Brain Bases of Conscious Awareness and Self-Representation

Dear Colleagues,

What is consciousness? What is the self? How do they relate to one another? While philosophers have pondered upon these questions for millennia, scientists have only recently been able to explore the connection quantitatively through lesion studies, electrophysiology, and measurements of the brain’s activity.

At a basic level, it may be said that consciousness is comprised of arousal and awareness, with a hierarchy of consciousness corresponding to increasing brain complexity. Minimal consciousness is attributed to animals with simple nervous systems that register raw internal and external sensory experiences – light, dark, hunger, warmth, and fear - with little awareness of their meaning. Awareness of the self, and by extension, self-representation is necessary to be able to construct a lifelong narrative of experiences centred on this abstract concept.

In recent years, a number of neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural basis of self-recognition processes in humans, including the bodily self and the mental self. The bodily self, and sense of agency appear to be based on the brain regions that process the visual-perceptual information about body parts and that match the visual and proprioceptive information with the movement information in the premotor cortex. Self-representation, or the mental self, is thought to be most closely associated with medial prefrontal cortex and cortical midline structures.

In conjunction, these investigations have contributed to our current understanding of the neural correlates of conscious awareness and self-representation in neurotypical and pathological states, but many questions remain unresolved in our understanding of the neural correlates of these multifaceted concepts and the interplay between them.

For this Special Issue, we aim to bring together cutting-edge research on the neural mechanisms of consciousness and conscious awareness, as related to the self, as well as self-representation in the brain. We welcome contributions from psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy that address typical brain function or psychopathology in development and across the lifespan. We are accepting scientifically rigorous and novel original papers on behavioral, psychophysiological and neuroimaging data, as well as reviews and meta-analyses. 

Dr. Istvan Molnar-Szakacs
Dr. Lucina Q. Uddin
Guest Editors

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