Synesthesia
I was reading about Dual-coding Theory, which states that visual and verbal information is processed on distinct and different cognitive channels. The verbal cues refer to symbolic codes; in other words, arbitrary representations of something (such as reading or listening to a speech). The visual cues are perceptual, that is, a direct representation of what you are seeing.
Dual-coding refers to utilizing both visual and verbal, that is, symbolic as well as perceptual codes. Memory seems to favor the visual channel, and this is known as the picture superiority effect.
Think of watching the presidential debates. The information is symbolic (through words) as well as visual. What we remember tends to favor the visual, which can then act as a voluntary trigger to retrieve the words.
This is an interesting concept, and taken further leads to synesthesia– a rare phenomenon where one cognitive pathway triggers another involuntarily. For example, someone with synesthesia may see numbers in different colors; or see musical notes. And not a voluntary association, but a completely involuntary reaction. The advantages should be obvious, such as encoding symbolic information into long-term memory as easily as a visual information.
I wonder, if with the right training, we could develop in ourselves something like synesthesia; associating visual/perceptual codes to symbolic codes — allowing perceptual representations of abstract concepts.
We tend to do this naturally with metaphoric associations, such as an emotional reaction to an image or sound. I suspect we can take this much further, where we directly leverage perceptual codes to involuntarily trigger any number of symbolic/abstract information (whether emotional, or intellectual, or artistic)