Morality and the Brain: The Right Hemisphere and Doing Right.

Morality, the set of shared attitudes and practices that regulate individual behavior to facilitate cohesion and well-being, is a function of the brain, yet its localization is uncertain. Neuroscientific study of morality has been conducted by examining departures from moral conduct after neurologic insult and by functional neuroimaging of moral decision-making in cognitively intact individuals. These investigations have yielded conflicting results: Acquired sociopathy, a syndromic surrogate for acquired immorality, has been reported predominantly after right frontotemporal lesions, whereas functional neuroimaging during moral decision-making has demonstrated bilateral activation. Although morality is bilaterally represented, the right hemisphere is clinically more critical in light of focal lesion data suggesting that moral behavior is subserved by a network of right frontotemporal structures and their subcortical connections. Evolution may have endowed the brain with bilaterally represented but unilaterally right-dominant morality. The unilateral dominance of morality permits concentration of an essential social cognitive function to support the perceptual and executive operations of moral behavior within a single hemisphere; the bilateral representation of morality allows activation of reserve tissue in the contralateral hemisphere in the event of an acquired hemispheric injury. The observed preponderance of right hemisphere lesions in individuals with acquired immorality offers a plausible hypothesis that can be tested in clinical settings. Advances in the neuroscience of morality promise to yield potentially transformative clinical and societal benefits. A deeper understanding of morality would help clinicians address disordered conduct after acquired neurologic insults and guide society in bolstering public health efforts to prevent brain disease.

Blending computational and experimental neuroscience.

The launch of the United States' BRAIN Initiative brings with it a new era in systems neuroscience that is being driven by innovative neurotechnologies, increases in computational power and network-style artificial intelligence. A new conceptual framework for understanding cognitive behaviours based on the dynamical patterns of activity in large populations of neurons is emerging.

Putting big data to good use in neuroscience.

Big data has transformed fields such as physics and genomics. Neuroscience is set to collect its own big data sets, but to exploit its full potential, there need to be ways to standardize, integrate and synthesize diverse types of data from different levels of analysis and across species. This will require a cultural shift in sharing data across labs, as well as to a central role for theorists in neuroscience research.

Exploring the causal underpinnings of determination, resolve, and will.

In this issue of Neuron, Parvizi et al. (2013) show that mild electrical stimulation using depth electrodes in the brains in human patients reliably elicits a highly specific configuration of cognitive-emotional-motivational responses to persevere in the face of danger. The underlying mechanisms involve distributed networks, both cortical and subcortical.

Modulating social behavior with oxytocin: how does it work? What does it mean?

Among its many roles in body and brain, oxytocin influences social behavior. Understanding the precise nature of this influence is crucial, both within the broader theoretical context of neurobiology, social neuroscience and brain evolution, but also within a clinical context of disorders such as anxiety, schizophrenia, and autism. Research exploring oxytocin's role in human social behavior is difficult owing to its release in both body and brain and its interactive effects with other hormones and neuromodulators. Additional difficulties are due to the intricacies of the blood-brain barrier and oxytocin's instability, which creates measurement issues. Questions concerning how to interpret behavioral results of human experiments manipulating oxytocin are thus made all the more pressing. The current paper discusses several such questions. We highlight unresolved fundamental issues about what exactly happens when oxytocin is administered intranasally, whether such oxytocin does in fact reach appropriate receptors in brain, and whether central or peripheral influences account for the observed behavioral effects. We also highlight the deeper conceptual issue of whether the human data should be narrowly interpreted as implicating a specific role for oxytocin in complex social cognition, such a generosity, trust, or mentalizing, or more broadly interpreted as implicating a lower-level general effect on general states and dispositions, such as anxiety and social motivation. Using several influential studies, we show how seemingly specific, higher-level social-cognitive effects can emerge via a process by which oxytocin's broad influence is channeled into a specific social behavior in a context of an appropriate social and research setting. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and Social Behavior.

Control: conscious and otherwise.

Social psychologists have shown human decisions to be sensitive to numerous ordinary, possibly nonconscious, situational contingencies, motivating the view that control is largely illusory, and that our choices are largely governed by such external contingencies. Against this view is evidence that self-control and goal-maintenance are regularly displayed by humans and other animals, and evidence concerning neurobiological processes that support such control. Evolutionarily speaking, animals with a robust capacity to exercise control - both conscious and nonconscious - probably enjoyed a selective advantage. Counterbalancing data thus point to an account of control that sees an important role for nonconscious control in action and goal maintenance. We propose a conceptual model of control that encompasses such nonconscious control and links in-control behavior to neurobiological parameters.

Self-representation in nervous systems.

The brain's earliest self-representational capacities arose as evolution found neural network solutions for coordinating and regulating inner-body signals, thereby improving behavioral strategies. Additional flexibility in organizing coherent behavioral options emerges from neural models that represent some of the brain's inner states as states of its body, while representing other signals as perceptions of the external world. Brains manipulate inner models to predict the distinct consequences in the external world of distinct behavioral options. The self thus turns out to be identifiable not with a nonphysical soul, but rather with a set of representational capacities of the physical brain.

Self-representation in nervous systems.

The brain's earliest self-representational capacities arose as evolution found neural network solutions for coordinating and regulating inner-body signals, thereby improving behavioral strategies. Additional flexibility in organizing coherent behavioral options emerges from neural models that represent some of the brain's inner states as states of its body, while representing other signals as perceptions of the external world. Brains manipulate inner models to predict the distinct consequences in the external world of distinct behavioral options. The self thus turns out to be identifiable not with a nonphysical soul, but rather with a set of representational capacities of the physical brain.