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This chapter examines dynamic states in which brain systems differentially express their involvement in conscious versus nonconscious representation. Given the evidence for a role of corticothalamic systems in consciousness, in what kind of state should they be to do so? Reviewing the neurophysiology of sleep, anaesthesia and wakefulness, a diverse picture of brain dynamics emerges in association with conscious processing. Comparing sleep with wakefulness, we see evidence for the primary role of so-called Up states in the neocortex, featuring high levels of depolarization, irregular firing, and desynchronized EEG. Pathophysiological and computational studies emphasize the importance of having decorrelated activity rather than global synchrony. Studies on "replay" during sleep or wakefulness show that this phenomenon unlikely corresponds to conscious processing, challenging simple implementations of “neural coalitions” embodying consciousness. Findings on anesthesia highlight the prominence of sustaining long-range rather than local interactions between distributed cell assemblies. On the fast time scale of perception, recurrent interactions from higher to lower cortical levels are probably important, yet more work is needed to find out which connectivity components are essential for perception or behavioral reporting. In EEG research on perception, alpha oscillations are emerging in regulating the phasing of stimulus perceptibility.

Social assistance schemes play a special role within social policies as they are supposed to be the last safety net for people in economic need. In this chapter I will focus my attention on the cash dimension of social assistance and identify some general trends. Despite its limits, this perspective provides a privileged entry into some relevant features of the Italian welfare model and how it changed over the last three decades. In order to address these issues, the chapter is divided into three parts. The first part presents overall trends of paradigmatic shifts within social assistance schemes. The second part, presents a synthetic overview on different social assistance models existing in Europe and how they changed, considering the territorial levels that regulate, manage and implement social assistance schemes and the actors involved. Finally, the third part addresses the Italian case framed within this comparative perspective, highlighting its specificities compared to the European context.

This chapter addresses the aesthetic exploration of historical alternatives by thinking about strange conceptions of historicity and the fantasy of alternate histories in three different texts: Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). Each of these texts not only thematises the condition of temporal alongsidedness but also formally structures itself by means of crosscut parallel plotlines that de-synchronise from one another. Nolan’s film uses parallel editing, normally deployed to construct simultaneity, to represent the de-synchronisation among reference frames. Woolf’s modernist text is an early model of this very specific sort of alternate history, a text that is likewise a kind of post-apocalyptic meditation on a variety of rhythms in a present interpenetrated by what might have been and what comes next. Dick’s text is like Woolf’s novel, featuring two main characters who never meet and live in timelines with differing pace, duration and sets of possibility. All of these texts are not interested simply in a mutation of a past sequence that produces a forking historical path with an altered present and future, but in the reconfiguration of alternativity, historicity and the present in the context of diverging concurrent trajectories.

This chapter applies the notion of dynamic embodiment to graphic illness narratives about depression, a disease that typically involves a range of both mental/cognitive and physical symptoms, including low mood, feelings of worthlessness, and altered perceptions of time. These symptoms lead to an inability to engage actively in the world and a tendency to spend many hours in a prostrate position. Correspondingly, in comics depressed characters are frequently drawn lying down and at the bottom of panels and pages, which reflects the close links between feelings of hopelessness and the effects of gravity on the body (SAD IS DOWN). Many metaphors of depression in these works also convey a sense of what shall be termed “temporal entrapment.” This is due to the unique process of translating time into space in the comics medium, which foregrounds temporal aspects of the depression experience when artists are communicating through the graphic pathography genre.