Abstract

This special issue is dedicated to one of the oldest and most controversial philosophical topics, the mind–body problem. Paradoxically, since Descartes until the present days, nobody has proposed a viable solution to this problem. In the last decades, through the unification of neuroscience and psychology, a new science, cognitive neuroscience, was created to deal with this problem. Using EEG, fMRI, and other apparatus, scientists try to grasp the “correlations” between any mental state and some neural patterns of activation. Articles and presentations on the “brain imaging” results (mainly using fMRI) have invaded journals and conferences. There are many optimists (with some quite remarkable results) and few skeptics regarding these results in cognitive neuroscience. Anyway, there are exciting times ahead for people working in this interdisciplinary field.