New Study Challenges What It Means for the Body to Keep Score

What if the Body Is the Messenger, Not the Archive?

That is the argument behind a 2026 paper published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience with a deliberately provocative title: “The Body Does Not Keep the Score.” Rather than treating the body as an archive of trauma, authors Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox, and Karl Friston propose that persistent physical reactions may be better explained through predictive processing. The brain is constantly making predictions about what is happening and what might happen next, and after trauma, the authors argue, it can become overly confident that danger is coming. A racing heart or unfamiliar bodily sensation may then be interpreted as evidence of threat, triggering more arousal, which gives the brain even more evidence that something is wrong.

The body still reacts and the fear still feels physical, but under this model, the body is helping carry the message rather than storing the memory itself. There is an important catch, though. The paper did not experimentally prove that the body does not keep the score. It is a theoretical paper, and its broader proposal that PTSD involves reduced “metastability,” meaning less flexibility in how the brain moves between different states, has not yet been directly demonstrated in people with PTSD.

Feeling Trauma Isn’t the Same as Storing It

Questioning literal trauma storage does not mean the physical effects of trauma are imaginary. In fact, van der Kolk and psychiatrist Alexander McFarlane made that case in a 2026 paper published in World Psychiatry, arguing that somatic symptoms and sensory dysregulation are central features of PTSD. Research has linked PTSD with differences in autonomic regulation, stress hormones, sleep, pain, inflammation, and cardiovascular health. A meta-analysis of 108 studies involving 6,484 people, for example, found small differences in cortisol regulation among people with PTSD, while another meta-analysis involving more than 151,000 people found an association between PTSD and greater coronary heart disease risk.

Where things get complicated is causation. Brain-imaging studies have found differences in regions including the hippocampus and amygdala among people with PTSD, but finding a difference after someone develops PTSD does not prove trauma created it. A well-known study of identical twins found that smaller hippocampi also appeared in the trauma-unexposed twins of veterans who developed PTSD, suggesting that some brain differences may represent pre-existing vulnerability rather than scars left by trauma. Other prospective research has found evidence that biological changes can develop following trauma too, suggesting that pre-existing vulnerability and acquired changes may coexist.

How a Metaphor Ended up in Our Hips

This is where the science and the popular version of “the body keeps the score” begin to separate. Somewhere along the way, “the body reacts to trauma” became “the body stores trauma.” From there, it was a short jump to trauma living in the hips, hiding in fascia, or waiting for the right stretch to set it free. Yet there is currently no convincing evidence that autobiographical traumatic memories are literally stored inside muscles, fascia, hips, or organs.

That does not mean trauma cannot contribute to muscle tension, pain, digestive symptoms, or other physical experiences. The distinction is about the proposed mechanism. Persistent bodily reactions can arise through interactions between the brain, nervous system, stress responses, perception, and behavior without requiring a traumatic memory to be physically lodged inside a particular tissue. The difference may sound semantic, but it matters once a metaphor that helps describe an experience starts being treated as an anatomical explanation for it.

A Treatment Can Work Even if the Explanation Doesn’t

There is another wrinkle: some therapies that focus heavily on the body may actually help people with PTSD. A 2023 review of 29 studies found that body- and movement-oriented interventions were associated with moderate reductions in PTSD symptoms, although the results varied considerably and almost every included study raised some concern about bias. Yoga offers a similar example. A 2024 meta-analysis of 20 randomized trials found improvements in self-reported PTSD symptoms, but those benefits were not statistically supported when symptoms were rated by clinicians.

Neither finding proves that movement physically releases stored trauma. Yoga, breathing, exercise, and body awareness could help through attention, exposure to bodily sensations, stress regulation, sleep, or several mechanisms at once. This is an easy distinction to lose when discussing wellness treatments: evidence that a treatment helps and evidence for the theory explaining why it helps are two separate things.

So, Does the Body Keep the Score?

The most accurate answer may be both less catchy and more interesting than a simple yes or no. Trauma can have physical consequences, and PTSD can affect how people experience their heartbeat, muscles, sleep, pain, stress, and surroundings. The nervous system can continue reacting to danger long after the danger itself has disappeared. What the evidence does not currently show is traumatic memories sitting inside muscles, fascia, hips, or organs waiting to be released.

The new 2026 paper does not settle the question either. Predictive processing offers one possible explanation for why trauma can continue to feel so physical without requiring the body to act as a memory bank, but parts of that model still need to be tested. Maybe “the body keeps the score” was never the problem. It captured something people genuinely experience: the past can continue to show up physically in the present. The problem came when a powerful metaphor started being treated as a biological mechanism.

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