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L’article développe le concept de « vérifiction » afin de déconstruire et mieux comprendre la relation entre la connaissance empirique de la réalité « naturelle » et sa représentation dans le langage. En prenant l’exemple de quelques cas limites liés par une sémantique similaire (un poème de Christian Morgenstern qui « invente » une étrange créature se promenant sur son nez ; le livret parodique d’un zoologiste allemand sur une espèce récemment découverte, elle aussi caractérisée par un nez proéminent ; les expériences littéraires et visuelles de la « biologie spéculative » et de « l’exobiologie »), l’article démontre que la connaissance naturaliste ne sculpte pas ses entités directement dans la réalité, mais plutôt, comme l’avait bien deviné la sémiotique de Greimas, elle les retrouve dans le langage.

Abstract Background Despite hypothalamus has long being considered to be involved in the pathophysiology of cluster headache, the inconsistencies of previous neuroimaging studies and a limited understanding of the hypothalamic areas involved, impede a comprehensive interpretation of its involvement in this condition. Methods We used an automated algorithm to extract hypothalamic subunit volumes from 105 cluster headache patients (57 chronic and 48 episodic) and 59 healthy individuals; after correcting the measures for the respective intracranial volumes, we performed the relevant comparisons employing logist regression models. Only for subunits that emerged as abnormal, we calculated their correlation with the years of illness and the number of headache attacks per day, and the effects of lithium treatment. As a post-hoc approach, using the 7 T resting-state fMRI dataset from the Human Connectome Project, we investigated whether the observed abnormal subunit, comprising the paraventricular nucleus and preoptic area, shows robust functional connectivity with the mesocorticolimbic system, which is known to be modulated by oxytocin neurons in the paraventricular nucleus and that is is abnormal in chronic cluster headache patients. Results Patients with chronic (but not episodic) cluster headache, compared to control participants, present an increased volume of the anterior–superior hypothalamic subunit ipsilateral to the pain, which, remarkably, also correlates significantly with the number of daily attacks. The post-hoc approach showed that this hypothalamic area presents robust functional connectivity with the mesocorticolimbic system under physiological conditions. No evidence of the effects of lithium treatment on this abnormal subunit was found. Conclusions We identified the ipsilateral-to-the-pain antero-superior subunit, where the paraventricular nucleus and preoptic area are located, as the key hypothalamic region of the pathophysiology of chronic cluster headache. The significant correlation between the volume of this area and the number of daily attacks crucially reinforces this interpretation. The well-known roles of the paraventricular nucleus in coordinating autonomic and neuroendocrine flow in stress adaptation and modulation of trigeminovascular mechanisms offer important insights into the understanding of the pathophysiology of cluster headache.

Este artigo explora a complexidade semântica e simbólica das bandeiras na cultura contemporânea. Discutindo exemplos específicos da Itália, o texto analisa como as bandeiras são empregadas em contextos variados, revelando suas conotações sociopolíticas, comunicacionais e culturais. Ele utiliza teorias semióticas para desvendar a relação entre as bandeiras e seus significados em diferentes situações, destacando a ambiguidade inerente a esses símbolos e seu papel na expressão de identidade nacional, protesto e poder. O artigo aborda também a influência do material, cor e contexto na interpretação das bandeiras.

Este artigo explora a interação entre práticas de consumo e crenças religiosas. Utilizando o exemplo pessoal da “Tia Pequena”, que acumulava objetos, examina-se como valores religiosos e culturais influenciam a maneira como as pessoas consomem e preservam bens materiais. Analisa-se ainda a ideologia subjacente a esses padrões de consumo, relacionando-os com a doutrina cristã e a semiótica religiosa e comparando-as com ideologias de consumo contemporâneas, destacando as diferenças e semelhanças entre elas.

This paper investigates the complex relationship between technology, religion, and sacrifice, positing this last term as a pivotal concept for understanding the evolution and impact of technological advancements. Through a detailed examination of various cultural and religious frameworks, it explores how artificial intelligence and other modern technologies both challenge and redefine traditional notions of the sacred and the profane. By analyzing historical and contemporary practices, the study highlights the paradoxical role of sacrifice in the digital age, serving as both a metaphor for the loss inherent in technological progress and a foundational principle that shapes the ethical landscapes of innovation.

Each culture develops a specific semiotic ideology of catastrophe and reparation. Comparing and contrasting them reveals continuities and discontinuities. Traditional Japanese aesthetics resolves the anxiety of potential catastrophe by focusing on the fullness of immanence. In the West, on the other hand, for whom the idea of the future is essential, the fatalistic approach of Greco-Roman civilization is replaced by the Christian idea of the miracle. A study of the iconography of broken glass and its holy repair is one way of understanding the aesthetic and semiotic consequences of this transition.

The medical masks that have emerged as a device to contrast the contagion of COVID-19 heavily affect the presentation and perception of the face, radically altering its phenomenology and semiotics, and thwarting its singularity. The global cultural production has often reacted to these unprecedented constraints, emphasizing the ethical importance of the face’s wholeness and singularity against any attempt at fragmentation, segmentation, and classification. The article proposes a general semiotic reading of the cultural tendencies which, in contemporary societies, operate, on the contrary, towards a reification of the face, and which the COVID-19 pandemic has only accentuated. The article focuses, in particular, on the new techniques of automatic processing of facial images, whose rhetoric of technological achievement it debunks. In conclusion, the article suggests that the protection and liberation of the face as a bulwark of humanity can only be achieved by envisioning a new era called the “Prosopocene”, which would guarantee an inalienable face to every form of life against any human or automatic de-figuration.

Massimo Leone, investigador italiano y uno de los máximos exponentes de la semiótica contemporánea, recorre lo ocurrido en los últimos 25 años en el campo de la comunicación y señala los contrastes radicales que existen entre sus años de formación universitaria y el universo mediático actual.

Verses 22-45 of canto XXVIII of Dante's Inferno are problematic for translations into languages that are prevalent in predominantly Islamic countries. These verses, in fact, describe the punishment that Dante imagined for Muhammad and Alì. The severity of their punishment is expressed, in particular, through the figure of the face cleaved in two halves, a counterpoint for those who, according to Dante, committed the sin of dividing Christianity. The face is omnipresent in Dante's masterpiece. The article summarizes its semantics in reference also to the various terms used by Dante to designate different aspects of the face (faccia, viso, volto, sembiante); ; it distills the salient bibliography on the subject and proposes that the itinerary of the viator through the three dimensions of damnation, purgation, and bliss is also and above all an itinerary made of faces that the viator meets, his face also transfiguring itself gradually along the path of holiness.

O “falso” é um elemento central nas ciências naturais, nas ciências sociais e nas humanidades. Também é fundamental na sociedade, na economia, na política e no direito. Em última análise, é a principal força por trás da criatividade e fantasia dos artistas. Muitos estudos e investigações foram dedicados ao falso. No entanto, as novas tecnologias de comunicação digital estão mudando drasticamente o cenário. Alguns dos fenômenos mais perturbadores das sociedades modernas, da “pós-verdade” (post-truth) às notícias falsas (fake news), das teorias da conspiração ao “falso profundo” (deep fake), originam-se na encruzilhada entre as invenções tradicionais e os novos simulacros. Abordagens convencionais para verdade e falsidade, autenticidade e simulação, fato e ficção são cada vez mais insuficientes para lidar com os novos híbridos da comunicação digital. Uma sinergia sem precedentes entre as ciências naturais e sociais, acadêmicos e partes interessadas da sociedade, pesquisadores e artistas é necessária para avaliar o papel mutável da falsificação nas sociedades contemporâneas. O artigo propõe um novo quadro de epidemiologia semiótica da cultura para o estudo do falso nas sociedades digitais contemporâneas.

L’article promeut une philosophie de la communication orientée sémiotiquement, capable de détecter les idéologies du sens qui sous-tendent les technologies de l’échange symbolique. Leur évolution au cours de l’histoire implique des changements importants en ce qui concerne la rhétorique du faux. Il s’agit d’un élément constitutif de l’espèce humaine, dont les conditions sont pourtant radicalement modifiées par le numérique et l’essor de l’intelligence artificielle. L’article se concentre sur l’idéologie sémiotique des réseaux adverses génératifs et leurs conséquences en termes de production et de réception des deepfakes. Ces nouveaux produits textuels, perturbants, sont le plus souvent considérés comme divertissants ; pourtant, conclut l’article, ce n’est qu’une question de temps avant que les humains ne soient incapables de les détecter. La sémiotique est donc appelée à se concentrer d’urgence sur la « crise épistémologique » que les progrès du faux numérique sont susceptibles d’engendrer.

Umberto Eco’s essential contribution to semiotics consisted in finding a theoretical equilibrium between deconstructive tendencies, aiming at presenting cultural habits as pure conventional but naturalized products, and motivational trends, claiming the natural fundament of constructed cultural habits. Fully comprehending and turning into analytical frame the concept of sign in Charles S. Peirce was instrumental to reach such equilibrium. In no other aspect of Umberto Eco’s semiotics it manifests itself with more evidence than in the characterization of indexes. The article seeks to propose a general theorization of their semiotic nature, starting from Umberto Eco’s interpretation of Peirce.

El artículo adopta el marco de la semiótica cultural del último Lotman para replantear una espinosa cuestión contemporánea, a saber, el difuso antagonismo contra la ciencia, la medicina y las vacunas durante la actual pandemia de COVID-19. El artículo interpreta esta animadversión irracional como el resultado de una dialéctica que proviene al menos del origen de la modernidad, y precisamente de la oposición entre una ideología semiótica de quietud, regularidad y orden, que sustenta la génesis de la ciencia moderna, y una ideología semiótica opuesta de movimiento, irregularidad y caos, que caracteriza la mayor parte de la estética moderna del idealismo y de la singularidad. Tras explorar esta oposición a través de un texto cultural crucial situado en el inicio de la tensión entre estas dos actitudes diferentes hacia el sentido y la vida, el artículo concluye que las ciencias y la medicina modernas deben seguir buscando regularidades en el mundo y en el cuerpo, en aras de mejorar la calidad de la vida humana, pero también deben aprender de la semiótica cultural de las ideologías estéticas: en tiempos de incertidumbre y agitación epistémica, los viejos mitos que ensalzan la singularidad del cuerpo tienden a resurgir, poniendo en peligro la credibilidad de la medicina.

Os novos espelhos digitais e as imagens que eles devolvem e com as quais frequentemente despertam desejo e consumo diferem dos espelhos analógicos, aqueles que Umberto Eco considerava estar fora da ampla gama da semiótica. Os espelhos digitais são na verdade telas que simulam espelhos, por isso já “mentem” em sua função refletiva, mas podem mentir ainda mais graças a novos formatos e processos de espelhamento digital, como as selfies e os filtros. Quando a estes novos espelhos é feita a pergunta “Espelho, espelho meu, haverá alguém mais bela do que eu”, eles sempre respondem “você, é claro, sempre você é a mais bela!”. O artigo reflete sobre os espelhos digitais como parte de uma consideração mais ampla sobre a ética das imagens na era digital. A ética das imagens difere da das palavras porque as imagens sempre carregam uma motivação intrínseca que as palavras não carregam. Há, naturalmente, algo convencional nas imagens, e pode haver motivação nas palavras, mas a materialidade dos sinais visuais os ancora à realidade e à percepção de uma forma diferente e mais coerente. É por isso que as imagens não mentem da mesma forma que as palavras. Mesmo quando são de fantasia, elas transmitem uma ideia de possibilidade real que as palavras dificilmente podem evocar. Duas posições ideológicas diferentes podem ser tomadas no que diz respeito à relação entre as imagens e o efeito de realidade que elas provocam. As humanidades, incluindo a semiótica, tendem a enfatizar o peso do contexto cultural; evidências crescentes, no entanto, mostram que as imagens funcionam também porque combinam com a neurofisiologia inata da cognição. Os humanos estão biologicamente inclinados a reagir às imagens, e as representações desencadeiam diferentes percepções dependendo de sua tecnologia, que está evoluindo por meio do acúmulo na história humana. A semiótica é, portanto, chamada a desmascarar a propaganda realista de novos dispositivos para representação e exibição, apontando para sua convencionalidade, mas também deve levar em conta como novos avanços na produção de simulacros tendem a introduzir dinâmicas emergentes na relação entre imagens e a percepção humana. O visual falso de hoje é de fato um pouco mais poderoso que os de épocas passadas, porque é construído através de máquinas cujo resultado só pode ser desmascarado por outras máquinas. Além disso, a evolução das culturas digitais está agora criando uma indefinição de gêneros fictícios e não-ficcionais. O visual falso começa a circular como um vírus, multiplicando as ocasiões para suspensões ambíguas de descrença. O que é necessário é, em vez disso, uma nova ecologia do falso, capaz de dar origem, por sua vez, a uma semioética razoável do visual falso.

Introduction: Studying the ‘facesphere’

Abstract Background Chronic migraine is a disabling condition that is currently underdiagnosed and undertreated. In this narrative review, we discuss the future of chronic migraine management in relation to recent progress in evidence-based pharmacological treatment. Findings Patients with chronic migraine require prophylactic therapy to reduce the frequency of migraine attacks, but the only currently available evidence-based prophylactic treatment options for chronic migraine are topiramate and onabotulinumtoxinA. Improved prophylactic therapy is needed to reduce the high burden of chronic migraine in Italy. Monoclonal antibodies that target the calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) pathway of migraine pathogenesis have been specifically developed for the prophylactic treatment of chronic migraine. These anti-CGRP/R monoclonal antibodies have demonstrated good efficacy and excellent tolerability in phase II and III clinical trials, and offer new hope to patients who are currently not taking any prophylactic therapy or not benefitting from their current treatment. Conclusions Treatment of chronic migraine is a dynamic and rapidly advancing area of research. New developments in this field have the potential to improve the diagnosis and provide more individualised treatments for this condition. Establishing a culture of prevention is essential for reducing the personal, social and economic burden of chronic migraine.

Isaiah 40: 6-8 contains the figure of the flower of the field, doomed to wither at the blowing of the divine breath. An immense exegetical tradition ensues, which comments on the ephemerality of any human distinction. This tradition intertwines, then, from the late Middle Ages on, with an equally abundant classical tradition, in Greek first, then in Latin, wherein the severed flower refers to the brutality of either war or love. Both traditions, the biblical and the classical one, merge in numerous literary texts, which multiply especially in early modernity. Drawing profusely from these textual series, the article seeks to seize in them some trends, in the frame of a semiotics of cultures, reading the figure of the flower through the methodology of generative semiotics.

In this paper I firstly propose a brief survey of the initial developments of the studies on the (un)clothed body meant as language, then I dwell on the way in which such perspective may be used to reformulate classical theories about the (in)visibility of the body, after which I characterize the fundamental semiotic mechanism of the language of the (un)clothed body as the projection of a semi-symbolic system of abstract valences, filled with different value oppositions depending on the historical periods and the socio-cultural contexts. I continue by exploring, through a specific semiotic square, the system of values of modesty/immodesty, by offering insights into the processes of naturalization that characterize the arbitrariness of the language of the (un)clothed body, and I conclude with remarks on the distortions that globalization brings about in the perception and attribution of meaning to the clothes of the Other.

Cluster headache is an excruciating pain syndrome characterized by unilateral head pain attacks, lasting between 15 and 180 min, accompanied by marked ipsilateral cranial autonomic symptoms, such as lacrimation and conjunctival injection. Despite important insights provided by neuroimaging studies and deep brain stimulation findings, the pathophysiology of cluster headache and its pathways of chronicization are still elusive. In this mini-review, we will provide an overview of the functional and structural neuroimaging studies in episodic and chronic cluster headache conditions conducted to clarify the underlying pathophysiology.

Este artículo inicia a partir del análisis de una imagen de la cultura visual contemporánea masiva – que promociona una famosa marca de café–, con el propósito de sugerir que la “semiótica del velo” debe desarrollarse a manera de “semiótica de un velo”. Comprender el significado de este dispositivo cultural multifacético requiere concebirlo no solo como un dispositivo general, sino también como un objeto singular. La semiótica, ciencia de los sistemas y las generalizaciones, debe, por lo tanto, potenciar su microanálisis con respecto al de otros tipos de herramientas. El artículo sostiene que la semiología del velo de Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault ofrece una gran cantidad de ideas sobre los microsignificados que posee este elemento. Dicha afirmación es aplicada a un estudio de caso: el microanálisis, a la manière de Clérambault, del “sistema del velo” en la película Una giornata particolare [Una jornada particular] (1977) del director Ettore Scola.

La conferencia plenaria analiza las modas que moldean el significado del rostro humano en las culturas visuales contemporáneas, concentrándose, por un lado, en las prácticas generalizadas de exhibición facial en redes sociales como Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat y Tinder y enfocándose, por otro lado, en las opuestas prácticas minoritarias de ocultación del rostro, incluyendo la máscara en el activismo político anti- establishment (Anonymous) y el velo en los códigos vestimentarios religiosos.

The semiotics of Umberto Eco is prolonged by other means in his novels : much has been written on the subject. But the reverse is also true : Eco’s novels continue in sibylline ways throughout his philosophical work. The great Italian scholar’s prodigious narrative ability manifests itself well before the Name of the Rose, and applies principally to ideas and knowledge. In Eco, the novel dresses with actors, figures, and icons, as well as with a brilliant arrangement of places, times, and aspects, a very solid narrative structure, inheritor to the great popular narratives of the nineteenth century. The paper expounds on the rhetorical effects of this synergy between theorization and narration and focuses, in particular, on the configuration of subjectivity in Eco’s works.

Why was Greimas’ theoretical proposal so divisive? Why did his disciples worship the new analytical method, while his detractors harshly rejected it? The article claims that the strength, as well as the weakness, of Greimassian semiotics consists in positing a rational way to determine the range of meanings of a text. Semiotic interpretive methods that are more aware of the diachronic dimension, such as Eco’s interpretive semiotics or Lotman’s semiotics of culture, inflect this view by anchoring the rationality of interpretation to the reasonableness of a community of interpreters that is, by definition, changing over time. The article claims that, on the one hand, Greimas’ theoretical stance is in line with the predominant ‘culture of meaning’ distilled by the Western civilization from the Greeks until the Enlightenment, stressing the value of truth as correspondence between textual evidence and its hermeneutics. On the other hand, the article also suggests that Eco’s and Lotman’s insistence on the dynamic character of hermeneutic communities entails a politics of meaning meant to preserve the core of the Western ‘semiotic civilization’ against threats that aim at deeply subverting it from both the inside or the outside of the semiosphere.

Urban marketing has recently been adopting the concept, and the label, of “second city”. However, this concept requires sharper theoretical definition in order to turn heuristic. Thus far, it has been conceived in relation to an “ideology of ranking”, strictly related to the worldview of post-modern globalization. A more fruitful definition of “second cities” results from Charles S. Peirce’s idea of secondness: a city is second to another not in quantitative, but in qualitative and relational terms. The semiotic model of Jurij M. Lotman offers a suitable methodology to analyse this relational definition, as it is exemplified by the case-study of the rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney. A historical survey of their relation shows that the latter progressively embraced an identity of “secondness” so as to successfully market an alternative vision of urban life. Melbourne therefore provides a model for non-quantitative construction of urban distinctiveness.

Au début de la période que l’on appelle moderne, l’exploration et la colonisation européenne du monde soulevèrent un problème à la fois cognitif et communicationnel : comment transmettre au public du Vieux Continent l’idée de la nature exotique que l’on découvrait dans les « Indes » orientales et occidentales? Confronté à cette question, le discours de voyage européen de la première modernité déploya toute sorte de signes, textes et discours censés évoquer, chez leurs énonciataires, un effet de sens double, combinant de façon paradoxale un sentiment de vraisemblance et une impression de merveille. L’analyse comparée des mots, des images, et des index de ce discours relève d’une question théorique outre qu’historique : on y lit en filigrane l’élaboration progressive de l’épistémè européenne moderne, celle où des types de signes différents agencent de façons diversifiées la relation entre réel et sens, vérité et vraisemblance. C’est le sujet dont s’enquiert cet article, en jetant un regard sémiotique sur des ouvrages tels que les Relations de divers voyages curieux de Melchisédec de Thévenot.

En el marco de la teoría narratológica de la semiótica estructural y generativa, el artículo define las narraciones como “maquinas civilizadoras”, indispensables para que un grupo social y sus miembros perpetúen en el tiempo y transmitan en el espacio su jerarquía de valores. Tras plantearse el problema de la representación del mal en las narraciones, y sobre todo en la transposición icónica de los relatos verbales, el ensayo reflexiona sobre lo que queda de la eficacia del dispositivo narrativo cuando está sujeto no solo a traducciones intersemioticas, sino también a operaciones transmediales. Define la transmedialidad como transtextualidad, y se pregunta por la eficacia de un relato que, como producto de la digitalización de las sustancias expresivas y de su consiguiente diseminarse en una comunicación globalizada, proteiforme y fragmentaria, desafía continuamente el marco del texto y requiere de quienes lo reciben una competencia metanarrativa. El artículo se concluye con el análisis de un caso de estudio, el cortometraje de activismo social Kony2012.

El artículo se plantea el objetivo de utilizar las teorías y los métodos más avanzados de la semiótica de la cultura al fin de desarrollar una mejor comprensión de un fenómeno comunicativo central de las sociedades contemporáneas: la protesta. El tópico de la protesta no será analizado desde el punto de vista de sus causas y motivaciones histórico-sociales, mas desde el punto de vista de su lenguaje: ¿Cuáles fenómenos de sentido y comunicación designamos con el término “protesta”? ¿Cuáles condiciones contextuales deben verificarse para que una protesta tenga lugar? ¿Cómo se articulan los lenguajes, los discursos, los textos, y los signos de la protesta? ¿Por medio de qué códigos? ¿O bien, contraviniendo a qué códigos? ¿Cómo se lee e interpreta el sentido de una protesta según su público, y con qué efectos pragmáticos? Y más: ¿existen unas ‘culturas de la protesta’, que cambian según los periodos históricos y las áreas socio-culturales, y cómo interaccionan con la evolución de los medios de comunicación, y en particular con el origen y el desarrollo de los medios digitales? En detalle, cómo se pueden describir las dinámicas comunicativas que caracterizan la protesta en su relación con las redes sociales? Más en general: ¿dentro de qué marco teórico se puede definir la relación entre sentido, consenso, y disenso?

The industry of tourism progressively strips the travel of one of its core anthopological and existential values, namely, being a laboratory where the traveller is allowed to experiment a temporary break up of his/her habits of sedentary belonging, shielded by the planned return home. In such perspective, the non-touristic travel is one of the best ways to test the limits of one's tolerance of cultural diversity and therefore to assess the identity of one's cultural and existential 'home'. Nonetheless, modern and contemporary travel texts usually celebrate the traveller's heroic ability to pass the limits of his/her tolerance. By arguing that the above emphasis springs from the colonial wish to tame and assimilate the world and its diversity, the article aims at subverting this logic and replacing the panoramic travel literature, dominated by the subjects' will to power, with the prosopopeial (that is, based on personification) one, which tells the stories of how the things of the world, the relics from centuries of civilisation, reject the traveller and his/her desire of domestication and conquer. As an example of such a subversion the article proposes a semiotic exploration of toilets, their variety and their 'cultural resistance'.

In the twenty-eighth book of the Naturalis Historia Pliny the Elder claims that, if a chameleon’s left leg is roasted together with a herb bearing the same name, and everything is mixed with ointment, cut in lozenges, and stored in a wooden little box, this will bestow on those who own it a perfect camouflage. The ring of Gyges (Plato, etc.), that of Midas (Pliny), the heliotropium (Pliny), the dracontitis (Philostratus): ancient cultures abound with references to objects, recipes, and techniques able to bestow different kinds of invisibility, meant as a perfect resemblance with the environment. At the same time, these same cultures also teem with references to how to avert the perfect camouflage: for instance, by being endowed with a pupula duplex, a double pupil (Ovid). The paper explores such vast corpus of texts from the point of view of a semiotics of cultures, in order to track the roots of a conception of camouflage that, from these ancient cultures on, develops through intricate paths into the contemporary imaginaires (and practices) of invisibility. The paper’s more general goal is to understand the way in which cultures elaborate conceptions of invisibility meant as the perfect resemblance between humans and their environments, often on the basis of the observation of the same resemblance between other living beings and their habitat. Ancient texts are therefore focused on in order to decipher the passage from camouflage as an adaptive natural behaviour to camouflage as an effective combat strategy.

Cluster headache (CH) is a short-lasting unilateral headache associated with ipsilateral craniofacial autonomic manifestations. A positron emission tomography (PET) study has shown that the posterior hypothalamus is activated during CH attacks, suggesting that hypothalamic hyperactivity plays a key role in CH pathophysiology. On this basis, stimulation of the ipsilateral posterior hypothalamus was hypothesized to counteract such hyperactivity to prevent intractable CH. Ten years after its introduction, hypothalamic stimulation has been proved to successfully prevent attacks in more than 60% of 58 hypothalamic implanted drug-resistant chronic CH patients. The implantation procedure has generally been proved to be safe, although it carries a small risk of brain haemorrhage. Long-term stimulation is safe, and nonsymptomatic impairment of orthostatic adaptation is the only noteworthy change. Microrecording studies will make it possible to better identify the target site. Neuroimaging investigations have shown that hypothalamic stimulation activates ipsilateral trigeminal complex, but with no immediate perceived sensation within the trigeminal distribution. Other studies on the pain threshold in chronically stimulated patients showed increased threshold for cold pain in the distribution of the first trigeminal branch ipsilateral to stimulation. These studies suggest that activation of the hypothalamus and of the trigeminal system are both necessary, but not sufficient to generate CH attacks. In addition to the hypothalamus, other unknown brain areas are likely to play a role in the pathophysiology of this illness. Hypothalamus implantation is associated with a small risk of intracerebral haemorrhage and must be performed by an expert neurosurgical team, in selected patients.

Religious conversion revolutions the boundaries which delimit personal identity. Therefore, the main semiotic problem of mental and cultural representations of this religious phenomenon is to convey simultaneously a feeling of sameness and otherness, identity and change. In the present paper, mirrors are analysed as cultural mechanisms which enable representations to accomplish this paradoxical task. After a brief survey concerning literature on mirrors, some early-modern religious texts using these optical instruments as representative devices are analysed in-depth: a painting of the Magdalene’s conversion by Artemisia Gentileschi, an engraving representing conversion from a 17th-century French book, a fragment from Sainte Theresa’s spiritual autobiography, a passage from John Calvin’s Institution de la religion chrétienne. In its conclusion, the paper underlines the importance of Saint Paul’s metaphoric conception of mirrors for the cultural history of these objects, and tries to define the role which cultural semiotics should play concerning this kind of representative mechanisms.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a complex disorder affecting mainly, but not only, teenagers. Researchers agree that AN is deeply associated with a pro-inflammatory state following an impaired immune system, resulting from altered levels of cytokines such as IL-1β and TNF-α, also impacted by the frequent depressive states. Thus, this case–control study aimed to evaluate the relationship between patients suffering from AN undergoing specialized eating disorder treatment for AN and pro-inflammatory cytokines. To reach our purpose, we assessed eating-related psychopathology and depressive symptoms and measured serum concentration of pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, and TNF-α before and after 6 months of integrated therapy (which included psychopharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, and nutritional treatment), to define whether selected pro-inflammatory cytokines could be considered a pathophysiological marker of the disorder. A sample of 16 young female patients with early diagnosis of AN, and without any previous treatment, and 22 healthy controls matched by age, sex, and socioeconomic status were enrolled. After 6 months of integrated therapy, a significant decrease of all selected pro-inflammatory cytokines was detected. In addition, an improvement in the anxiety-depressant aspects was also noted. In conclusion, the results obtained suggest that pro-inflammatory cytokines are indeed related to the pathophysiology of AN. However, further investigations, involving larger samples of patients with distinct subtypes of AN, are essential to confirm the current findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article questions the relationship between the face and food. The face is, theoretically speaking, an affordance that one recognizes in the environment when it presents itself as endowed with meaning; this explains the origin, in anthropological, evolutionary, and cognitive terms, of folkloric traditions that assign a face to food, a correct direction to its handling, or that even associate its shape and fiber with entire cosmologies, as in the case of macrobiotic gastronomy. Ultimately, what drives humans to assign a face to food and to normalize the human approach to it is the intrinsic semiotic nature of the species, and thus the innate aptitude to transform every asymmetry into a difference that is a harbinger of meaning and axiologies.