Recent advances in neuroscience challenge the old narrative about trauma, revealing that the brain is a predictive organ constructing reality from past experiences and current inputs. This predictive processing framework suggests that consciousness floats atop a vast system of unconscious predictions and prediction errors. In trauma, bad memories generate predictions that shape current experience, but therapies can leverage prediction errors to update these memories. For example, EMDR therapy uses adaptive information processing to connect stuck traumatic information with new, corrective experiences—essentially a prediction error. Similarly, Flash approaches introduce pleasant experiences alongside small pieces of the memory, creating repeated mismatches that gradually reprocess the memory. The disruptions in EMDR 2.0 may also induce prediction errors by making the client’s current experience differ from their expectation. Even psychedelics and parts work (where different self-aspects interact) might function by generating such mismatches. The therapist’s compassion and attunement could likewise create prediction errors that facilitate healing. Ultimately, healing appears to occur across experiential mismatches, and predictive processing already aids in restoring senses lost to disease, clarifies perception, explains functional disorders, and dissolves the artificial divide between organic and psychogenic causes of pain. This framework offers powerful new avenues for making peace with the past.
Hoping the predictive brain update bad memories. Turns out, the story we've been telling ourselves about the neurology of trauma doesn't make sense anymore, based on what we've learned the past 25 years about brain evolution, function, structure, memory reconsolidation, neuroplasticity, and the predictive brain. How we understand perception of our external world and internal world has changed profoundly. There's a growing consensus around the core idea that our nervous system is predicting and constructing our reality for us. And while this has some really disturbing implications related to things like our felt sense of free will and our illusion of objective observation, it has potentially remarkable implications for how humans might heal. Predictive processing might be able to do what no other theory of mind has, explain how we construct reality and possibly even our own selves. Central to this understanding is the role that prediction error plays at all levels of abstraction. And for the purpose of what I'm talking about now, the vast majority of predictions and prediction errors occur outside of direct consciousness and awareness. Prediction errors are central to perception, memory formation, learning, movement of all types, and every experience imaginable. We can think of consciousness, awareness, experience, and our own identities as floating on top of our predictive system, the way a full matte floats in a pool. Remember that the brain is in a black box. Its job is to predict what's about to happen. And to do this, it uses everything it's ever learned, as experienced, is currently it's experiencing, including what it can construct from our right now senses. When a part of a bad memory comes into awareness, the nervous system predicts what is about to happen next. Those predictions based in part on everything that has ever happened shape what you right here right now are experiencing, including your emotions. In EMDR therapy, at the core of the adaptive information processing model, the stuck information in the trauma connects to right now information that already knows better. Do you know what that is? It's a prediction error. You're literally having the experience of a repeated prediction error. You can put that in Brusekker terms or in predictive processing terms, add all those up, and that's what might update permanently the experience of that memory. In Flash approaches, we bring a tiny piece of the memory into working memory, and we have a pleasant experience over and over and over. That's a prediction error that we can leverage over and over to allow each micro slice of the memory to be experienced differently. Add them all up, and we get a fully and adaptively processed memory, that when accessed in a future state will generate a different set of predictions with different body budget allocations. What if the disruptions of attention in EMDR 2.0 are taxing working memory at all? What if they induce a prediction error between the clients right now experience and the expectation? Every demo that I've seen of EMDR 2.0, the client is literally having an experience that is different than the expectation in the bad memory. What if the disruptions create a prediction error? And that is what is facilitating the update of the information. What if psychedelics generate prediction errors between the right now experience and expectation? What if parts work works because it allows parts of you to have relational experiences with other parts of you that are different than the expectation? What if parts work creates prediction errors? What if your stance in session, your compassion, your attunement create prediction errors? What if predictive processing is right? What if everything Brusekker says is simply a level of practical abstraction down from everything predictive processing implies? There's little doubt that we heal across experiential mismatch. What we've learned from predictive processing is already helping people restore senses, loss to disease. It's showing us clearer than ever what perception is. It explains functional disorders. It removes the organic, psychogenic boundary for pain and strongly implies some places to go check out if we need to make better peace with the past. Let's go check out.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The traditional understanding of trauma neurology is outdated; predictive processing now explains how the brain constructs reality.
Prediction errors—mismatches between expectation and experience—are central to perception, memory, and healing.
Therapies like EMDR, Flash, and parts work may work by creating prediction errors that update traumatic memories.
Predictive processing has broad implications, from restoring lost senses to explaining functional disorders and removing the organic-psychogenic boundary in pain.
Summary:
Recent advances in neuroscience challenge the old narrative about trauma, revealing that the brain is a predictive organ constructing reality from past experiences and current inputs. This predictive processing framework suggests that consciousness floats atop a vast system of unconscious predictions and prediction errors. In trauma, bad memories generate predictions that shape current experience, but therapies can leverage prediction errors to update these memories.
For example, EMDR therapy uses adaptive information processing to connect stuck traumatic information with new, corrective experiences—essentially a prediction error. Similarly, Flash approaches introduce pleasant experiences alongside small pieces of the memory, creating repeated mismatches that gradually reprocess the memory. 0 may also induce prediction errors by making the client’s current experience differ from their expectation.
Even psychedelics and parts work (where different self-aspects interact) might function by generating such mismatches. The therapist’s compassion and attunement could likewise create prediction errors that facilitate healing. Ultimately, healing appears to occur across experiential mismatches, and predictive processing already aids in restoring senses lost to disease, clarifies perception, explains functional disorders, and dissolves the artificial divide between organic and psychogenic causes of pain.
This framework offers powerful new avenues for making peace with the past.
FAQs
The core idea is that the nervous system predicts and constructs our reality, shaping perception, emotions, and experience based on past learning and current input.
Prediction error occurs when current experience contradicts expectations from a bad memory, and repeatedly experiencing this mismatch can update and permanently change the memory.
In EMDR, the adaptive information processing model uses prediction error by connecting stuck trauma information with right-now information that knows better, facilitating memory update.
Flash approaches bring a tiny piece of a bad memory into working memory while repeatedly having a pleasant experience, creating prediction errors that allow each micro slice to be experienced differently.
Disruptions may induce a prediction error between the client's current experience and the expectation from the bad memory, facilitating the update of information.
Psychedelics generate prediction errors between current experience and expectation, while parts work creates relational experiences between different parts of oneself that differ from expectations, both aiding healing.
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