Understanding “how” the ventral pathway achieves this requires that we define one or more levels of abstraction between full cortical area populations and single neurons. For example, we hypothesize that canonical subnetworks of ∼40K neurons form a basic “building block” for visual computation, and that each such subnetwork has the same meta function. Even if this framework ultimately proves to be correct, it can only be shown by getting the many interacting “details” correct. Thus, progress will result from two synergistic lines of work. One line will use high-throughput computer simulations to

systematically explore the very large space of possible subnetwork algorithms, implementing each possibility as a cascaded, full-scale algorithm, and measuring performance in carefully considered benchmark object recognition tasks. A second ATR inhibitor line will use rapidly expanding systems neurophysiological data volumes and psychophysical performance measurements to sift through those algorithms for those that best explain the experimental data. Put simply, we must synergize the fields of psychophysics, systems neuroscience, and computer vision around the problem of object recognition. Fortunately, the foundations and tools are now available to make it so. J.J.D. was supported by the U.S. National Eye Institute (NIH

NEI R01EY014970-01), The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). D.Z. was supported by an Accademia Nazionale dei PD0325901 price Lincei-Compagnia di San Paolo Grant, a Programma Neuroscienze grant from the Compagnia di San Paolo, and a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant. N.R. was supported by the NIH NEI and a fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “
“Chronic pain is a major public health problem, with epidemiological studies reporting about one fifth of the general population to be affected both in the USA and Europe (Breivik et al., 2006). The condition is debilitating and causes not only considerable personal suffering old but also enormous socioeconomic costs, estimated to reach an annual 60 billion U.S. dollars in lost productivity. It is a figure that only stands to increase with the aging populations

of the Western world (Krueger and Stone, 2008). In addition to these bleak statistics, pharmacological management of chronic pain conditions has seen only limited progress in the last decades. Despite the seemingly bewildering array of nonprescription analgesics being advertised and sold in dedicated drugstore aisles, treatment of pain is still very much dominated by two classical medications: opioids and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Only a handful of compounds acting on novel, distinct molecular targets have emerged since the 1960s, for instance gabapentinoids, TprVI agonists, or cannabinoids (Kissin, 2010). Many of these painkillers have serious side effects, such as neurotoxicity (e.g., TrpVI agonists) and addictive properties (e.g.