Perspectives

This paper provides recommendations for researchers on responsibly conceptualizing, contextualizing and communicating issues related to race and ethnicity, including examples of important terms and frameworks.

Recent discoveries highlight the skull bone marrow, linked to the CNS via osseous channels, as a key neuroimmune compartment. Here, the authors discuss the anatomy, functions and implications of this immune reservoir on CNS health and disease.

This paper characterizes two distinct philosophies underlying previous work on how Bayesian computations are linked to neural data, highlighting how different theories may be motivated by different tacit assumptions and thereby explain different data.

Despite diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, women remain underrepresented as academic leaders in neuroscience. In this Perspective, Bourke, Spanò and Schuman discuss current European initiatives and propose further actions to support women’s career progression in STEM.

Recent progress in astrocyte biology requires a more cohesive conceptual framework. This Perspective introduces a ‘contextual guidance’ paradigm in which astrocytes are key to adaptive modeling of neural circuits in response to state changes.

Oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) are mostly known for their ability to differentiate into myelinating oligodendrocytes. Here, the authors discuss the multiple functions of OPCs beyond their precursor cell function in the healthy and diseased CNS.

Genome-wide association studies for brain and behavioral traits have provided insights but also present challenges related to privacy and misuse. We discuss these ethical issues and how to mitigate potential negative consequences.

The use of field-standard approaches in neuroscience and psychology can exclude participants from research, biasing our understanding of brain–behavior relations. Here the authors discuss how we might address inequity in our scientific methodology.

Human neuroscience methods (for example, electroencephalography, functional near-infrared spectroscopy and electrodermal response) are biased to exclude data from dark skin and coarse hair—traits common in Black people—and possibly people with racial trauma. We outline strategies to prevent a biased ‘unusable data crisis’.

Palser et al. show that at the top 100 journals in psychology and neuroscience, male editors and those from the USA outnumber female editors and those affiliated with other countries, at rates significantly beyond their participation in the fields.

In this Perspective, Tononi and colleagues argue that while knowledge of elementary mechanisms is enough to predict everything about the dynamics of a system, only the analysis of causal structures can provide a coherent account of ‘what caused what’.

Mandates to include both sexes are a critical step toward improving the translational value of preclinical research, but they will not succeed without intentional, large-scale shifts in scientific incentive structures and publishing standards.

Recent research has discovered new connections between cerebellar neurons, revealed abundant inputs related to reward, demonstrated a cellular solution for the temporal credit assignment problem and restructured theories of cerebellar learning.

The Organization for Human Brain Mapping presents its best practices report for reproducible EEG and MEG research, highlighting issues and main recommendations in this Perspective.

Most psychiatric genetics research has contrasted diagnosed ‘cases’ and controls. Here the authors describe alternative approaches leveraging large population-based cohorts and examining disease-related endophenotypes.

A deep network is best understood in terms of components used to design it—objective functions, architecture and learning rules—rather than unit-by-unit computation. Richards et al. argue that this inspires fruitful approaches to systems neuroscience.

Many studies focus on neural associations yet understanding the brain will ultimately depend on discovering the causal interactions underlying its functionality. Moving from association to causation will thus be essential for advancing neuroscience.

When crossing the street, you can ignore the color of oncoming cars, but for hailing a taxi color is important. How do we learn what to represent neurally for each task? Here, Niv summarizes a decade of work on representation learning in the brain.

This paper first reviews the work on brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) for restoring lost motor function and then provides a perspective on how BMIs could extend to the new frontier of restoring lost emotional function in neuropsychiatric disorders.

The authors review the most recent measurement and manipulation approaches that enable links between synaptic plasticity and learning to be examined, and they propose potential future approaches to tackle this endeavor.