Discover Top Posts Tagged with #metastability

I love how this is a scientifically accurate description of false vacuum decay.

#star trek lower decks #metastability #idw #ryan north #physics

The Body Does Not Keep the Score: Trauma, Predictive Coding, and the Restoration of Metastability By Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn F

The Body Does Not Keep the Score: Trauma, Predictive Coding, and the Restoration of Metastability By Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox, Karl Friston For nearly a decade, the idea that "the body keeps the score" has shaped public and clinical understanding of trauma. It is an enticing metaphor-implying that experience is literally inscribed in flesh, that the body bears the scars of what the mind cannot face. Yet recent advances in computational and systems neuroscience reveal that this image, while emotionally compelling, is biologically inaccurate. The body does not store trauma; the brain dynamically reenacts it through maladaptive inference. What endures after trauma is not a memory lodged in tissue but a collapse of flexibility-a loss of metastability, the brain's ability to fluidly switch among semi-stable network states. The traumatic memory is real, but it is entrenched in deep, defensive ravines in the landscape of our beliefs and thoughts.The landscape in question is a free energy landscape where every (Bayesian) belief is equipped with a measure of its plausibility. On this view, making sense of the worldand our bodies -entails a process of (Bayesian) belief updating that can be read as minimizing free energy or, in the vernacular, finding apt explanations for our sensations that are the least surprising, or the most plausible.When trauma strikes, the brain's Bayesian mechanics, as described by the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference -the continuous anticipation and minimization of surprise-can lock into a narrow regime of threat expectation. Functional imaging studies show this concretely: in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), neural networks become hypersynchronous, dominated by recurrent loops between the amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex. Signal variability drops, connectivity patterns harden, and the brain's dynamic repertoire shrinks.In computational terms, trauma overweights the precision of danger priors: the brain assigns excessive confidence to threat predictions, constraining inference based on the prior premise of enduring and ever present danger. The result is hypervigilance, flashbacks, and avoidance-symptoms of a system caught in self-confirming predictions.

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To restore mental health is therefore not to "release" stored emotion but to reestablish dynamic equilibrium-to recover the brain's ability to move with graceful agility over a landscape of beliefs, commitments and intentions.From this view, trauma is a disorder of prediction, not storage. Predictive coding reframes perception as active inference: the brain does not passively register the world but actively predicts it, adjusting only when errors arise -or acting to resolve such errors. For example, a reflexive movement fulfils the brains predictions that our limbs should be in a particular place; thereby minimizing prediction error (and free energy). However, the brain can also resolve prediction errors by affording them less precision. A process known as sensory attenuation. In trauma, or ability to attenuate sensory precision is lost and prediction errors are mis-weighted. Internal threat expectations dominate the search for -and attention to -sensory evidence of danger; unattenuated interoceptive signals-racing heart, tight chest-are interpreted as confirmation of danger rather than imprecise noise. The "score" the body appears to keep is thus an artifact of circular inference: the brain predicts pain, senses arousal, and takes that arousal as proof that pain persists. The body participates in trauma, but as messenger, not archive. This dynamic interpretation aligns with the broader field of embodied cognition. The body and environment are extensions of the brain's predictive loop, scaffolding thought through action. Yet embodiment is active and transient-it does not imply storage. Trauma-related somatic symptoms are better understood as mis-calibrated feedback between prediction, action, and sensation, not as remnants of the past frozen in muscle or fascia. The distinction matters. Where the storage model leads to metaphors of exorcism-finding and purging what was buried-the inference model leads to training: recalibrating precision, retraining expectations, and expanding the brain's capacity for adaptive variability.A more compelling thesis -for how emotional maps are truly embodied -comes from Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH). The central premise of the SMH is that while the body provides the territory for emotion, the "maps" (e.g. the storage and representation of emotional experience) are constructed in the nervous system through distributed processing centers, including visceral, brainstem, and cortical networks.Mechanistically, the re-emergence of a strong feeling -central to the experience of PTSD -can be explained using Damasio's notion of convergence-divergence zones (CDZs) (Damasio, 1989;Meyer & Damasio, 2009).

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Healing, in this light, is not excavation but exploration.Understanding trauma as a dysregulation of metastability may also dissolve a longstanding paradox in mental health: why so many diverse treatments-exposure therapy, EMDR, mindfulness, exercise, psychedelics, flow-inducing pursuits-can all succeed. Each, in its own way, restores flexible coupling between large-scale networks, quiets maladaptive self-referential loops, and rebalances neuromodulation. The mechanism is not specific content but dynamic reorganization. The nervous system learns to balance oscillation and homogenization, inhibition and excitation.Framing trauma dynamically does not diminish the suffering it causes, but it grounds that suffering in mechanisms that can be directly addressed. Interventions can target network flexibility, not metaphorical scars. This perspective also guards against pathologizing normal adaptation: most humans recover because their brains retain the capacity for metastable inference. Our task is to support that process, not convince people that their bodies are indelibly marked by pain.Future research should quantify metastability as a clinical biomarker-tracking signal variability, entropy, and network switching before and after interventions. Early findings from psychotherapy and flow-based programs suggest that successful recovery coincides with restored variability in resting-state connectivity and increased crossnetwork integration. These objective indices could unify trauma research under a single measurable principle: health equals flexibility.If the old story held that "the body keeps the score," the emerging narrative elides somatic chauvinism, is subtler, and more hopeful. The body does not keep the score; the brain keeps predicting it. When prediction becomes too rigid, experience repeats itself, not because it is stored, but because it cannot yet be reinterpreted. Flow-and other states that expand metastability-offer the nervous system a chance to update its model of the world, to reassign precision where it belongs, and to rediscover safety in uncertainty.Healing, in the end, is not the erasure of what happened, but the return of movementwithin the mind, within the networks, within action, within life itself. van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking Press.

#healing #PTSD #brain #body/mind #The Body Keeps the Score #metastability #health equals flexibility #what the brain predicts

D/disabled people, do you have any experiences of metastability and to what degree? (read under cut for explanation!)

Yes, it is a prominent feature of my life as a D/disabled person

Yes, it affects me to a moderate degree

Yes, but it is only a small part of my life as a D/disabled person

No, I do not

I am not D/disabled, but I will reblog for a wider sample size

I am D/disabled + do not wish to answer so I will reblog for a wider sample size

Voting ended onAug 30, 2025

So, I’m Disabled, and I recently had a difficult time with my assistive tech not working as it should, but I am a politician and sociologist at heart so I’m turning those Feelings TM into some easy research!

Please do interact, I am interested to see answers and commonalities between them, and if you do want to share your thoughts in the reblogs, this is totally optional but I’d be fascinated to see if the degree of metastability (explanation below) that you experience correlates to the severity of your disability/ies and the other life factors that may be impacting that.

Metastability: originally a physics term, but I find it applicable to human lives, particularly queer, trans, global majority, and Disabled lives. It’s basically where your life is more susceptible to unpredictable events of destabilisation than others; you live closer to a state of chaos than people with greater protection through privilege do.

For D/disabled people, this may look like your cochlear implants/hearing aids getting stuck dead out of battery and you/no one near you signs. Your wheelchair breaking. Your essential medication being unavailable.

How to interact with this post: you can do up to four things - reblog for a wider sample size, like it, answer the poll, or give your experiences of metastability in the reblogs (please, do share your experiences and thoughts if you feel comfortable!)

I’m going to tag all the peeps I can remember off the top of my head for as big a sample size as I can have. (Hey guys! Reblog to help a girl out?)

@slumberofthesea @trans-tim-stoker @soulsofthedead @baskabytheanglerfish @somanyquestions-featuringanxiety @head-of-oncology @jasminuwu @ririwithrice @howbutwaithow @teathattast @dustybookcover @hawthorne-swift-enthusiasttt

#disabled #society #disability #metastability #please reblog #please read #research #actually disabled

Shapeshifting materials: Using light to rearrange macroscopic structures

OIST researchers create self-assembling molecules which can be broken down by ultraviolet light to recombine into novel macroscopic shapes.

Traditional chemistry is immensely powerful when it comes to producing very diverse and very complex microscopic chemical molecules. But one thing out of reach is the synthesis of large structures up to the macroscopic scale, which would require tremendous amounts of chemicals as well as an elaborate and complicated technique. For this purpose, scientists rely instead on "self-assembling" molecules, compounds that can interact with other copies of themselves to spontaneously congregate into spheres, tubes or other desired shapes. Using this approach, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) now reports in Chemical Communications new self-assembling molecules that can transform into novel, exotic and previously unobserved shapes by simply using UV light to force them to rearrange differently into "metastable" states.

When designing self-assembly structures, scientists typically aim for the state of lowest energy -- or "ground state," in which the structure would be at its highest stability. Less stable shapes are usually dismissed as incorrect and undesirable. However, this "ground state" being very stable makes it arduous to break down the structure if you wish to alter its shape. In this research, OIST scientists inserted a weakness into their ground-state self-assembled structures, resulting in structures requiring only a small nudge to collapse. In this case, the nudge is the use of ultraviolet light to snip a specific bond between two atoms within the molecule, splitting the structure into smaller fragments. The fragments are then able to co-assemble into less stable -- called metastable -- but novel and exotic shapes.

#metastability

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