flexible again.

That is a really big difference.

And I think some healing models unintentionally keep people scanning for what’s wrong instead of looking for what’s strong.

They are always trying to figure out what is the problem. Always looking for the deeper reason. And always feeling like there must be one more hidden thing underneath it all.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes that kind of reflection can help. Understanding your pain and putting words to your experience is kind of important.

But I also think there are moments when the brain doesn’t need to do more digging.

It needs new experiences that help it remember life can feel different.

Our brains need more moments that help us feel safe. More experiences where not knowing what happens next does not automatically feel dangerous.

The article ends with a line I absolutely love, “Healing, in the end, is not the erasure of what happened, but the return of movement.”

Doesn’t that feel aligned with the Neuro Informed approach?

Because flexibility is the ability to calibrate, update, restore, and move again.

Maybe healing is less about past hostility and more about future possibility.

If this article connected with you, please share it. I really do think we are watching an important change happen in the neuroscience conversation around trauma and healing.

A lot of people are still working from older models that frame healing as endlessly searching for what is broken. But understanding the brain through prediction, energy, and adaptability opens the door to a much more hopeful and practical conversation.

If you want to keep exploring these ideas, now is a really good time to do it because this article is going to push a lot more people toward learning about what we call Neuro Informed. Be ready for those conversations. Keep learning by checking out the trainings, eBooks, and other resources on my website training page and consider a paid subscription to Neuro Notes. We are just getting started.