Anosognosia and the Determinants of Self-Awareness

Dear Colleagues,

I was invited by Brain Sciences to serve as a Guest Editor for a Special Issue of the journal devoted to Anosognosia and the Determinants of Self-Awareness. I accepted this invitation with pleasure because I think that anosognosia remains one of the most complex and intriguing disorders observed in patients with brain damage. Some reasons behind this complexity include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. The term anosognosia (lack of disease awareness) seems to indicate a unitary phenomenon, but all authors acknowledge that this term denotes several selective defects, because patients can be unaware of some deficits but not of others. This fact seems to highlight that conscious awareness is a mechanism that is intrinsic to each brain function and can be influenced by different (neurophysiological, psychological, and social) factors in different forms of anosognosia.
2. Anosognosia (of hemiplegia) is the first defect attributed by Babinsky (more than one century ago) to a lesion of the right hemisphere, but the relations between anosognosia and right hemisphere lesions are still controversial.
3. Anosognosia is not only important because it allows us to understand the brain mechanisms underlying conscious awareness, but also because it has a negative impact on the recovery and rehabilitation processes.

For all of these reasons, and in consideration of the excellent contributions that you have already provided to this area of research, I would really be very pleased if you could participate in this project.

Prof. Dr. Guido Gainotti
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Brain Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.