Welcome to Mr Aslanov’s Lessons QUESTION-TYPE BASED TESTS FunEnglishwithme +99894 6333230
TEST 2 – Storytelling Match each statement with the correct person. List of People A. Hernadi
B. Mink
C. Plotkin
D. Mithen
E. Edelman
F. Holyoak and Thagard
G. Carruthers
H. Albertus
1. Early European storytelling came about because of a traditional form of
memorising…
2. Cognitive fluidity allowed early humans to make and change
arrangements
3. Telling stories allows us to relate to our surroundings
4. The brain changes our recollections of past events to match our current
circumstances
5. Telling stories is a trait which is common to all nations
6. Early humans became more inventive when they were able to make a
connection between different ideas
7. Your memory of something will be improved if you visualise it rather
than just listen to it
8. Humans adjust to their surroundings as well as changing them
Dr Tom Sjoblom, University of Helsinki, explores the link between narratives and memories
Storytelling seems to be a fundamental feature of human existence. In a recent article, Paul Hernadi points
out that storytelling and narratives are such widespread phenomenon that they could justifiably be included
in a list of human universities (Hernadi, 2001). But our craving for narratives or stories, goes deeper than
this. It is embedded in our mental images of whatever happens around us (Boyer, 2001). In other words,
creating narratives is our way of connecting and interacting with our environment (Mink, 1978).
As a species, we humans appear to have a much more active attitude towards our environment than
any other species. Our bodies and minds not only adapt to the surrounding world, but we actually shape and
construct our environment to better suit our needs (Plotkin,1983). From this perspective, culture is nothing
more than an environment that we create ourselves. Culture is not something in opposition to nature. Instead
it is a part of it; It is - in a way – nature modified to better suit the requirements of the human life form.
Thus, culture and all aspects of it are basically products of natural selection and, more specifically, the
evolution of the human mind (Boyer, 2001).
Between 60,000 and 20,000 years ago the first sign of art and religion appeared and humans started to
build houses and invent more sophisticated tools and weapons, such as bows and arrows. This period has
been called the ‘big bang’ of human culture. There is still much controversy on how to explain this period of
innovation, but a growing consensus connects the greater cultural energy and innovation of the period to the
emergence of individuals as creative beings (Mellars,1994)
The archaeologist Steven Miller has suggested that this creativity can be explained by the emergence
of a ‘cognitively fluid’ mentality. In other words, the ability to link together information from different areas
of our life. Cognitive fluidity makes it possible for human beings to emerge from the concrete situational
present and to adopt a more general and abstract approach (Mithen, 1996). As Gerald Eldeman puts it, ‘With
that ability come the abilities to model the world, to make explicit comparisons and to weigh outcomes;
through such comparisons comes the ability of reorganising plans.’(Eldeman,1992) Eldeman goes further
than this and argues that it is the flexibility of our memory system which is the key to understanding how
cognitive fluidity affects our ability to learn new things in general (Eldeman, 1992). The basic idea here is
that our memory does not really represent the past as it happened. In most of the cases, it does not even
represent it as it is stored and coded into our brains. Instead, our memory prefers creating the past from the
perspective of how relevant it is to our present situation. Striving for this kind of coherence, our mind
combines stored representations and blends information stored in them (Holyoak and Thagard, 1995). Thus,
all things being equal, we do not remember the past, we create it. The medieval art of memory, known as
memoria, has interested historians for a long time, but seldom from a psychological or cognitive perspective.