Abstract
Synesthesia is a phenomenon wherein the stimulation of one sensory modality leads to a percept in another non-stimulated modality—for example, classical music triggers an additional memory percept hidden in that the particular tune can be called as auditory synesthesia, which encompasses the variants in memory and audio synesthesia. Until recently, it was assumed that synesthesia occurs strictly in a unidirectional manner, and although the perception of a particular topic induces a video, audio and image percept in synesthetes, they typically do not report as to what really triggered the percept of memory. Recent data on number processing in synesthesia suggest, however, that colors can implicitly elicit numerical representations in digit–color synesthetes, thereby questioning unidirectional models of synesthesia. Using a video/audio/imagery fragment completion paradigm in synesthetes, we demonstrate in this paper that video/audio/imagery can implicitly influence memory and their recall performance. Our data provide strong support for a bidirectional nature of video/audio/imagery synesthesia and, in general, may allude to the mechanisms of cross-modality interactions in the human brain. Extending the idea further, we propose a new concept of learning called Synesthetic Learning Pedagogy (SLP), wherein a variety of video/audio/imagery can be used to positively and/or negatively to enhance learning. In this paper, the results of this exploratory study on SLP are being reported, while detailed experimental works are being carried out based on a comprehensive set of hypotheses, whose results will be hopefully reported in the near future.
