I can’t listen to audiobooks. Oh, now I wish I could, but I see every word scrolling across my mind like subtitles. If I try to do something else while listening the ticker tape vanishes, and I have to go back and relisten. When certain conversations shift in tone, the ticker tape kicks in again, most likely as a trauma response. I stop hearing the voice and only read the words in my mind, silently and urgently, hoping they’ll clue me in to why my nervous system flagged the change. In those moments, I lose track of almost everything except the language. I don’t notice the gestures and micro-expressions I’m usually so attuned to. I don’t register context, temperature, or tone, only the words.
The reverse can happen too. When I sense discomfort in someone’s posture or presence, I lock onto their physical cues like a bloodhound, often missing everything they’re saying. My perception seems to split into two, and I can’t always choose where my attention goes.
This response doesn’t happen with music. The lyrics of a song don’t float as words. Instead, I feel colours, shapes, and emotional geometry in tune with the music. The discrepancy between spoken and sung language became one of the first signals that I might be experiencing the world a bit differently than others.
While deep-diving my late-diagnosis, I found language for it: synaesthesia, but not the type we hear about. I don’t taste names or colour-code letters, though I’m fairly certain number five is blue, but that’s because of too much Numberblocks with my children.
Mine seems quieter, more conceptual. I realised I don’t just feel things; I translate them. Grief is the weight of a heavy rock. The word grief is grey too, possibly because it begins with the same two letters. Happy is yellow, obviously. Any mention of sandwiches and images of knights’ flash in my head. The Earl of Sandwich must have burned into my brain during a primary school lesson. Song lyrics immerse me in visuals and colour, but spoken word, when it isn’t anchored in imagery, just produces scrolling words in my mind.
While grapheme-colour synaesthesia remains the most commonly recognised of the over sixty documented types of synaesthesia, accounting for as much as 80 percent of cases in literature, it is also the easiest to measure. This has shaped research priorities. But conceptual synaesthesia doesn’t always have a single sensory output. It spans modalities, and mixes symbolic, emotional, spatial, and metaphorical information. It is harder to study, but no less consistent for the people living it, and for those of us who experience it, it is not a novelty. It is a structure for thinking.
Archetypal mapping arrived in me long before I ever read Jung. Ideas often don’t come in sentences. They arrive as textures, images, or storylines. I often need time to decode what I already know before I can even attempt to articulate it. I’m frequently flooded with imagery, no filter, no order, and it takes time to find the right thread to pull, particularly if I’m already in or close to sensory overloaded. Often, I suspect I choose the wrong thread purely out of overwhelm if answering too quickly. The delay in my response is rarely confusion; it’s careful navigation.
When I say I map things, I mean internally, in my operating system, the old noggin! Emotions, conversations, decisions, even climates; they all have placement, characteristics, weight, and form. I don’t just experience them, I often use them for orienting myself within the context surrounding me. And when that inner structure is contradicted or disrupted, I lose my bearings. Sometimes it might just take a brief pause, a breath, a recalibration to re-enter the map, but not always. I’m not being poetic if I say I feel a bit out of it, for me, alignment is spatial.
I used to assume everyone thought like this, and I’m still partially unconvinced that they don’t. Isn’t the world so obviously layered in colour, shape, and emotional tone? Don’t all people navigate ideas through textures or loud and demanding visuals? Don’t they feel shame in their body as grey and black shadows that take over their ability to think, move, or communicate clearly? I thought the way I processed wasn’t unusual. And in a way, I was right, everyone does it, but to a certain point.
Speed et al. outline that metaphors often emerge from embodied and perceptual experiences, drawing on multimodal patterns through cultures. In educational settings, learners frequently express their understanding through gestures, visual representations, or analogies. This is not for decoration, but for stabilising meaning and making abstract ideas concrete. This type of communication, while not always described as such, often functions in fundamentally synaesthetic and cross-sensory ways.
But here’s where the differences are; for most people, metaphor is a choice. It’s a hat they can take on or off. The structure of mapping can be set aside when inconvenient or used strategically. But for me, it’s not optional. The metaphor is the map. The map is my operating system, and it can’t be taken off. It’s not just a way of explaining a feeling. It is what I’m experiencing.
Mattingley describes synaesthesia as marked by two features: automaticity and consistency. The response needs to arrive without effort, and it needs to arrive the same way each time. If I only picture Mel Gibson’s blue and white face once when someone says “freedom,” that’s not it. But if that image pops into my head every single time like clockwork, then that makes it neurologically distinct from imagination or association. My grief is always grey and a heavy rock. Time is a green spiral with a clock face. Calendars are also circular, an extension of the time spiral.
And more than that, these experiences happen across domains. When a lyric lands, it draws a moving shape. When a conversation shifts tone, the subtitles come online. The feeling of shame arrives as density; a physical weight, a blanket of monochromatic mist, but heavy, that takes over my system entirely. Depending on context, or if the word is spoken, but not associated to my own shame, it will take the form of a ringing bell and a Queen walking naked through a city.
That Game of Thrones image is branded into memory, not because of its cinematic drama, but because it fit allegorically with the architecture of what shame feels like; all consuming. These aren’t visual tricks I use to remember the periodic table, they’re spatial orientations. Meaning, for me, has to be aligned or mapped to something in the internal operating system in order to be properly understood.
Sitton and Pierce suggest that this kind of cognition, where boundaries between language, sensory input, and emotion blur, is often linked to creativity, particularly in verbally dominant domains like metaphor or pun-making. That makes sense to me. I don’t think in neat sentences, and I don’t plan meaning. Meaning arrives through a composition: colour, gesture, tone, a lyric fragment, maybe a shape. Then, I work backwards to find the words. Metaphors, allegories, parables, these are usually the first verbal articulations that come up.
But when I’m overwhelmed, by emotion, urgency, or sensory overload that system often collapses. The internal scaffolding vanishes, the metaphors scatter, and language doesn’t follow. It’s not that I don’t know what I mean, I do. It’s that the translation process has gone offline, but interestingly, music can usually flick me back online.
Apparently in music, there’s a lot of variation. A study by Akiva-Kabiri et al. found that some people experience musical pitch spatially, mapped not just high or low, but diagonally across mental space.
While I’m not sure if I experience pitch that way, it resonates with the idea that sound can produce internal architecture. When lyrics vibrate with me, they don’t pass through language first. There’s no transcript like with audiobooks or online lectures, only form and emotion, and often, a pre-existing pattern. I experience music so strongly that I often limit the number of new songs I hear, realising recently how much music connects with me and that familiar songs are an easy serotonin hack. Unfamiliar ones can be sensory overload. When Lana Del Rey releases a new album, I need months of lyrical processing time, and I’ve learned to practice restraint in how many new tracks I expose myself to at once. The fear of frying my brain in synaesthesia overload is real.
And there’s something uncanny about the fact that researchers are now building “synesthesia displays”; devices that convert sound into light in real time, creating encrypted feedback loops of colour and pitch. These systems are celebrated as the future of multi-input design. But for some of us, that future is already internal. We’ve been living inside that Windows Media Player from our teens for years.
I realized how my mapping benefits my interactions when I realized how I navigate small talk. One of my go-to questions is to ask people which superhero or villain they identify with. I lean into my kids as rationale for the question, but it’s not actually small talk for me. I’m not looking for nostalgia or proud when I map my Bruce Banner/Hulk binary guess correctly. I’m trying to locate the archetype people resonate with, because this shows me an internal shape of their values, story, and often, their mode of survival. I’m placing them on a shared pop-culture map so I know how to connect with them. And for me, it isn’t necessarily optional—it’s orientation in one of the only ways my brain knows how, and I’ll map people regardless of whether I get an answer.
This way of mapping, using archetypes, metaphor, and pop culture as a kind of sensory-social compass, goes beyond conversation. Pool et al. describe this kind of cognitive orientation as a literacy of immanence, a meaning-making practice that is grounded not in language, but in sensation, rhythm, symbolism, and spatial engagement. In their research with neurodivergent students, they found that understanding often emerged not through verbal reasoning, but through movement, affect, and material interaction. These students weren’t deviating from literacy, they were expressing it immanently; engaging with knowledge through embodied, sensory, and affective means, rather than through detached or representational language and perhaps in forms and systems that not everyone could read. That distinction feels crucial and underacknowledged; I’m not using metaphors to be clever, and I’m not speaking poetically to be quirky. This is how my thinking arrives: patterned, cross-sensory, and alive in internal structure before it translates into digestible language.
As Connolly notes in her article Cognitive Aesthetics of Alchemical Imagery, symbolic images are not passive reflections of archetypes. They are cognitive tools, historically shaped and affectively charged. They don’t just represent meaning but actually play a large role in generating it. The combinations I perceive; grief as grey rock, shame as blanket mist or the Queen’s Walk, they aren’t poetic license. They’re internal architectures, built through years of sensory compression and patterned metaphor. What Connolly calls “compressive metaphors”, I’ve always experienced as default modes of understanding. The image isn’t a shortcut, it’s the shape of the thought itself.
This is particularly poignant when it comes to our approaches to learning and comprehension. Todd, in her article Reframing Education Beyond the Bounds of Strong Instrumentalism reminds us that when education becomes too tightly aligned with demands for measurable, predictable outcomes, it risks erasing the most human aspects of learning: relation, sensation, and creativity. Education should create the conditions for meaning to emerge, not just the outputs we expect to measure as evidence for what optimal learning looks like. This is especially vital for affective learners like me, and many others, who cannot think in straight lines if their life depended on it, but instead think in spirals, shadows, lyrics, and visuals.
Cunliffe offers an educational foundation for this through art and design pedagogies, showing how metaphor and cross-modal awareness are not just expressive tools, but actual cognitive strategies. I would add that these cognitive strategies are probably the most utilized in a person’s day-to-day life, yet very possibly under-utilised in their educative approaches. These strategies help learners connect the seen and the felt, the known and the imagined, and the same applies to conceptual synaesthetes; I don’t learn in spite of it, but through it. It’s my operating system.
Circling back to Jung’s archetypes, Hunt reframes them not as static psychic imprints, but as imaginative, metaphoric systems grounded in socio-cognitive experience. His work situates archetypes within a collective symbolic grammar, the very same grammar I rely on when I build internal maps to understand. It isn’t small talk when I ask which childhood movie from the ’80s traumatized them, or which dinosaur they loved as a kid. It’s a key to understanding where they sit on the map, particularly in how their view themselves and their relationship with the world.
Yes, everyone uses metaphors, allegories, and parables. But not everyone needs them to access memory, make a decision, or calm their nervous system. Not everyone senses a week as a shape—it’s a caterpillar, by the way, so are trams. Not everyone waits for the emotional geometry of an idea to settle before they can speak clearly and authentically.
But some of us do. And once we understand the system of our own mind, we don’t have to be lost inside it anymore. These internal systems also run the risks of being misdiagnosed or pathologised in educational and psychiatric settings, if they’re noticed at all. When learners process differently, through visual, spatial, or metaphor-based cognition, they may be labelled as delayed, inattentive, or disordered, rather than recognised as operating within an alternative cognitive framework.
We can navigate it, use it to adapt our learning, and we can even invite others into it, if they’re bold enough to recognize kids who liked triceratops are different from kids who stanned the T-rex, and those differentiations are residually important in how they view the world.
I don’t think we are necessarily lacking language. In fact, many synaesthetes flourish with written expression. But internally, we are using a different one. Verbal articulation, for me, comes well after the flood of visuals and emotions associated with the experience.
This is where inclusive educational design needs to evolve. If demonstrations of learning are only recognised when expressed through linear logic and verbal articulation, then many valid ways of thinking will continue to be overlooked, and many of us will continue to be misread, sidelined, or forced to mask, potentially without retaining the information we’ve been tasked with learning. While I’ve gotten to a point where I can hack my mapping for learning, it doesn’t mean everyone can, and they probably need scaffolded environments to figure out how to start. What’s needed is not just inclusion in name, but a restructuring of pedagogical assumptions. As inclusion and equity is focused on more within education, this has to include the expansion of cognitive access to meaning in learning.
Educators and curriculum designers would profit from recognising that symbolic literacy, spatial orientation, and affective resonance are not decorative traits, but processing modes. They are knowledge systems— what Connolly describes as compressive cognitive tools, and what Hunt frames as shared symbolic grammars shaped by imagination, emotion, and culture.
These systems are often incredibly rich, deeply visual, and underutilised in pedagogy outside of early childhood education or certain artistic disciplines. My ability to understand, communicate, and contribute doesn’t emerge adjacent to my conceptual mappings. It emerges through them.
Designing for learners like me shouldn’t mean simplifying content. It should translate as allowing multiple access points: visual, symbolic, rhythmic, archetypal. It’s acknowledging that understanding and demonstrating learning for some of us, is not as simple as it seems.
Emotional resonance can be as important as facts, and while assigning new vocabulary to colour may help with memory recall, but for some of us, it’s natural. Can you guess what colour distraught is? The word is white, and much like the feeling of shame, it is all encompassing, like TV snow, obscuring all else. Visualisation and mapping is an important part of any learning toolkit, but it is more than that for people like me, it is the way I comprehend the world around me. If pedagogy recognised the vitality, and I suspect the commonality, of this kind of thinking beyond discipline-specific contexts, we might begin to make proper strides in inclusive education.
