Antipsychotic medications at therapeutic concentrations remain the foundation of standard-of-care first-line pharmacotherapies for schizophrenia spectrum illness [1]. However, therapeutic mechanisms beyond the D2 dopamine receptor synapse have been challenging to characterize, particularly with respect to cognitive systems neurophysiology.

In that vein, neurovascular-dependent measurements of brain function (e.g., with PET or fMRI) have yielded important insights into the nature and topography of antipsychotic action [2] but are obtained on seconds-to-minutes timescales. In contrast, magnetoencephalographic techniques with spatially well-resolved data collected on a millisecond temporal scale provide direct windows into rapid dynamic neural processes and oscillatory activity, thereby permitting the parsing of moment-to-moment neural responses to cognitive operations in a more detailed manner. Work in this area relying on the exceptional temporospatial resolution of magnetoencephalography (MEG) can temporally pinpoint and, thereby, further elucidate established cortical disturbances in schizophrenia (e.g., prefrontal working memory-related dysfunction) by defining millisecond epochs of specific cognitive subprocesses and linking them to neural function. This work can also demonstrate how antipsychotic therapy exerts precise, temporally-constrained effects on these disturbances [3].

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