News & Comment

As long-awaited advances in psychiatric genetics begin to materialize in force, promising to steer us safely to the best of times in psychiatric disease research, many pharmaceutical companies pull away from the challenge of drug development, threatening to bring us to the worst of times for the field. There is a real danger of missed opportunities and a sense of urgency for defining a clear path forward.

This commentary reviews the neural processes underpinning the learning of social norms, as well the enforcement of these norms through second-party and third-party punishment. The authors suggest how these structures may have formed during our evolutionary history.

Neuroscience seeks to understand how neural circuits lead to behavior. However, the gap between circuits and behavior is too wide. An intermediate level is one of neural computations, which occur in individual neurons and populations of neurons. Some computations seem to be canonical: repeated and combined in different ways across the brain. To understand neural computations, we must record from a myriad of neurons in multiple brain regions. Understanding computation guides research in the underlying circuits and provides a language for theories of behavior.