New 2026 Research- the brains predictive coding, pain and the flow state

Margot!!

Margot!!

Well known member
THIS is so interesting. I hope is interesting to this community too.
Our Brain looks for pain, if the nervous system is aroused at all, the brain assumes the pain is still present. It predicts it based on the state of our nervous system!
The flow state helps to reset the nervous system and when you approach a topic instead of avoiding, your brain interprets nervous system arousal as a call to action. When you avoid a topic your brain interprets that as danger and the amygdala fires up (fight flight or freeze).
This is just a snapshot of what was interesting to me AND if someone has a different interpretation let's talk about it!🧠

Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability
Steven Kotler1, Michael Mannino1,2*, Glenn Fox3 and Karl Friston41Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, United States, 2Miami Dade College, Miami, FL, United States, 3University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States, 4University College London, London, United Kingdom

You can read it here https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957/full (Frontiers | The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability)
 
karipro said:
What is the “flow state”? Aka- how do we reset our nervous system according to the study (layman’s terms)
Click to expand...
the flow state happens when someone is fully emersed in a project. An hour feels like 5 minutes. This is consistent with the everything on TMS and mindbody syndrome. 🤓
 
@Margot!! I was so jazzed to see your post about the Frontier article. I read it a while back and was very excited about the way they brought in the statistics of neural landscapes. It makes so much sense. I don't have time to write more just yet but wanted to thank you for bringing it up.
 
It looks to me like the article is a criticism of an aspect of Bessell van Der Kolk's eleven year old book The Body Keeps the Score. One of the coauthors of the article, neuroscientist Karl Friston, is the leading authority on the predictive coding model of how the brain works. That leads me to what I am going to say next even though I doubt that it will be in interest to anyone here.

Margot!! said:
Our Brain looks for pain, if the nervous system is aroused at all, the brain assumes the pain is still present. It predicts it based on the state of our nervous system!
Click to expand...
No, under the predictive coding (aka predictive processing) model of how the brain works, your brain does not "look for" pain. It creates the pain--all pain including a broken arm or sprained ankle.

No, your brain does not predict based on the state of your peripheral nervous system. The nervous system data that the brain receives about what is going on inside your body has no inherent meaning by itself. Another leading authority on predictive coding is neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. Apart from her own research, she has coauthored a predictive processing paper with Karl Friston. Barrett explained how the brain goes about interpreting the ambiguous data that theperipheral nervous system sends to spinal cord neurons for transmission to the brain. She wrote in her book Seven And A Half Lessons About the Brain at p. 66: "Faced with these ambiguous scraps of sense data, your brain must somehow figure out what to do next. Remember your brain's most important job is to control you body so you stay alive and well. . . . Luckily, your brain has an additional source of information at its disposal: memory. Your brain can draw on your lifetime of past experiences--things that have happened to you personally and things you have learned about from friends, teachers, books, videos, and other sources."

In her earlier book How Emotions Are Made, Barrett discussed chronic pain in the absence of physical injury. She said that your brain, drawing on your lifetime of past experiences, erroneously predicts that the incoming data about what is going on in a part of your body means you have tissue damage or are in imminent danger of suffering tissue damage there, and to help you stay alive and well your brain creates pain to induce you take it easy so that you don't injure yourself if your are uninjured, or if you are injured so that you don't make the injury worse or interfere with the natural healing process. And if your brain does not correct its erroneous prediction and keeps misinterpreting new data as it come in, the pain becomes chronic. This modern neuroscience model of how the brain works sheds light on Sarno's astute clinical observation from years earlier that his TMS patients did not get better unless they rejected the notion that the cause of their pain was structural. As long as your predicting brain thinks you have might have tissue damage or might be in imminent danger of tissue damage, it will create pain to protect you.
 
This is a fascinating topic! The connection between predictive coding, pain, and the flow state raises interesting questions about how the brain interprets signals and how attention may influence our experience of discomfort. I wonder whether activities that help people become deeply focused could also support a healthier relationship with persistent pain, although individual experiences can vary. Even simple activities like playing Slope can create a sense of concentration where you become absorbed in the moment. Has anyone explored practical ways to use the flow state as part of a mind-body approach to pain management?
 
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