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10] Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education 1.1 Narrative and Cognition Jerome Bruner (1986) distinguishes two modes of human thinking: paradigmatic and narrative. These two modes are two ways of organizing memories and experiences and constructing reality. Paradigmatic thinking is framed by rules, theoretical concepts, arguments and evidence, while the other way of thinking is through narratives. The different nature of the logic of the two systems is illustrated by Jerome Bruner through the logical proposition of “if x, then y”, and so “The king died, and then the queen died”. Paradigmatic thinking looks for factual truth in the statement, while narrative thinking is concerned with the relationship between two events, which, according to Bruner, can be grief, suicide or intrigue. Logical-scientific thinking is based on the ability to match empirical truth with verifiability, while the narrative mode is based on insight into the intentions behind the actions, as well as the twists and consequences in the stories. In a narrative, beyond the components of action - the world of situations, actions, actors, and means - there is another realm: the realm of the actor’s consciousness, through which the thoughts, emotions, motives, motivations and perspectives of the actor are revealed to the recipient. While paradigmatic thinking tends to abstract and embed knowledge into a general logical system, narrative cognition is individual and personal. In order to understand why storytelling is so effective and natural in everyday human communication, we need to explore its general functions. The relationship between cognition, memory and narrative is addressed by narrative psychology. The act of storytelling involves a unity of knowledge construction, transmission, reception and storage through narrative. The process, while seemingly trivial, is composed of important cognitive moments: (1) in constructing the narrative, the narrator subjectively organizes his memories, (2) for the transfer, the narrator creates a linguistic or pictorial representation, (3) the representation must follow a narrative logic that is interpretable to the receiver, (4) collectively interpretable narrative schemas help with memory retrieval. Understanding human cognition through the telling and reception of stories is aided by key concepts from narrative and cognitive psychology such as representation, narrative, schema and script. The definitions for these concepts are underpinned by cognitivist social psychological and psycholinguistic models. In a constructivist approach to narrative psychology, representation is an active process whereby an individual creates a substitution of a phenomenon outside him or herself while accounting for similarities and differences. During ‘re’ - ‘presentation’ the individual recalls the event, concept or person, and as it were present, ‘presents it. The function of this mental action is to create a representation of the objective cultural and social reality that is meaningful for the individual. Individual or community representations, however, not only define the cultural and social milieu,
