overcoming the bottleneck-effect of working memory. Further, alliteration can
be the performer’s friend when reproducing a list (serving as a memory cue
when retrieving the words), while it can make it for difficult for the listener to
remember it (as suggested by the phonological loop model and the simple
experiment presented above).
4.3 MENTAL SCHEMATAAfter reviewing the basic facts about remembering at the level of neurons, we
are now switching to a different level of analysis. In order to understand
textual transmission from a cognitive perspective we have to complement
our understanding of the neural processes of memory with insights about the
high-level organization of information in the mind. These structures are
emerging from the processes already discussed; yet it is both impractical and
technically impossible (for the time being, at least) to deal with them at the
level of neurons.
Our story begins several decades before the time of H.M. and Brenda Miller,
in the late 1910s. In Frederic Bartlett’s famous experiment, Cambridge stu-
dents had to recall a North American folktale,“The War of the Ghosts”
(Bartlett, 1932). The subjects read the text from a piece of paper and had to
write it down from memoryfirst afterfifteen minutes, then after different
intervals ranging from a day to several years (pp. 64–6).“One night two young
men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals,”the story began. The
bulk of the text, occupying about forty printed lines, tells that one of the young
men joined a war party and was hit in a battle. After returning home he
recounted his adventures, but next morning he died:“When the sun rose he
fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted.
The people jumped up and cried. He was dead.”
Already a day after reading the story, students reproduced substantially
shortened and changed versions. For example, one student recalled the death
of the young man like this:“While he was talking something black issued from
his mouth. Suddenly he uttered a cry and fell down. His friends gathered
around him. But he was dead”(p. 66). The black substance is now associated
with talking, and the cry (originally given by the people jumping up) with the
young man’s collapse. After a week, however, the student retold these modi-
fied details almost verbatim (p. 67). Most students changed the story in similar
ways, producing increasingly shorter, coherent, and modern versions of the
narrative as time went on. There were exceptions, however. A student from
northern India, for example, replaced the two young men by ghosts, which
originally played a marginal role in the narrative (pp. 75–7). Another student,
a painter, provided baroque elaborations on details, even during the veryfirst
Memory and Transmission 67