walls”or“a car that likes to watch movies”) whereas others did not (“a man
who has no shadow”or“a car that is weightless”). After testing subjects’
memories of the 153 items, following a break of one or two weeks, Steenstra
found that explicit violations of ontological schemata (counterintuitiveness)
and stretching the limits of ontological schemata (strangeness) had similar,
positive effects on remembering. She found that counterintuitiveness had a
further advantage when the violation included agency (such as“a car that likes
to watch movies”)—but no difference between counterintuitiveness and mere
strangeness was observed when agency was not involved in the violation. In
other words, someone or somethingdoingsomething counterintuitive was
found to stick to memory better than simplydoingsomething strange, but
there was no significant difference if the counterintuitive detail was not about
doing something. In sum, adding agentive traits to concepts (such as cognitive
abilities or goal-directed behavior) that are counterintuitive is a good recipe
for cultural success, whereas concepts with other counterintuitive traits do not
necessarily beat merely strange concepts in cultural transmission.^10
In Chapter 6 we will see that the gospel narratives frequently stretch the
limits of intuitive ontology without explicitly violating them, such as healing
serious illnesses (John 5:1–15, 9:1–12, etc.) or catching extraordinary amounts
offish (Luke 5:1–11). But, as we already noted above, truly counterintuitive
traits are not very frequent. They mostly include agency, as suggested by
Steenstra’s experimentalfindings, and are mostly related to Jesus, who can
heal from a distance (Matt. 8:5–13), appear or disappear at will (Luke 24:31,
36), and so on. Overall, the gospels seem to follow an economy of violating
cognitive schemata that leads to a successful package of cultural concepts:
most things remain completely intuitive, some are strange but not impossible,
and only a few are counterintuitive.
4.8 MEMORY AND LITERACY IN ANTIQUITYSo far it might seem as if the cognitive science of memory can help the study of
the New Testament only if one is interested in oral tradition. In this section,
I would like to argue that memory played an important role in ancient literacy
and thus insights from memory studies are relevant for understanding a much
(^10) More recently, Michaela Porubanova and colleagues (2013) found that concepts violating
cultural expectations were remembered as well as minimally counterintuitive ones. Porubanova
and colleagues (2014) also reported that the involvement of agency gave an extra boost to the
memorability of concepts violating both cultural and innate schemata. Differences in the designs
of the respective experiments cited in this section could explain the differences in their outcomes.
Clearly, further experimentation is needed to work out the details of how cultural violations and
agency influence memorability.
Memory and Transmission 83