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)
 
@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 the peripheral 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 you 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.
 
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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?
 
Duggit said:
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.


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.
Click to expand...
Thank you, I found that very intersting.
 
Emporio Alnino said:
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?
Click to expand...
Instictively I have been using it for years.I didnt know, way before I discovered TMS. I just knew sitting in discomfort wasnt helpful, so I used art to distract my brain. when I am in flow I just create. The pain came back after, however I am always more relaxed after hanging out in flow state for a while.
 
@Duggit Thanks for bringing How Emotions Are Made by Barrett in to this thread. I found out about that book while reading Dr Monty Lyman’s description of how our brains are prediction machines (Chpt 4) in his fantastic book “Immune Mind” (another great suggestion from someone’s post here in the TMSwiki Forum). The thing I’m struck by with Barrett’s work and neuroscience in general is that new research results are constantly being made that make previous, current or mainstream explanations seem at best incomplete and sometimes misleading. Another thing that strikes me is how, in the absence of complete “scientific” understanding of TMS, wiki participants have (and share) effective methods and “tools” (like the SEP) that work for becoming pain free from TMS. They work empirically, in the absence of knowing precisely how the brain is doing the stuff that it does to bring on physical pain.
The latest research that floored me (and helps me better understand how the pain-free tools work) is the discovery/uncovering of the importance and centrality of the colliculus (a small under appreciated brain structure) and its main function of anticipating physical input, a whole new understanding of our predictive mind. Their quote: (from article about the paper in https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-10-tiny-brain.html)
In “predictive processing: the brain doesn't just wait for sensory input and react to it, it constantly predicts what's about to happen and prepares for it,"
I’m also fascinated by the explanation for why this is happening, it’s energetically efficient. Organisms have evolved to use the least energy necessary to survive and reproduce. I guess our species’ brain hasn’t finished evolving for the social systems we find ourselves in.
 
@Duggit thank you for sharing book titles. I have ordered 7 1/2 lessons about the brain and How emotions are made by Lisa Barrett. I love learning about the brain its fascinating.
 
I love how all the new research on the brain supports Sarno's original clinical findings. In the absence of such research, Sarno used the Freudian model to explain what was going on in the mind. Of course the Freudian model is not evidence-based and could never hold up to the riggers of testing needed for outcomes in controlled studies, which we needed to lend validity to Sarno theory and methods. Still, I love the Freudian model, though it is more like using a fairy tale to describe a complex set of body-mind interactions.
 
Ellen, I agree with everything you said above about Sarno and Freud. Perhaps you would find a new book regarding Freud interesting. It does not mention Sarno or TMS, but it says a lot about Freud and modern neuroscience. The book, which was published earlier this year, is titled The Only Cure.

The author is Mark Solms. He is both a Ph.D. neuroscientist and a fully credentialed and experienced psychoanalyst. The "Cure" to which the title refers is, unsurprisingly, modern psychoanalysis. A prominent neuroscientist has called Solms the world's greated living authority on Freud. One reason for that, I think, is that for more than half a century the leading English language translation of Freud's writings from German was a 24-volume set titled The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Two years ago, under the auspices of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Solms came out with The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

Solms does not hesitate in The Only Cure to point out things that Freud got wrong, e.g., "Freud thought that the root of every mental disturbance was frustrated sexual desire. He was flat wrong." But Solm's has high praise for Freud's prescience in getting a lot if things right about how the mind works. He laments that modern neuroscientists too often fail to give Freud credit for that, e.g., "We will see how modern neuroscience has taken up these Freudian ideas--often arriving at them independently, using different methods, which is one sort of vindication. At other times it has simply followed Freud's footsteps without realizing it. And sometimes it has been fully aware of its debt, yet chosen to hide it."
 
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