Synesthesia and Its Extremely Important Role in ‘The Greatness of Film’

“When one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is activated at the same time”, this causes an overwhelming feeling as your senses combine in an unnatural and sometimes unnerving way – this is known as ‘Synesthesia’.

For creating this short film, I took on the role of Director as my primary, and Co-editor and my secondary role. Both of these I have prior experience with but wanted to approach both roles with an open mind, ready to learn and take inspiration from others in these particular fields.

We chose to base our short film on the subject of Synesthesia; not to just raise awareness of the condition, but also because a fellow group member experiences this and we felt it would be interesting to explore this phenomenon in the medium of film. It was also incredibly helpful to have someone on set who could tell us exactly what the actress should be experiencing, and how it should look. The genre we decided to convey this as was a Thriller as we felt the unnerving nature of the condition could make for quite a sinister sequence.

One of our main filmic inspirations came from shorts like ‘Synesthesia’ by Terri Timely, for example, in Timely’s interpretation of Synesthesia you notice several moments in which the characters are doing normal, mundane tasks, but with one or more aspects changed to show the symptoms of the condition. For example, in one particular shot you can see the woman slicing pieces of paper from inside a book as opposed to slicing food in preparation for the meal she is making – this is showing that she tastes words when she reads them. Although this is subtle, it is an interesting way of conveying the point they are trying to make, as you could see this and realise that perhaps the senses can cross over, but in actuality the director has given us a specific scenario in which this can happen; however, it is something that might not be noticed at first glance. This could also be compared to how someone experiencing Synesthesia may look and feel; as although from the outside they may look ‘normal’ and unaffected, in reality their brain is performing in an incredible way but that only they, themselves can see.

In contrast to this, another short film that I had taken inspiration from gives a more blunt representation of Synesthesia. From watching this, came the decision to overlay a voice-over, explaining the ways in which Synesthesia can affect people whilst following the perspective of a singular character, and being immersed by ‘her world’. I felt that it helped to move the narrative along as there is no dialogue from the character herself. Likewise, in our film we chose to only have an inner monologue rather than spoken dialogue as we wanted to ensure that the viewer is ‘in her head’ – we also did this by including several point of view (POV) shots.

A film that is entirely made up of POV shots is Robert Montgomery’s, ‘Lady In The Lake’ (1947). This is an extremely interesting concept and the first of its kind; however, I felt that having the POV shots make up the entire film could mean that we don’t feel as connected to our character as we would never see their reactions or facial expressions – only in reflections. In contrast, this could have been an interesting way of interpreting our subject matter of Synesthesia, as it would be a way of clearly showing that only she is experiencing these incredible surroundings – furthering my earlier concern of the viewer perhaps not understanding that the world does not look like this to everyone else. Taking tester POV shots with our actress in pre production would have been an efficient way to determine whether this concept could have worked – in future projects this is something I would like to explore further.

During the pre production portion of this project we used a stand-in actress to take tester footage with on location, as well as, footage for our Kickstarter which was a quintessential part of fundraising so that we were able to pay our actress and for any expenses during filming, i.e. food and transport. We also conducted these tests to ensure the lighting was appropriate and that we didn’t need to hire any extra lighting on the day of filming. We also used a DSLR camera that I own for this tester footage and although it didn’t perform perfectly once the sunlight was limited, for the extreme close-ups it gave a defined image with great depth-of-field. One of these shots can still be seen in the final cut of our film. When using the C100 camera on the day, we noticed that it did not cope well with the change in lighting and therefore resulted in slightly grainy images in post production, making it hard for the visual effects to be applied over the top of it. Therefore, something I would do differently in future projects would be to take the camera that you are using on the day to also be used for the tester footage prior to filming – this is so that you can be sure it will perform as well as you need it to, without risking the outcome of unusable footage.

We also completed a risk assessment after finding our location before any filming took place to ensure the area was safe to work in and that no harm would come to us, the actress or the equipment – this was a paramount precaution to be taken due to the filming location being adjacent to a lake. In this area – which also can be seen in a section of the short film – was a building that allowed us to take cover if needed, in case of a change in weather. Despite this, we checked the weather forecast prior to filming which, in turn, meant one of our filming days was unusable due to the rain, compressing our original two days, into just one.

Whilst researching editing styles I found several examples of ‘distortion’ in film – this is important as the majority of our 90 second film entails a great amount of creative editing giving the illusion of a condition that our character is experiencing. We planned to do this by creating as much on-screen distortion as possible, alluding to our character experiencing something ‘hallucinative’.

The first example of this can be seen in ‘Limitless’, the 2011 Science-fiction/thriller directed by Neil Burger, in which the protagonist must ingest a pill in order to gain knowledge. Once he had taken the pill, he begins to see blurred visuals as well as, the sounds around him becoming intensified; thus clearly showing the viewer, the agitated state he is in.

Another example of this is in Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ (1996) during Ewan McGregor’s detox scene. Interestingly, there is an important difference between having a distorted effect added in post production and making the viewer believe that effect is the reality for the character – therefore, having the actor acknowledge this, and play to it. In this film you truly believe and sympathise with the main character ‘Mark’, as by changing the physical set that he is in, it now not only allows the audience to realistically see what he sees, it also helps us to gain a deeper understanding of Mark’s problems.

Due to our character experiencing a crossover of her senses, we also wanted to have these become heightened to add to the overwhelming style of the film. To do this we increased the volume in everyday sounds that she hears, such as birds or footsteps. However, most importantly, we made the visuals impactful by playing with the colour grade of certain objects in frame. An example of this is when our character sees a bush, the colour remains normal, but once she makes contact with it, it changes. This shows, early in the sequence that it is only her experiencing this – not that this is the world around her.

An example of heightened colour in ‘film’ is in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) in the desert scene – this has been colour graded to heighten the surroundings, creating an intense orange effect to enhance the scene.

Due to our short film being limited to 90 seconds, it meant that we couldn’t always include everything we wanted to when it came to post-production – only being able to leave in the information that was crucial to the viewer. When deciding on this, I read ‘In the Blink of an Eye’ by Walter Murch (1992), in which, page 17-19 in particular Murch talks about the ranking order of what should be most important when editing. He claims that ‘at the top of the list is ‘Emotion’ – this is also something I stand by and try to transfer into my own films, much like ‘Synesthesia’. Therefore, scenes such as; the girl moving from one place to another, became less important if I wanted to ensure that I had enough shots in there that could convey the emotion I wanted. Murch also states that “if you are considering a range of possible edits for a particular moment in the film, and you find that there is one cut that gives the right emotion and moves the story forward” – regardless if it means there will be less continuity – “that is the cut you should make”, furthering my previous point.

This is certainly something I took on board when editing and found that cutting out scenes in which our actress was moving from one location to the other, for example; going from the building to the tree that she then touches. After making this decision and reviewing the edit, it became clear that the viewer didn’t need that context to still appreciate the film and most importantly, her emotions.

Our colour palette is made up of mostly greys and neutrals, but with a pop of colour in each shot, usually protruding from a specific object. This is similar to ‘The Tree of Life’ (2011), in which, director Terrence Malick used only soft, dull colours, but with a pop of bright, overly heightened colour scattered throughout.

When analysing my own film I can see many intentionally placed symbolism, an example of this is towards the end of the film when the effects become so intense, they begin to conceal the visuals – eventually making it almost impossible to see our character, or what she’s seeing. This is symbolised by the girl running into the dark distance, until out of shot. Also, when our character runs back inside to her ‘safe zone’ you notice that she still has a distorted effect on her, making her seem out of place – but towards the end of that shot, as the credits roll, you can see this grainy effect disappear as she slowly returns back to normal, like before she went outside. This is a metaphor for how she’s feeling, and that once shes inside where she feels safe, her overwhelming senses can’t become triggered and she is normal and unaffected.

Furthermore, we made a conscious decision to keep her ‘safe zone’ (Interior location) as neutral and bland as possible to represent her mind and how she must live her life if she doesn’t want to experience her condition. This also allowed us to create a clear contrast for when she went outside, meaning we could include bright, extreme colours that would stand out in comparison to the interior.

In conclusion, through the use of research I had accumulated and discussions with someone who is affected by Synesthesia, I believe I used my existing and new directing skills to successfully guide and supervise my production crew, as well as listening to their ideas and incorporating them. This project also gave me experience with directing actors and the most successful way of doing that I found is to be approachable but also clear with your intentions. Furthermore, through reading Murch’s ‘In the Blink of an Eye’ I learnt new editing techniques and found more efficient and preservative ways of piecing together a sequence – specifically one with a limited length. This project heavily emphasised on colour and its uses, so through this I was also able to experiment with how colour can affect a scene and how it can also be a great tool in moving a story along.

Interestingly, I found that Synesthesia plays an extremely important part in ‘the greatness of film’. Similarly, in great examples of film there will be a unity of the senses creating a seamless experience. For example; the tracking shot in ‘Goodfellas’ (1990) is a perfect moment of when both sight and sound run parallel, therefore constructing a smooth and harmonious combination of these elements. Whilst the main character walks from scene to scene, a perfectly correlated sound plays distantly in the background.

So, although initially the condition of Synesthesia being made into a film could be seen as meaning the complete opposite of ‘great film’, it is in fact the embodiment of this.

Exploration of Synesthesia As a “Perception-based Experience” and As an Indicator for Differential Synaptic Alignment

The specific aims of this project are to:

  1. Developed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) protocols to demonstrate brain activity in adults diagnosed with synesthesia.
  2. Investigate the distribution and localization of brain activity following an auditory or visual (A&V) stimulus.
  3. Investigate the effects of hallucinogens on the A&V responses of the same subjects. Functional MR imaging of the brain can provide reliable, predictable responses in a population of adults with synesthesia, given proper screening for the type of synesthesia each has.
  • Differences in synesthesia types correlate to distinct brain activation patterns to auditory and visual stimuli.
  • The effects of hallucinogenic substances altering auditory and visual input responses are independent of the type of synesthesia of the subject.
  • Hallucinogens can be used to mimic hallucinatory brain disorders in synesthetes. Demonstrate predictable or recurrent activation patterns in the brains of synesthesia subjects to provide diagnostic tools to assess synesthesia.
  • Dynamic imaging of responses to auditory and visual stimuli with and in the absence of a hallucinogenic substance will provide insight into signaling systems of healthy and disordered individuals.
  • Localized responses in the hallucinogenic state can be used as markers to differentiate between hallucinogenic disorders like schizophrenia and synesthesia. Synesthesia is defined as the condition where one sensory domain often, but not always, evokes experiences in another. Synesthetic associations are often involuntary, recursive, and arbitrary. Traditional forms of synesthesia include cross-modal correspondence, cross-modal imagery, sensory autobiographical memory, empathic perception, hallucination, and doppler illusion [1]. To distinguish synesthesia from imagination, however, it is necessary to understand the neural correlates behind each type of synesthesia. For example, in a synesthete that experiences bimodal color and sound associations, a higher note may correspond to a brighter color. This correlation can be due to extra neuronal connections across neighboring brain regions (cross-modality) or from differences in signal transmission magnitude and frequency across the same. Prior magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) meta-analyses of synesthesia have concluded that differences in signaling occur at the cortical level [2]. However, much debate remains about the significance of these results due to response quantification on a per voxel basis as well as questions on the appropriate protocol. This study seeks to focus on a specific subset of synesthetic patients to quantify changes in, rather than a standard profile for, brain behavior.

In a similar vein, neuroimaging of schizophrenia has revealed underlying structural differences which reflect neuronal abnormalities [3]. These structural brain changes are often gradual and result in auditory or visual hallucinations. Additional markers for schizophrenia include cognitive impairment, such as memory loss and attention deficit, or a variety of emotional and psychological delusions which lead to negative symptoms and severe life impairment [4]. Upon diagnosis, schizophrenia may require lifelong treatment and intervention. Generating new imaging markers for schizophrenia will be a useful tool in identifying the condition for earlier treatment applications.

The focus of this study is to scrutinize signaling and activation differences between severe hallucinogenic diseases, which significantly perturb quality of life and synesthesia. Furthermore, this study wishes to explore synesthesia as less of a “perception-based experience” and more as an indicator for differential synaptic alignment. For the purposes of this research, schizophrenia shall be mimicked by the controlled delivery of hallucinogens to synesthetic subjects: hence, each synesthete shall serve as his own control for baseline brain activity. I shall seek to identify global changes in brain activity while the subject is at rest with and without drug delivery. Audio-visual alterations are of special interest, as both parameters are easier to control within a study. Subjects shall experience the same audio-visual stimulus and their brain activity response shall be recorded in altered and resting brain states. Applying functional MR imaging techniques to synesthesia in the presence of hallucinogens could produce a brain signature for disease versus a benign neurological condition. The oldest brain imaging technique, electroencephalography (EEG), was one of the first methods purported for the measurement of synesthetic responses. EEGs directly record the electrical activity of depolarization by tracking transient electrical dipoles during ion flux across the cellular membrane [5]. The method is non-invasive and relies upon electrodes placed on the scalp of the subject, recording the overall activity of post-synaptic currents. Particularly, EEG was useful in tracking synesthesia during rest and free-viewing stimulation and revealed distinct activity patterns in the visual LPIT/BA37 brain region of grapheme synesthetes [6]. Non- and pseudo-synesthete control subjects were used as baseline activity comparisons. Spatial resolution is lacking, however, as the method relies upon a summed signal of currents for measurement. Additionally, it would be difficult to track the effect of an active agent like a hallucinogen, which diffuses into the brain via the bloodstream, with direct electric imaging methods.

In addition to EEG experiments, one PET study analyzed grapheme-color synesthetes and normal controls. Positron emission tomography (PET) is a nuclear imaging methodology that tracks small radioactive metabolites called radiotracers and models radioactive signals with mathematical equations [7]. The advantage of this method is that metabolic rates can be deduced from different tissues concerning specific metabolites, and the metabolites (or portions of them) can be tracked within the tissue sample. Using PET, however, derived no statistical difference between grapheme-word synesthetes and normal controls when introducing them to words and tones [8]. Hence, fMRI remains the most popular synesthesia imaging method by far.

Additional studies have centered upon functional magnetic resonance imaging, the main method applied in this proposal. Following these experiments, two major theories have been proposed to explain the neural basis for A&V-based synesthesia. First, it is believed that a region in the visual cortex (fourth visual area V4) preferentially processes color and cross-communicates with the motion processing region, called “MT” [9]. It is surmised that cross-activation comes as a result of reduced synaptic pruning, a process of ensuring synaptic plasticity during brain development. The second predominant theory is that of “Disinhibited Feedback,” a more signaling-based rather than structural explanation for synesthesia. Disinhibited Feedback assumes a reduction in the amount of inhibition signaling between brain regions, causing signaling to travel from “higher” to “lower” order areas about the signaling pathway. Synesthesia would be a result of an overall abundance of excitatory over inhibitory signaling, causing an over-activation of visual cortical brain regions in synesthetes [10]. It is under the second theory that synesthetic experiences can be induced with hallucinogens such as LSD, the main hypothesis of this proposal [11]. Functional MR imaging (fMRI) applies the magnetic properties of select nuclei to generate a comprehensive, temporal image of the brain as a response to small changes in blood flow. fMRI contrast is dependent upon blood-oxygen-level (BOLD): deoxygenated and oxygenated hemoglobin exhibit different magnetic properties, producing a high-resolution, specialized map of brain activity [12]. Brain activity in fMRI is based on the proportional relationship between energy usage and increases in localized cerebral blood flow, volume, and oxygenation. Active regions will display an influx of blood, increasing the concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin and decreasing that which is deoxygenated.

Quantitative analysis of the MR imaging data can then extract changes in concentrations of deoxygenated and oxygenated blood. Statistical filtering separates the signal of interest from noise in each voxel and produces a portrait of brain metabolism [13]. Additionally, because of its dependence on the change in blood flow, the method is noninvasive, hence it will not perturb the effect of any introduced hallucinogens for the second portion of this study. fMRI is also relatively accessible (can be performed on a 1.5 T scanner), low cost, and provides good spatial resolution [14]. Typical fMRI experiments display regional, time-dependent changes in metabolism over an average period of an hour or less [15]. All stimuli delivered must be artificial, as the patient will be lying within the scanner and therefore cannot receive real-life sensory input. The subject shall be provided goggles and earphones through which they shall receive a controlled auditory and visual stimulus that would elicit synesthesia.

Due to the subjective nature of the synesthesia experience, the study shall rely upon the synesthetes themselves to control for their hallucinogenic stages. Hence, brain activity measurements will be recorded at rest and audio-visual stimulus states both before and after hallucinogen introduction. The baseline activity level shall be determined relative to the non-hallucinogen synesthete data.

As voluntary motion control cannot be guaranteed after the introduction of the hallucinogen, the subject shall be asked to remain as still as possible during the control portion of the experiment (i.e. undergoing no motor tasks). Speech data may also be recorded during the control portion, as a precaution against any speech elicited by the subject in the non-control phase. After the introduction of the hallucinogen, the subject shall be secured comfortably to the scanning bed, to reduce head and body motion as much as possible without restricting natural involuntary movement. A sequence of the same auditory and visual stimulus shall be relayed. Subjects shall be awake during the examination. Drug dosage shall be low enough to not require additional sedatives or anesthesia to provide a relatively motionless environment and to ensure proper capture of brain activation. Due to the complexity of schizophrenia, the hallucinogen of choice will be selected to model only the audio-visual aspect of the mental disease, rather than elicit all symptoms. Though an ideal schizophrenia model would simulate all biological changes and lead to very predictive symptoms, the scope of this study contains only responses at the audio-visual sensory level. It should also be noted that it is not the interest of this study to explore long-term brain changes in schizophrenia, but rather instant neurobiological changes that may occur at the beginning of disorder diagnosis.

Glutamatergic NMDA receptors play a central role in synaptic plasticity and serve as fair targets for schizophrenia modeling. Glutamate signaling hypofunction is generally reported in schizophrenia, a possible cause for the pathogenic reduction of gray matter over time [16]. The molecule itself is an excitatory glucose derivative which promotes the influx of sodium atoms during depolarization and action potential propagation. Hence, the model assumes the perturbation of the neurotransmission signaling pathway following an A&V stimulus. NMDA post-transcriptional NR1 subunit mRNA is also shown to be reduced in schizophrenia [17].

Ketamine shall be applied in controlled dosages as a glutamatergic NMDA uncompetitive antagonist to mimic schizophrenic hallucinations. These dosages will follow pediatric sedation recommendations of a single bolus of 1.5 mg/kg, with an average recovery time of approximately 20 minutes [18]. The drug itself weighs approximately 237.72 g/mol and is a parenterally administered anesthetic used commonly for short-term surgical procedures. Among other effects, ketamine increases functional connectivity and prefrontal glutamate levels due to a reduction in GABAergic interneuron function (possibly through preferential binding of ketamine on GABAergic cells) [19]. The chemical structure of the molecule is provided below. Prior studies have shown that ketamine exacerbates schizophrenic symptoms and induces them in healthy subjects in acute dosages [21]. Hallucinations induced by the molecule are primarily visual and mimic earlier stages of schizophrenia onset, preferential for the profile this study would generate. Generally, ketamine administration shall mimic schizophrenia pathogenic onset via inducing temporary NMDA receptor dysfunction. The study shall be conducted in two stages: one without the hallucinogen, and one with the hallucinogen. These stages shall in turn be subdivided into a rest-state experiment and another with audio-visual synesthetic stimulus, for a total of four experiments. The rest state experiment will have the participant rest within the scanner, awake, with no stimulus for the duration of the experiment (around 20 minutes depending on hallucinogen clearance time). A scanner with EPI capability and appropriate receiver coils shall be used for data collection during these 4 sessions. Basic auditory and visual stimulus shall be controlled in intensity and frequency throughout the study.

Regions of Interest (ROIs) for the functional MR imaging portion of the experiment shall likely rest in the auditory cortex in the upper side of the temporal lobe, as well as regions of the occipital lobe which show increased activation or significant activation patterns.

Standard statistical techniques for the determination of average baseline and stimulation voxel signals shall be applied for differentiating brain region activation. Auditory stimuli will be tones, voices, or musical sounds which the subject has proclaimed triggers a synesthesia response. Tones shall be present at an appropriate level to ensure listening, with intermittent bouts of the silence of approximately 200 milliseconds between each sound bite. Audio shall be delivered via headphones the subject shall be wearing. A minimum of ten sets of sounds, each less than a minute long, shall be played in succession with intermittent pauses. The sequence shall be repeated for the duration of the experiment. The audio shall be played in two stages: once alone, and once with visual input after the first set of sounds alone has been played. Subjects shall experience visual stimuli via LED goggles placed over the eyes. The number of images shall be concurrent with the sound sequence described in the auditory paradigm and correspond to audio-visual synesthesia triggers reported by the subject. Hence, images shall only be played after the first set of audios has occurred. This study proposes a representative sample of sound-to-color synesthetes with no concurrent mental diseases which are above the age of 21. As in all functional MR imaging studies, subjects with metallic clips or metallic objects within their bodies shall be rejected. Insufficient sedation or any indication of significant adverse response to the hallucinogen shall stop any experimental tasks immediately and warrant medical review. Informed consent shall be required of all subjects. In the interest of time and resource management, this study has proposed an analysis of sound-to-color synesthetes with short-term hallucinogen influence. Future studies may strive to track hallucinogens if introduced to synthetic subjects or otherwise explore hallucinogens that mimic long-term schizophrenic behavior. The study could be additionally enriched through PET tracking of these hallucinogens during the introduction: a traced pathway of drug interaction within the brain would introduce another level of completeness to the signaling pathway I plan to develop.

Analytical Essay on Human Memory: Different Types of Synesthesia

How can we make memory without memories? We are the sum of our memories and these memories represent who we are. However, the way people archive and remember the past contradict each other. Our brains are becoming increasingly reliant on digital devices to archive and remember life’s occurrences. Digital memory relies entirely on the fidelity of recorded images, but it cannot capture the richness of human memory, such as the feelings and smells we associate with a particular time. The less memory is experienced from within us, the greater the need is for external devices and tangible reminders of that which no longer accessible via memory. In other words, memory which is contained in a digital sense becomes memories. Therefore, people will have fewer and fewer individual memories that can be remembered by themselves.

There are various forms of digital memories, such as ROM, RAM, hard drive, etc. Digital devices are technically just one type of electronic storage. Without accessing and using them, there is no difference between a useless box and them. All of the computer processes in digital devices, from start-up to shutdown, rely on different forms of memory in order to function. For example, the core part of a computer is its CPU (Central Processing Unit), which runs all programs and operations. There are two types of memory that function within computers, that is primary and secondary memory. Primary memory is the main storage of memory and secondary memory stores data and programs. However, memory is not stored in the CPU, it is just part of the operations mainstream. A computer needs to process and store data, the same as humans do, but in a digital format. The process of storing a piece of data to its memory is called writing, and the process of retrieving data is called reading. RAM usually stores the data of a computer. However, RAM does not keep the information after the computer shuts down. Every piece of data in the computer is stored as a number. For example, letters and images are all converted to a set of numbers. Especially for images, it is just a numeric representation between 0 to 255, of a two-dimensional image. They exist in a virtual world, not a physical world. For Brief 1, I wanted to raise the awareness of remembering memories within ourselves and not on digital devices to people by visualizing the difference between human memory and digital memory. Actually, all the photos and videos which exist as a digital form are just a bulk of numbers between 0 to 255 and in reality, our memory is hard to indicate with by just numbers. How can we say that those numbers represent our memories? I will explain about how human memory is different from the memory of digital devices in the this critical report.

Human memory is fundamentally formed differently from digital memory. Human memory is an assembly of how people have perceived and experienced life through their senses. Different parts of senses are coded in different locations of the brain. Visual, smell, motoric, kinesthetic, and emotional elements are coded and stored in different parts of the brain. Altogether, the hippocampus has hold of those individual brain anatomical areas and eventually binds them together and produces a memory that people are capable of remembering. People may be curious about all the information that is coded in our brains, whether that means every memory is actually tattooed onto our brains and if that is true, why can’t we remember them all? The act of remembering itself can be the answer to this question. A memory only comes alive when we recall it. In general, memory can be considered as a kind of library. The place where we can save our memories when they are formed, filed up, and recalled when we need it. This is called consolidation. Though a memory might fade out over time or get lost, people think that it will always be there. The neuroscientist Karim Nader wondered if that is actually true. Nader designed an experiment. He trained rats to fear the sound of a tone while paring it with a mild shock. The rats learned to fear the tone alone. They formed a long-term memory that the tone predicts a shock. So the rats felt fear and froze every time they heard the sound of the tone, even though there was no shock effect. After that, Nader gave them a drug called anisomycin directly. It’s a drug known to block the proteins needed to build connections that store new memories. If our memory consolidation is like a library, and if the memory is wired in the brain and has built permanent memory, the drug should have no effect. However, when Nader played the tone after feeding the drug to the rats, they kept moving like the memory seemed to be gone. The drug is known to block a new memory from being formed but also blocks the memory from being recalled. This means our memory can be changed when we recall a memory. Nader’s experiment gave us the idea that any time we recall a memory we essentially disturb it. So, our memory is not like filed up in our memory like a library. It is a process of bringing up a memory from our brain and returning the memory to a long-term memory by creating new proteins to rewire the memory into your brain, in other words, re-consolidate. For example, if there is an object in a box and every time we take it out, it changes a little bit and we put it back. The theory of our memories is that it is possible to alter them by remembering them, leading people to understand the aspect of memory in various perspectives.

People probably think human memory is more vulnerable than digital memory in terms of factual information. However, what people should think about regarding factual information is what people really put value on, such as the date, where it happened, and its visuals. Rather than remembering factual information, remembering how we felt and what we experienced is more important and those small memories gathered all together make us who we are. These days people are relying on digital devices to remember every single thing. It is obvious that digital devices are helping our life, but the more we rely on them, the more we lose the key value of our life, which is our identity. Even if our memory is not 100 percent perfect and vulnerable, our memory has value itself which cannot be replaced by digital devices.

In the book ‘Memory’, I Farr argues that in the past, collectors, scholars, and monks devoted their lives to amassing documents on the fringes of a society that was oblivious of them and of a history that was written without their aid. Later memory history seized on this treasure trove and used it as the basis of its works, disseminating the fruits of its labours through myriad social institutions tailored to the purpose. Now that historians have abandoned that cult of the document, society as a whole has acquired the religion of preservation and archivisation. This phenomenon is similar to how people archive their memory externalized into digital format. The photos from the event became more important than the event itself. It arose a question in myself on why are people so obsessed with archiving their memory by capturing visuals. Is the feeling of fear that every memory is on the verge of disappearing or the anxiety about the precision of memory that makes people to archive and refrain from losing any of their memories?

In order to help us find the answer to our research question, it is useful to consider the two extremes of people regarding memory types. People who can remember great details about everything and a person who cannot remember anything. People who have HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) remember every detail from almost every day of their life. It is not sure how HSAM happens, but it arose the question do people have the ability to remember everything in them, but people just cannot remember everything or did the memory just not get encoded into their function in the first place. People who do not have HSAM would think they will have a better life or that it is a great ability to have. It could be a great ability in some ways. However, if it is impossible to forget something it means people who have HSAM have to remember every bad thing that happens to them. Is that what people really want? Will people be satisfied and happy if they can remember every great detail of their life? There will not be only happy memories, there will be bad and sad memories too. Also, it is always bad memories which bothers people the most, not a happy memories. Can we handle ourselves when it our memory just keep files piling up and up?

On the other hand, Henry Gustave Molasion, known as ‘Patient HM’, suffered from what we call densely amnesia after he got a surgery to remove the part of his brain that was causing his seizures. He got a surgery called a bilateral medial temporal lobe resection, which is removing a portion of the temporal lobe, including parts of the hippocampus and amygdala from both sides of the brain. After the operation, he could only remember about his childhood, but could not make any new memories. People measure time by our memories, and thus for Henry, it was as if time stopped when he was 16 years old, eleven years before his surgery. He could not even remember what he ate for breakfast. In 1962, Dr Brenda Milner, a psychologist from McGill, wanted to know, despite his amnesia, could he still have some form of memory. So she asked Henry to draw a star shape, using only a mirror to see this hand. It was a bit difficult, but if normal people practice and learn, they could do it. Henry seemed like he had no ability to make any long-term memories, he seemed hopeless. In fact, every time Milner asked him to draw a line, he said he had never done it before. However, the result was different. He got better and better. He was not able to remember new events of his life, but it proved that he was able to learn motor skills. It demonstrated that our memory has various types of memories and how important our memory is. If we cannot make new memories, although we can learn motor skills unconsciously, we are stuck in time. Imagine every morning when you wake up and you cannot remember what you did yesterday or even just a minute before. Many scientists study deep into memory, but it is still unclear what memory exactly is. People would say they understand memory, but we only understand the tip of the iceberg. Although we cannot understand it fully in a scientific point of view, we are all living with memory and feel what it is. Also, how we experience our memory is very different from person to person, and that is what makes one individual distinctive from another.

An interesting art project related to memory is Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s ‘Home Within Home’ installation about space and memory of fabric medium. It’s about a full-scale reconstruction of the house building where he lived before. He had to move often and that caused him to get interested in residential spaces. He said regardless of where he is living now, the memory of the space where he lived will stay deep in his heart. He said that installation is kind of like making clothes go into a spatial memory. The translucent organization-like fabric emphasized in bright colours is the invisible memory of our daily experience at home. He said that the audiences can put in their own meaning by reflecting themselves into installations, which is interpreted by the result of the interaction between installation and installation and the exhibition space. The concept of giving intangible memory a shape inspired me on how I can visualize intangible elements and how the medium itself can connect to the work. Also, how he connected his personal memory to a general issue was impressive. My briefs 1 and 2 are about memory and it is hard to define because everyone has different memories. His work gave me an idea on how I can expand my initial idea and reconstruct it beyond my perspective of memory.

The series of sculptures, Images in Debris, by Sarah Sze installation consists of a desk with multiple screens, and around them moving images are projected onto torn pieces of paper and onto the gallery walls. She explores sense of time, pace and distance, and the construction of memory, through a never-ending stream of images – personal, searched, researched, and found, which is what people negotiate daily. Images in Debris, both re-frames and refracts are the collision of images we are confronted by daily. The title, referring image has ceased, also alludes to the filmic idea of the persistence of vision, where the after image fills in the gaps between film frames, setting still images into motion in our perception and memory (Victoria Miro, 2017). When I saw this installation for the first time, it was visually pleasing. The installation seems big but when I saw it closely, I could see little pieces of torn paper. On those little pieces moving images were projected individually. Of course, it was not 100 percent perfect, but the accuracy was quite good. Because it was not 100 percent accurate and it did overlap each other a bit, it looked more like memories to me. Although, this installation is not only about memory, when we talk about memory we associate it with various things a well. Our memory is complicated and cannot be explain in one perspective.

Our memory involves all kinds of senses like sound, smell, touch, taste, and visual. There is an article about the relationship between food and memory from Harvard University Press by referencing a book called The Omnivorous Mind by John S. Allen(2012). The book reveals how cultural and biological facts evolved the relationship of food. People all have their own memories about food, some good and some bad. The taste, smell, and texture of food can even trigger people to remember circumstances where they were, when they were, not only by eating the food itself. In the article, they gave the example the Bit-O-Honey bar experience, when some people eat a Bit-O-Honey bar, they feel like they are going back to the time when they were a child. The Bit-O-Honey bar bridges an old memory for some people. Not only, the Bit-O-Honey bar experience, but it is also common to have some memories saved about food or taste. For example, when I see old Korean junk food that I used to eat when I was small, it reminds me of the time when I was in primarily school. It was kind of my deviation from a time when I did not want to study. Additionally, in the article, it states that for a child, candies and candy bars are often a special treat. This alone could make eating them a memorable experience. But beyond that, those candies that are associated with special childhood occasions, such as driving trips, visiting a friend or relative, or holidays, are often especially memory-rich. (Harvard University Press, 2012)

Sometimes a scent brings our memories back from a long time ago. This memory is called a ‘Proustian memory’. It is named after the French writer Marcel Proust, one of the novelists of the 20th century. He describes this phenomenon in the book ‘Swan’s Way’. He wrote about how a certain smell triggered him. The smell of madeleine cake dipped into a lime-blossom tea, recalled a long-forgotten memory vividly from his childhood: “and as soon as I had recognized the taste of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me … Immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set … and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine.” From the scent of madeleine, he could have remembered spatiotemporal information. Like what he experienced, we bring that situation back with not only one sense.

When I think of memory about sound, the first thing I can think of is music. When I Listen to some songs, it reminds me of the time when I used to listen to that specific song every day. Which season it was, how old I was, or even what I did. It seems like I came back to that time. For me, these memories are more emotional than other memories. Unlike other senses, a lot of music has its own story-like lyrics. From BBC’s website, there was an article about ‘Why does music evoke memories?’ by Tiffany Jenkins(2014). In the article, she claims that music has been an important mnemonic device for thousand of years by referencing the book Memory in Oral Traditions’ by David C Rubin(1995), who is a specialist in autobiographical memory and oral traditions. She said he explains how epic stories like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were passed down verbally using poetic devices. Before the narratives could be written down, they were chanted or sung. Oral tradition depended on memory. The rhythm, rhyme, and sometimes alliteration help one to retrieve the memory with cues. The structure of the song helps people to remember it, as well as the melody and the images the words provoke.

While I was researching about memory, I found that I barely remember something with haptic memory. It is actually everywhere and we always associate with it, but barely realise it. Fabian Hutmacher and Christof Kuhbandner, researchers at the University of Regensburg, experimented with haptic memory. For the first experiment, they asked participants to touch 168 everyday objects like a pen for 10 seconds each. After they had a haptic experience, they had a blindfold test. In the test, they had to choose which one was the one they touched between two similar items (e.g., two different pens, but they only touched one pen before). Surprisingly, almost all participants were able to the choose correct objects (94%) when they tested it right after the exploration. Even a week after, the accuracy rate did not go down that much, it was 85 percent. In the second experiment, they asked a new group of participants to do the same thing, but without the intention of memorizing them. A week after, the participants had the same test as the first group of participants did. The accuracy rate was still high, it was 79 percent. Even when participants had to visually identify without being blindfolded or having seen it previously, the accuracy rate was still high (73%). These results show that the effect of haptic perception is much stronger than people may think. Also, it shows how haptic perception is durable, detailed and how long-lasting the memory is, even without recognisable it. The reason why people could have generated memories of what they have never seen is that haptic experiences activate an area that is involved in processing visual signals not only in the somatosensory cortex (the area that processes the sense of touch). Moreover, our brain forms imaginary images when we touch an unseen object.

The fact that touch experience can also affect the visual sense, made me think of synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. (Wikipedia) People who are experiencing synaesthesia called synesthetes. There are various types of synesthesia. According to the research done by Sean A. Day (2005), there are 40 distinctly different types of synesthesia. 66.5% of participants reported they experienced a grapheme to the colours synesthesia. Time units to colours, musical sounds to colours, general sounds to colours, and phonemes to colours followed after. The top 14 types were one sense to a colour type of synaesthesia. The percentage of people who can feel sounds, tastes or touch from another sense was similar.

An interesting fact is that vision is the responsive sensor most of the time, not the trigger. That gave me a question again, why would people want to evoke their memory with visual elements that hard. Also, actually our senses have a synesthetic character in their interactive connections. Our senses intertwine with each other. In my opinion, if our memory is perceived by our senses being all combined in one sense like smell, taste or touch if it can evoke our memories, we can call it synaesthesia. It could be more broad than actual synaesthesia. Smell, taste, touch, and sound evoke our memories and most of the time the memories we recalled contain more than one sense. Our memories can recall all kinds of senses in very individually unique ways. For example, if we think of the smell of winter, some people might feel cold, some people might think of the food they usually eat in the winter, or some people might remember the texture of snow. Our brain and senses are much more complex and richer than people think, but people are overlooking the richness of memory. I think graphic designers are people who design everyday life. We often work with visuals but through the visuals or the works we make, we should communicate with our audiences and give them a direction where the designers want them to see. For brief 1, I informed people how digital memory and human memory is different. Brief 2 is the next step of brief 1. As a graphic designer, I wanted to design a new trigger for people to experience their daily life not only relying on vision. We all have 5 different senses, it is important to feel those different senses. How we feel, experience, and perceive our surroundings shows individual distinctions.

After I got the idea of synaesthesia, I researched how synaesthesia appeared in art. There was an interesting research about art and synaesthesia. Dr. Hugo Heyrman in Art sciences, a painter, a synaesthesia Research Professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts argues in his research that ‘art as a synaesthesia experience’ with the concept of making new connections between the senses. He claims that in the arts, the search for correspondences and complementarities between senses is essential and artists have brought the ‘synaesthetic experience’ to the surface to share certain visions with the world. The concept of synaesthesia appeared in the art scene quite early. The article from The Guardian by Gerard Mcburney(2006) said that Goethe declared that architecture was “frozen music”, and the mid-victorian uber-aesthete Walter Pater breathlessly announced that “all art aspires towards the condition of music”. By the late 19th and early 20th century, however, blurring edges between music and the other arts had become a widespread obsession. The artist who inspired me was Wassily Kandinsky who is well known as a synesthetes. Kandinsky appealed in his manifesto to the evidence of synaesthesia. He also wrote about how a certain sound had a “blue taste”. After he experienced the synaesthesia, he said that “Our hearing of colours is so precise … Colour is means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.” (The Guardian, Gerard Mcburney, 2006). The synaesthesia aspect of Kandinsky does appear in his artworks. He visualized music in his paintings, he converted each note with an exact hue.

An intriguing artwork related to synaesthesia that Daniel is working on is a collaboration project with artist and filmmaker, Lucy Cordes Engelman, who is creating works exploring her synaesthesia. Lucy experiences a different colour sequence when she sees time and numbers like a day, week, hours or years. Also, to Lucy, time is spatial and coloured related. It is technically called: Spatial-Temporal Synaesthesia. Daniel tried to visualize as close as possible how Lucy experiences hers even though he does not have the same synaesthesia himself.

There was an exhibition called ‘New Synaesthesia’ in Tokyo. This exhibition aimed to extend the concept of ‘music’ as a field of complexity that embraces various forms and textures of art and explores a close relationship with visual and visual art. (E-flux. 2013) In this exhibition, the term ‘synesthesia’ refers to a composite sense like incorporate sound and visual. How they introduced a new concept of synaesthesia inspired me to get an idea of if one sense can evoke memory, that could be considered as synaesthesia too. There was an installation made by Otomo Yoshihide and his collaborators called With out Records. Otomo explains that record machines are displayed on stands or hanging from the ceiling and it was his intention to give the audience a “trees in a forest” like feel. The record players played music at scattered moments for an unpredictable period of time. The machines would start and then stop suddenly, sometimes before the visitor, and while one is walking through the installation, they can determine which particular machine the sound came from. Indeed, the scraping, squeaking, rattling noises are as unpredictable as the bird calls and rustling one hears from the bushes in a forest (ArtAsiaPacific. 2012). My brief 2 has to interact with audiences and also has more than one medium involved, I have to think about how these elements can work effectively and together. Designing a space is honestly not my thing, I had a hard time thinking about where I should display my work or where would my audience experience my work best. Form this installation, how spaces are used and how spaces and sounds help each other and go together with each other helped me understand more on how I can make more coherence in this kind of work.

Manel Munoz is an artist based in Barcelona. He implanted a cybernetic sensory organ in his body to perceive changes in the atmospheric pressure. The barometric organ allows him to perceive the arrival of cyclones and anticyclones via beat frequencies transmitted through the skill. Depending on the input perceived, he can predict weather changes, as well as feel at what altitude he is in. He explains that his work is a new perception created inside his mind. After I saw his work, I realized how important we see some things through our own point of view and not through a camera lens.

These references I mentioned, showed how synaesthesia is applied in arts. Some are just about the artist themselves and some involve the audiences, but they are all giving us an idea of experiencing senses in different ways. Also, it shows how senses and art can be closely related. In a design aspect, the way synesthesia works looks pretty much similar to how design works to me. We design something visual and through that we want people to feel something different from only a visual sense. It could be emotion, actions or empathy. In my case, it is memory. In brief 2, I designed a set of experience kits: list of soundtracks and a task paper. People will experience the soundtracks which are recorded in Central Saint Martins and then fill in the answers on the given task paper. The reason why I chose CSM is because we come to college every day, but we barely remember what CSM sounds like. The sound of CSM is always different, like how the weather is different everyday. When listening to the sounds, people can imagine where this sound was recorded or it can evoke a particular memory in the audience. By answering the questions on the paper, the audience can figure out how sounds associate with other senses and how it evokes their memory.

We need to think about what is the ultimate purpose of memory. The way we store and experience our memory does matter. It is not about quantity of memory it is about quality of memory. Human memory flaws would actually be a part of its strength. It would be hard to pick out each specific memory from tons of our past events if we have a picture-perfect collection of 40,50 years of memories. Also, there is a hierarchy of memory. What we usually can not remember is not important information to us. Whereas, we remember minor details when we think it is important to us or when it’s something we are interested in. We also should think about why our brain memory system is structured this way, our body wants to work as effective as possible. If our brain has to remember every detail, we will suffer from every bad thing that has happened in our life. In my opinion, our brain protects us from getting too much stress and hurts from what makes us depressed. Those memories which remain after it’s filtered or what should have been forgotten is usually unconsciously remembered within us and it comes back to us when we do not expect it to. In my opinion, those memories that exist in our unconscious mind are powerful. Because, that means even when we do not think about it, it affects our life. Some people might raise a question on what about sustainability? To answer that question, I would say in despite of almost a perfect ability to store everything, you never know which parts of memory will be lost from your digital devices. Even if you back it up regularly, it is going to be lost in the end. On the other hand, our memory never loses them if we think it is important to us. Especially, when people experience something for the first time. I admit that which one is more durable would be different from what perspective people are looking for. However, in my opinion, human memory is more durable than digital memory. I think when people realize how other senses are more involved in our memory than they know, people will try to feel other senses more than before and designs can help them to realize it by the setup of the environment which helps to trigger other senses. Furthermore, if designs can help people build their own sensory triggers, it would be the best scenario.

Neuroscience Paper on Synesthesia As a Rare Neurological Condition

Genius

In our brains, there are connections made between the cerebral cortex. In normal brains, there is an equal split in the long and short connections inside our cerebral cortex. The short connections are related to our interests and our ability to do something that interests us, while the long connections relate to the capacity our brain has for things outside of these interests (Stinson, 2015). Our dopamine receptors in the thalamus determine what gets through. “Our brains process thoughts faster than we can sort through them.” There is a difference in the brain of a genius; in which a genius brain, has less of these dopamine receptors, in which lets more thoughts come through (Stinson, 2015). The gray matter in the brain refers to the darker tissue in the brain and spinal cord. It made up of dendrites, that are literally waiting to receive information from axons. When studying the brains of people who achieved IQ scores over 130 it was discovered that they have a greater volume of gray matter. There are larger quantities of nerve cells in their gray and white matter which means that communication happens more quickly and effectively. There may be various amounts of physical or tangible characteristics that are different in the brains of geniuses but, something non-physical would be their creativity and approach to different problems. (Stinson, 2015). Geniuses come with a flood of ideas in which they do not eliminate their ideas based on efficacy or practicality, everything is considered, and thoughts are not disqualified. There is no one identifying factor for what makes a genius instead there is many factors in which it becomes a mysterious puzzle for scientists and researchers (Stinson, 2015).

Creativity and Intelligence

In the relationship between creativity and intelligence, creativity can be known as a subset to intelligence, in which creativity is the broad search for information and the generation of various answers to problems. There are four factors of creative problem solving: sensitivity, fluency, flexibility, and originality (Sternberg, 2014). Sensitivity refers to one’s ability to recognize problems, fluency is the number of ideas one can come up with, flexibility is how one shifts their approach, and originality is how one comes up with an answer that is unusual from others (Sternberg, 2014). Sternberg and Lubart (2014) believe there are six main elements that converge to form creativity: intelligence, knowledge, thinking styles, personality, motivation, and the environment. Intelligence has three aspects according to Sternberg, the synthetic aspect relates to creativity as synthetic ability is the ability to generate the ideas that are novel, high in quality, and task-appropriate (Sternberg, 2014). The first essential element of synthetic ability is the meta-component. The meta-component for creative people may mean, taking problems that others see or that they’ve seen, and redefine them in a different way (Sternberg, 2014). For example, they might redefine a problem by deciding rather than trying to make more money to meet expenses, they should instead cut back on their expenses. Sternberg and Lubart state, “redefining problems involves both an ability and an attitude – the ability to do it effectively, but also the attitude whereby one decides to do it in the first place (2014).” What they are pertaining to is the discipline to revert the problem and follow through with a unique answer to the problem. Having the attitude is the thought process of trying a different approach to the problem.

Savant Syndrome

Savant syndrome is a rare, but extraordinary, condition in which persons with serious mental disabilities, including autistic disorder, have some “island of genius” which stands in marked, eccentric contrast to overall handicap (Treffert, 2009). Whatever the particular savant skill, it is always linked to massive memory. The most recent savant to date was known a “Rain Man”, his real name, Kim Peek. Peek, was known for having memorized over 6000 books and reading them at a rapid rate, being able to scan pages simultaneously with the left eye reading one page and the right eye reading the other. His MRI shows no corpus callosum and other relative CNS damage. Also, he has Autism Spectrum Disorder in which one out of every ten people with autism shows some savant skills. The autistic savant is one of the most fascinating cognitive phenomena in psychology. ‘Autistic savant’ refers to individuals with autism who have extraordinary skills not exhibited by most persons (Treffert, 2009). The most well-known of these savants is famous artist Stephen Wiltshire, who can draw well-detailed drawings of any city from his memory. Although savants may have many skills and capabilities, their main skills are in art, mathematical skills, higher memory recall, and being able to play music at a high level (Hughes et al., 2018). Researchers have recorded savant syndrome to occur in 37% of individuals who have autism. Bölte and Poustka (2004) explained there is no difference in intelligence between savants and autistic individuals. In which it is believed autistic individuals develop their skills through many hours of practice, making their abilities closely related to those who are “memory athletes”. An example would be, memorizing thousands of digits of the number pi using mnemonic devices and techniques, while taking hours of practice to do so. Although savants don’t tend to need practice, they indeed do, creating the question why and whether practicing their skills has effect on the cognitive or perceptual aspect of learning. Simner et al. (2009) believe that the hours spent practicing savant skills come from the austism-linked trait, obsessiveness. Most savants tend to have an obsessive trait to over-rehearse their skills to a prodigious level. In which individuals who have prodigious event-memory expressed higher obsessional traits than others. One other sensory link between savant syndrome and autism is synesthesia. This is a trait where numbers or sounds immediately trigger a sensory response of color. Simner et al. (2009) state that, “the obsessive over-rehearsal of savants may focus primarily on the skills of synesthesia”. Hughes et al. (2018) has supported this claim with a model that shows people with synesthesia have many skills related to savants.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a rare neurological condition that occurs when the brain entwines its senses. In those with synesthesia, one sensory modality automatically triggers a perception in a second modality. For example, a sound might instantly trigger a blob of color (Cytowic, 2002). This neurological phenomenon is a X-linked dominant trait, in which it is seen more in females. People with synesthesia appear to be just like ordinary people. Most of all synesthetes have a relatively high intelligence but lack some cognitive skills. Fifteen percent of known synesthetes have a family history of dyslexia, autism, or attention-deficit disorder. Synesthetic percepts are neither a conventional perceptions nor an image. Instead, they possess a curious spatial extension and dynamism. The mechanism controlling these additional percepts or associations is unknown; it could involve cross-activation from a cortical area representing the inducing stimulus to one representing the concurrent percept or association. This cross-activation could be mediated by direct connections (Hubbard, 2007). Alternatively, the experience could involve “hyper-binding” between cortical areas (Weiss and Fink, 2009). Where some mechanism such as the synchronization of cortical oscillations drives the co-activation. In which, the mental association of patterns of activity represents the inducer and concurrent. Several studies have identified structural differences in the brains of synesthetes compared to controls (Weiss and Fink, 2009). In almost all cases, synesthetes showed greater volumes of areas of grey or white matter or greater fractional anisotropy (FA) within certain white matter tracts than controls. Sagiv and Frith (2013) believe synesthesia can help with understanding conscious experiences. They have researched that synesthesia is special change in subjective experiences that can different from the conscious percepts of other people. Sagiv et al. (2013) state that, the consciousness is mediated by essential nodes in the brain which are required for a conscious experience. They use color as example, stating that synesthesia gives support to their claim because there are localized differences in the activity level in the brains of people with color synesthesia color regions. There are actually different kinds of synesthesia where one may get triggered by letters, numbers, words, names, music, smell, taste, even time. Majority of the cases with synesthesia involve time units and graphemes. For grapheme-color synesthesia one and the same physical stimulus can induce a different concurrent all in which depends how the stimulus was received and interpreted in the shape of a “S” could also be interpreted as the shape of a “5” (Dixon et al., 2006). It has been recently discovered that new synesthetic associations could be created immediately as a new meaning could be given to any symbol (Mrockzo et al., 2009). For the most common synesthesias are conceptual in nature, an example, days of the week that are colored by the position their in and the amount of importance rather than being colored based on the letters in which the weekday starts with. Synesthesias for numerosity use the same that creates the same color in all cases which demonstrates that synesthesia could occur anytime a synesthete is thinking of the inducing signal.

Hyperthymesia

Hyperthymesia or Super Autobiographical Memory is condition in which one can remember their life on a day-to-day basis. They can remember events on any given calendar date, dating back to their puberty years, with extremely accurate detail. This ability allows for individuals to use their minds as such of a database, being able to remember what clothes they were wearing or what they ate on any date (Viklund, 2015). Although this may be an extraordinary mental ability, it comes with some drawbacks. A person with this talent may have a difficult time with relationships, as they are always correct about past details, conversations, and things that happened. In which could make it very difficult to argue with someone who has this ability or lie to them because of their ability to analyze everything and find holes in the story you are telling. Their ability to recall or recollect events from the past is effortless and is distinguished from other types of exceptional memory by not needing any form of practice or mnemonic device to help store the information (Viklund, 2015). One other detrimental effect the ability can have is interfering with one’s thinking capacity since a stream of memories could disrupt an average day’s activity. With this condition, people may be able to associate events with dates but they do not have a photographic memory as they may still have trouble memorizing common information. Scientists believe this phenomenon is revolved around semantic cues that are used to retrieve the information, but they would need a larger group of people with hyperthymesia to be discovered to create a better model of how their memories are stored and played back. Other relative evidence suggests that amygdala may belong to autobiographical memory and that it plays a vital in emotional processing which likely helps encode stimuli charged by one’s emotions (Ally, Hussey, & Donahue, 2012). There is evidence of right hypertrophy and enhanced amygdala-to-hippocampus connectivity in people with hyperthymesia. With this knowledge, researchers speculate that autobiographical memories with emotional, social, and self-relevance are charged by the amygdala. Researchers in cognitive neuroscience have reported structural and connectivity changes associated with brain development could be responsible for changes in autobiographical memory. There are studies that suggest an increase in gray matter volume in memory-related areas until approximately the age of 16 (Giedd et al., 1999) and a recent study shows an increase in amygdala volume from ages 11 to 13 correlating with increased testosterone in males during puberty. Thus, proving that brain development may change autobiographical memory. The amygdala is connected to relatively 90% of all cortical areas of the brain (Cole et al., 2010) which makes it easy to convince researchers that it could increase the likely memories are stored and retrieved (Ritchey et al., 2008).

Telepathy

Telepathy refers to communication outside of the known senses. Studies have shown that we are able to “read” other people’s minds because we have neurons that may act as automatic mirrors. In this instance, we can automatically grasp the emotions and intentions of others. The ability to interpret subtle social cues can be enhanced by oxytocin, a hormone that increases trust and social approach behavior (Domes, 2007). In 2008, psychiatrist Ganesan Venkatasubramanian and his team conducted a study in which they prepared images for someone who is telepathic and one who isn’t. The results showed that the telepath was able to produce a image similar to the one prepared for him, whereas the person who was not telepathic could not. Venkatasubramanian concluded that when telepathy is successful, the right parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) was activated, thus meaning it is not active in a person who is not telepathic. Instead, one is who is not telepathic has their left inferior frontal gyrus activated. Thus meaning, this provides evidence that humans are indeed able to sense each other’s intentions. Some researchers believe telepathy is a clairvoyant perception of someone else’s neural process (Krippner, 2015).