Abstract
Background. Animals meet the same sensory classes under different physiological and social conditions and select different actions. How experience changes the mapping from stimulus to behavioral program, without adding any act to the motor repertoire, is a central question for mechanistic neuroendocrinology. Proposal. We separate three operations. Open denotes the physiological state in which a neural substrate is writable; write denotes durable, activity-dependent modification of that substrate; and read denotes recovery of the modified architecture into a competition among behavioral programs for common effectors. We propose that local inhibitory configuration, comprising GABAa receptor subunit composition and neurosteroid tone, contributes to that competition by determining how a broadly distributed permissive signal is transformed at each node. Evidence and predictions. Prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) supply a tractable mammalian case, since reproductive maturation, pair bonding, selective aggression, parental care and partner loss repeatedly remap social stimuli onto different outputs, each with an accessible neuroendocrine handle. The critical mechanistic requirement is non-proportional receiver function: when all channels respond proportionally to a common field, that field alters overall gain while leaving unchanged which program wins. Conclusions. The framework yields discriminating physiological tests linking life-history transitions, local receiver properties and behavioral selection, and it remains agnostic about whether any single molecular signal is universal across taxa.