memory in a chain-like fashion, until wefind the right words. The latter
method is certainly needed when we have to recall a particular line of a
poem. In a situation when we have to tell a story, we rely on a combination
of both methods: we will have an idea about the overall structure, the expected
outcome, and the episodes along the route from the beginning to the end, but
we can also decide to skip some parts or make a detour, much like the bards
proceeded in Lord’s and Parry’s ethnographies. When it comes tofilling in
minor details, we will use plenty of local cuing, so that we can produce a well-
formed, smooth, and acoustically pleasant text. We can say that serial recall
makes use of schemata as well, but instead of governing the large-scale
organization of memory, these schemata are about stylistic and phonetic
regularities. It is ultimately serial recall that gives a story with individual
colors, rather than a mere variation of a schema in an oral performance. In
fact, the gospels contain stories that are almost told as bare narrative scripts.
For example, Mark 6:56 comes close to a narrative script of healing by
touching:“And wherever he came, in villages, cities, or country, they laid
the sick in the market places, and besought him that they might touch even the
fringe of his garment; and as many as touched it were made well.”The New
Testament tells about various instances of healing by touching, and most of
the time we learn about a number of individual details. When it comes to these
details, serial recall starts to play an important role. To put it simply, the
transmission of narratives involves scripts that arefleshed out with the help of
serial recall. In addition to the stylistic and acoustic factors that we have
discussed, particular memories about characters, places, and other details are
used in this process.
4.6 MEMORY AND EMOTIONSThat memory and emotions are closely related has become clear already in our
survey of brain anatomy (see section 3.2). The amygdala and the hippocampus
are located next to each other in the brain, the former playing a central role in
the experience of emotions, especially fear and anxiety, and the latter being the
orchestrator of long-term memories. The significance of this connection has
been recognized in both the Cognitive Science of Religion and the study of the
New Testament. A particular question about emotions and memory interested
several researchers in bothfields: how do people remember things that happen
to them, given that the events generate intense emotions?
In the 1970s, psychologist Endel Tulving introduced an important distinc-
tion between two types of long-term, declarative memories (Tulving, 1972). As
Tulving suggested, some memories refer to clearly identifiable episodes in a
person’s life, such as “yesterday I ate smokedfish on the marketplace.”
76 Cognitive Science and the New Testament