in making such sequences into meaningful formulas is to tie newly forged
formulas into intensely felt,highly particular,multimodal scenes of real
life.
How did this happen? Activities that a group of people were doing
while they were vocalizing together,activities that were important or
striking or richly emotional,came to be associated with particular sound
sequences,so that each time the sound sequence came up again,highly
specific memories would be evoked in participants.Whenever people
sang or chanted a particular sound sequence they would remember the
concrete particulars of the situation most strongly associated with it:ah,
yes! we sing this during this particular ritual admitting new members to
the group;or,we chant this during a long journey in the forest;or,when
a clearing is finished for a new camp,this is what we chant;or these are
the keenings we sing during ceremonies over dead members of our
group.
Over the years and centuries more and more different chanted for-
mulas came to be associated with more and more different aspects of
group life,as human social life became more and more complex.Even
though these chanted formulas became somewhat conventional and
ritualized in form,and shortened by frequent use,and eventually,by
becoming open-slot formulas,admitted the combining of different for-
mulas and parts of formulas into each other,they were remembered and
produced as holistic units whose processing was tied to limbic-emotional
memory.This is the kind of memory that is specially developed in
mammals (and even more developed in human evolution) that works as
a gatekeeper in the brain so that creatures have to only deal with and
process events that are especially salient and important and leave aside
emotionally unimportant events.The limbic-emotional system works
by comparing continuing events to emotionally important,remembered
scenes that are stored as whole,multisensory scenes of real life remem-
bered as concrete particulars.Such memory explains how we can remem-
ber hundreds of thousands of different,highly idiosyncratic formulas and
use them so quickly and fluently.
At first,in childhood (or historically at the beginnings of language) we
remember sequences as wholes tied to particular scenes.(This still is
the case for me for some spoken formulas:“Ain’t it the truth!”evokes a
specific scene of the Cowardly Lion/Bert Lahr in the film The Wizard of
Oz).But later in our language development and in language evolution
our limbic system is able to generalize from the many thousands of occa-
sions of use of such formulas so that we pick out a varied collection of
highly schematic features,any family resemblance collection of which
will trigger an instant comparison and tell us that this particular spoken
formula is the appropriate one to use now.Consider a group of people306 Bruce Richman