Synchrony in schizophrenia: a window into circuit-level pathophysiology

• Schizophrenia is characterized by deficits in local and long-range synchrony.
• These deficits provide circuit-level phenotypes.
• Animal models can link synchrony deficits to cellular mechanisms.

As a complex neuropsychiatric disease with both hereditary and environmental components, schizophrenia must be understood across multiple biological scales, from genes through cells and circuits to behaviors. The key to evaluating candidate explanatory models, therefore, is to establish causal links between disease-related phenomena observed across these scales. To this end, there has been a resurgence of interest in the circuit-level pathophysiology of schizophrenia, which has the potential to link molecular and cellular data from risk factor and post-mortem studies with the behavioral phenomena that plague patients. The demonstration that patients with schizophrenia frequently have deficits in neuronal synchrony, including deficits in local oscillations and long-range functional connectivity, offers a promising opportunity to forge such links across scales.