THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

What processes are used by our brain to comprehend an event from hearing a few words?

Nili "smiled" Orin into marriage. Isn’t that a poetic image? When “smiled” is used in the common syntax noun + verb + preposition + noun, the word becomes a causative force. Grammar dictates the cognitive construction of mental images. As a cognitive scientist, Nili analyzes the relationship between the parts of speech in a sentence to understand how they trigger a mental image.

Nili Mandelblit earned her Ph.D. in cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. These pictures were taken the day she met physicist Orin Zacher.