In my life, the Biblical knowledge that I possess at the moment has come from various sources, including previous experiences. In my episodic memory, there are very illustrative cases of deviations from values promoted in the Bible. As a primary school student, I learned from my best friend that she had taken the teacher’s parker pen without permission, but I did not tell her to return it and express regret for that. At the time, I did not even realize that it was a case of theft and that one “shall not steal” to incorporate Christian values (Holy Bible, New Living Translation., 1996/2015, Exodus 20:15). As I grew up, the reconsideration of these memories added to my spiritual knowledge.
Previous learning from diverse sources, such as religious acquaintances, also contributed to what I currently know about the Bible and the lifestyles that it promotes. In adolescence, I would communicate with peers from very religious Christian and Muslim families. From conversations with Christian classmates, I learned the term “righteousness” and that it could be promoted and taught by “God-breathed scripture” (Holy Bible, New Living Translation., 1996/2015, Timothy 3:16). Since that moment, I had in mind the idea of God’s righteousness as a Christian moral and spiritual ideal glorified in the Bible.
Retaining and recalling the knowledge cited above is another interesting issue. From the perspective of cognitive psychology, both examples exemplify explicit episodic and semantic memory since there are the memories of personal events and facts that my interlocutors mentioned (Goldstein, 2019). The knowledge was retained by means of unintentional rote rehearsal, which is a common memory encoding mechanism (Unsworth, 2016). I still remember repeating those pieces of information mentally and avoiding missing any details since I felt the magic of being told a secret that I had to keep. For this assignment, the memories have been recalled through stories for the most part. The recollection of specific Bible quotes that are personally relevant and associated with past events in my life is another method. This connection between general facts (Biblical passages) and personal stories demonstrates close links between the semantic and episodic aspects of conscious long-term memory.
References
Goldstein, E. B. (2019). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (5th ed.). Cengage Learning.
Holy Bible, New Living Translation. (2015). Tyndale House Publishers. (Original work published 1996).
Unsworth, N. (2016). Working memory capacity and recall from long-term memory: Examining the influences of encoding strategies, study time allocation, search efficiency, and monitoring abilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(1), 50–61. Web.