🧠✨ Discovering Metaphors: Two Workshops for Young and Old!
The Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia and its Laboratory of Neurolinguistics and Experimental Pragmatics will take part in the Festival del Pensare Contemporaneo with two special events dedicated to creative language and neuroscience, as part of the European project PROMENADE (PROcessing MEtaphors: Neurochronometry, Acquisition and DEcay.
👉 Two engaging opportunities to explore how metaphors connect language, the brain, and everyday life.
📌 Programme
👵👴 #trovalametafora: Train Your Mind!
📅 Friday, September 12, 2025 – 3:30–5:00 pm
🎯 For adults 65+
👩🏫 Led by: Chiara Barattieri di San Pietro, Alessia Tavars, Valentina Bambini
A workshop to explore the power of metaphors as a resource for communicative and cognitive well-being throughout life. Through proverbs, idioms, and language games, participants will engage in activities that stimulate memory, attention, and creativity, learning to “read between the lines” and strengthening communicative confidence. Because healthy ageing also grows through the pleasure of communication.
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👧👦 #trovalametafora: A Game for Kids!
📅 Saturday, September 13, 2025 – 10:00–11:30 am
🎯 For children aged 6–10
👩🏫 Led by: Chiara Pompei, Elena Didoni, Valentina Bambini
A workshop combining science and creativity to discover how the brain understands and expresses metaphors. Young participants will become “junior researchers”, exploring figurative language through interactive games and mini-experiments. A journey through words and emotions to spark imagination and critical thinking.
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🌍 The #TROVALAMETAFORA Campaign
These workshops are part of the wider research and outreach initiative #TROVALAMETAFORA, promoted by the Laboratory of Neurolinguistics and Experimental Pragmatics at IUSS Pavia.
🎯 The goal is simple yet ambitious: to sharpen linguistic awareness across all ages, encouraging people to notice and reflect on the metaphors we encounter every day. Far from being mere figures of speech, metaphors are powerful cognitive tools that shape the way we think, communicate, and interpret reality.
👉 Through the campaign, we invite everyone to:
- spot metaphors in everyday language – in newspapers, TV, literature, advertising, political or social campaigns, or casual conversations;
- collect and share them with us via this form – you can write them down or send us a photo;
- explain why they struck you – for their beauty, originality, or effectiveness.
- 📖 All contributions will become part of an open archive, a public “metaphor album” that documents how figurative language shapes our world.
- And that’s not all:
- with #riconoscilametafora, you can test your knowledge of Italian literary and media metaphors by guessing their authors;
- with #crealametafora, you can unleash your creativity by inventing new metaphors.
🌐 More about the PROMENADE project: cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101045733
📅 Full festival programme: pensarecontemporaneo.it
🔎 Learn more about the campaign #trovalametafora: neplab.it/trovalametafora