Consciousness and Cognition - Ediotorial

Despite several decades of research into the neurobiological underpinnings of psychotic disorders, many aspects of these clinical conditions remain obscure. The peculiarity of the subjective experience of psychosis and the devastating effects on these patients’ lives have somehow made it the Holy Grail of psychiatric research. Indeed, the term itself is commonly used to describe a clinical condition within which a subject ‘‘loses touch with reality’’, implying a loss of the person’s innate ability to adequately discern between internally generated processes and objective information from the external world. The resulting mentation, clinically described in terms of hallucinations, delusions and disorganization, is of central interest not only for psychiatrists and clinical psychologists but also for basic neuroscientists and philosophers, given the potential implications for our understanding of the ways in which genetically determined neuronal networks in the brain interact with the environment to generate complex theoretical constructs such as Self, agency and consciousness itself.
 

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