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This is the earliest and most familiar category of prosthesis and affects words beginning with [s] plus a consonant. Its origins and early development are first traced, exploring its geographical distribution, actualization, and possible causation. The varied medieval and modern outcomes across Romance are then systematically examined in a comparative‐historical perspective.

This category of vowel prosthesis postdates I‐prosthesis and operated on rhotic‐initial words. Its early development is examined closely, and its geographical diffusion and likely causation are investigated. The problematic case of Southern Italian is explored in detail. The later, varied fortunes of A‐prosthesis across Romance are traced, analysed, and assessed from a comparative viewpoint.

U‐prosthesis occurred in the later Middle Ages following a special type of syncope. The structural circumstances surrounding its rise are explored in detail, and the geographical incidence and possible causation of the development are examined. Differences in the treatment of clitics and lexical forms are analysed. More recent changes in U‐prosthesis are finally considered in a comparative perspective.

After a definition of vowel prosthesis and its relationship to other additive and reductive segmental process, various general aspects of it are considered. These include its incidence in Romance, whether it represents a regular or sporadic process, the quality of prosthetic vowels, and the various factors that can trigger prosthesis.

The three main categories of vowel prosthesis that have operated in the history of Romance are identified. These are labelled I‐prosthesis, A‐prosthesis, and U‐prosthesis and their general characteristics are outlined. Occasional examples of other, apparently anomalous cases of vowel prosthesis are accounted for.

This chapter discusses the neural mechanisms of voluntary movements in the motor cortex — a major node in the brain network of initiation and control of such movements. Specifically, it discusses the neural mechanisms of reaching movements in space with respect to the encoding of movement parameters in the activity of single cells and the decoding of information from neuronal populations. This decoding scheme can be used to monitor the processing of movement-related information in various contexts and, ultimately, to drive motor prostheses.

Basic structural properties underlying the different categories of vowel prosthesis are enumerated and compared, revealing important characteristics shared by all categories. Of central importance is syllabic structure, and areas of further research into the syllable and its evolving architecture are identified. Finally, the significance of sociolinguistic forces as well as structural factors in shaping developments is reiterated.

This chapter presents an overview of research on retinal prostheses and progress in this field, and provides a perspective on artificial vision and the role of modern technologies to support research in this sector. It also reviews studies on brain plasticity that provide essential information on changes in the brain as a consequence of (partial) blindness, the interaction of visual areas with other sensory modalities, and possible ways of influencing brain plasticity as a basis of visual rehabilitation.

Revisiting classic ethnological theories on the contagious transmission of force, this chapter explores the place of material objects in the performance of divine communication and the practice of faith. Tracking between the devotional specificities of the practice of “standin’-in” within the context of southern Appalachia and the broader mass-mediated performances of healing prayer during the Charismatic Renewal, this section also articulates Oral Roberts’s famous notion of “the point of contact” as a physical conduit for the transmission of healing power.

For a long time neuroscience has focused on basic research, but now studies have begun to demonstrate how brain science can be put to use to solve practical real-world problems. Specifically, research in human neuroimaging has led to the development of techniques that allow to accurately read out a person's conscious experience based only on non-invasive EEG and fMRI measurements of their brain activity. Such ‘brain reading’ is possible because each thought is associated with a unique pattern of brain activity that can serve as a ‘fingerprint’ of this thought in the brain. By training a computer to recognize these fMRI patterns associated with each thought it is possible to read out what someone is currently thinking with high accuracy. Despite these promising findings, there are still many limitations that make it unlikely that a ‘universal thought reading machine’ will be developed in the near future. Nonetheless, the first simple applications have begun to emerge, including brain-computer-interfaces, more reliable lie detectors and approaches for predicting consumer decisions. These raise ethical concerns related to mental privacy, data security and quality control.

Peter H. Schiller, in collaboration with numerous investigators, has carried out research using psychophysical methods, single-cell recordings, microstimulation and pharmacological manipulations. The research has examined (1) The neural underpinnings of visual illusions and visual masking, (2) Retrograde amnesia, (3) The neural control of eye movements, (4) The functions of the midget and parasol systems that originate in the retina, (5) the functions of the ON and OFF channels of the retina and (6) The functions of extrastriate areas in visual processing. Studies at the present time are engaged in assessing the feasibility of creating a prosthetic device for the blind based on electrical stimulation of area V1 and in specifying the neural mechanisms that underlie depth processing.

As a literary fairy tale, Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old (1874) employs a fantasy setting and magical circumstances to depict the moral, psychological, and physical development of its hero, Prince Dolor. The hybrid story combines fairy tale, Bildungsroman, and parable, defies conventional narrative closure, and produces incongruous understandings of disability. The story’s narrative trajectory moves towards closure, first reinforcing Dolor’s physical deviance and the eradicating it through magical prosthetic gifts; as such, the outer structure creates a story of disability as abnormal, restricting, and in need of compensation if not cure. However, by making readers aware first of the narrator’s physical limitations and of their own roles as spectators, and then by focalizing through the disabled hero while he is a spectator, The Little Lame Prince undermines its earlier use of Dolor as a sentimental spectacle. Moreover, moments in which readers focalize with Dolor through his magical prostheses reveal the limitations of all bodies and speculate on the beauty and infinite variety of physical difference. These colliding views of disability in The Little Lame Prince exhibit the complex, shifting role of the body in Victorian thought.

This chapter shows an illustration of the black-figure side on an Athenian bilingual Type A amphora, painted by Andokides or the Lysippides Painter. There are several strands that it pursues, to which the issues raised by this vase serve as an introduction. In particular, the chapter examines the gradual standardisation of some sorts of mythological subject-matter in relation to genre scenes, and the idea of a craft-ethos as it seems exemplified in the workshop practice in the surviving output of Athens in the sixth century. The earliest figure-scenes on Athenian vases are ones that serve a specific purpose to accompany the kind which presents with a single picture of the prothesis or ekphora in a frame. This means that the standard scenes, both frames and continuous, are not narrative, though they may be illustrations of parts of a continuous ceremony well understood by the intended viewer of the vase.

This chapter examines instances in Greek literature where the voice is conceptualized as transformed through objects that act as prostheses for the vocalizing body. The particular objects under discussion are two musical instruments: an oboe (the aulos) and a war-trumpet (the salpinx). Both of these instruments were perceived as shifting the boundaries of human voice and body, the aulos by summoning dangerous affective power and the salpinx by producing an aura of invulnerability. The voice in these transformations becomes both an extension of ability and a displacement of identity. The chapter explores the descriptions and implications of these transformations in texts by Aristophanes, Pindar, Homer, Aeschylus, and Aristotle in view of the theories of Mladen Dolar, Steven Connor, and Adriana Cavarero.