#metastability

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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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?)

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.

Buridan's Ass--the name given to a paradox: that a hungry and thirsty ass placed exactly in the middle between water and hay will be unable to choose because neither choice is preferable or closer; he will therefore die of thirst and hunger.  Indecision is a terrible thing.

Situations like Buridan’s Ass arise in digital electronics when inputs to a system are equal and the system is suspended in an equilibrium state, unable to produce an output.  The condition is known as “metastability.”

Word origin:  The paradox is named for Jean Buridan (c.1300-c.1361), who studied and taught at the University of Paris, but the paradox was not original to him. Aristotle used a version of the paradox in his De Caelo (On the Heavens) "a man, being just as hungry as thirsty, and placed in between food and drink, must necessarily remain where he is and starve to death." 

More:

Indecision

Materials that emit rainbows

Mechanochromic luminescent (MCL) materials change their color in response to a change in their environment, like pressure and temperature. To date, most MCL materials only change between two colors, limiting their applications. The international research team comprising of chemists at Osaka University and physicists at Durham University has developed tricolor-changing MLC materials. Not only that, the developed materials exhibited efficient thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) and allowed high performance organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) devices. The findings can be read about in Chemical Science.

"Most MCL materials generate two colors by switching between a stable state and one metastable state. To realize multi-color MCL, more metastable states are necessary," explain Professors Youhei Takeda and Satoshi Minakata at the Department of Applied Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering of Osaka University. To create these states, the chemist team led by Takeda and Minakata designed a new molecule by applying a conformationally-switchable phenothiazine (PTZ) as the donor.

"By making the use of a promising and unique acceptor, dibenzophenazine (DBPHZ), which we previously developed, we made a PTZ-DBPHZ-PTZ triad," said Takeda. "In this structure, the PTZ moiety could take two distinct conformers, which therefore in principle creates in total four metastable states as a whole molecule."

Melting solid below the freezing point

Phase transitions surround us -- for instance, liquid water changes to ice when frozen and to steam when boiled. Now, researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science* have discovered a new phenomenon of so-called metastability in a liquid phase. A metastable liquid is not quite stable. This state is common in supercooled liquids, which are liquids that cool below the freezing point without turning into a solid or a crystal. Now, scientists report the first experimental evidence of creating a metastable liquid directly by the opposite approach: melting a high-pressure solid crystal of the metal bismuth via a decompression process below its melting point.

The results, reported in the January 23, 2017, issue of Nature Communications, could be important for developing new materials and for understanding the dynamics of planetary interiors, such as earthquakes, because a metastable liquid could act as a lubricant strongly affecting the dynamics of the Earth's interior.

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