Proto-Story....

Looking over my notes I realized that I never commented on a sentence written by Schank on page 15. He says, "We understand events in terms of events we have already understood." Let's say for the sake of argument that this is indeed true. What does it mean? I can make sense of saying that events I now experience manifest themselves as a sort of knot on an expanding web of experiential relationships, but was there some sort of proto-event? Or proto-story? How did little baby Josh understand anything around him if he was not only experiencing them for the first time, but was too young to have had any other experiences to relate the new situations to? Doesn't this make you wonder if we don't already carry experiences with us? Perhaps situational knowledge can be encoded in genomes, and we have vestigial knowledge given to us by our parents' genes. Some religions believe that we are reincarnated souls who carry with them much of the knowledge learned from previous lives. (This reminds me of a book entitled, "Many Lives, Many Masters.") I wonder if it's now possible in my life to encounter a situation where I would have NO references. Essentially, in such a situation I guess I would have no understanding....