Why your brain creates trauma | Lisa Feldman Barrett
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Oct 20, 2025
Discover how trauma influences the brain's ability to predict future threats. Leading neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that trauma is rooted in the brain's predictions rather than just the body. She highlights how repeated trauma reinforces neural connections, making negative predictions more likely. Instead of solely focusing on physical healing, she emphasizes altering these predictive models through therapy to break the trauma cycle. This perspective offers new hope for transforming traumatic experiences and finding effective healing pathways.
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insights INSIGHT
Trauma As A Predictive Construction
Trauma is a constructed experience produced by the brain's predictive model.
The brain overweights an adverse event so it re-experiences and strengthens that prediction.
insights INSIGHT
Brain Keeps The Score, Body Is The Scorecard
The phrase 'the body keeps the score' mislabels where trauma is stored.
Barrett argues that the brain keeps the score while the body merely reflects the brain's constructed experience.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Update Predictions To Heal
Change your brain's predictions to alter traumatic experience rather than 'fixing' the body.
Use methods that create new experiences to update predictive models and make them more flexible.
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Aided by best-selling psychology books of the last decade, such as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, discussions about trauma and how to deal with it have entered popular public discourse. From police departments to school classrooms, trauma-informed approaches have taken center stage.
But leading neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett challenges the popular notion that trauma resides solely in the body. She asserts that trauma is rooted in the brain’s predictions and the construction of our experiences. When an adverse experience becomes traumatic, the brain heavily weighs and anticipates that experience in its future predictions. This ongoing prediction and re-experiencing of the traumatic event strengthens the neural connections associated with it, making the predictions more likely to occur in the future.
Rather than focusing on the body as the site of healing, she suggests that changing the brain’s models of prediction is what needs to be addressed to break free from the cycle of trauma. By understanding the role of predictions and the brain’s plasticity, Feldman Barrett offers hope for transforming traumatic experiences and finding new, lasting paths to healing.
0:00 Why your brain creates trauma
1:44 Does your body keep the score?
2:53 Effective treatments for trauma
4:33 Trauma IS in your head (but everything else is too)
Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/the-well/neurosc...
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About Lisa Feldman Barrett:
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is among the top 1% most-cited scientists in the world, having published over 250 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Dr. Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior. She is the recipient of a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for transformative research, a Guggenheim Fellowship in neuroscience, the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and from the Society for Affect Science (SAS), and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (APA). She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and a number of other honorific societies. She is the author of How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, and more recently, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
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