About Thinking Aloud

Thinking Aloud was created to raise awareness of synaesthesia, both as a standalone condition and because of its close association with the autistic condition, or autism if you prefer. Synaesthesia is, if you like, a form of neurodivergence, but to label it as such is to risk it getting lost in the increasingly wide-reaching broader conversation about neurodivergent conditions and special educational needs.

Synaesthesia is simply a different way of processing the world: it’s not right or wrong, or better or worse. Synaesthesia won't change the world, but a better understanding of the condition could help to explain certain behaviours, responses or learning differences.

With that in mind, this website is intended primarily for teachers, teaching support staff and SEN professionals, to serve as an accessible introduction to synaesthesia and how a child with the condition might present in a classroom setting. It is perhaps geared more towards early years and primary school age groups, but many of the observations and manifestations of the condition would be just as valid in a secondary education setting or beyond. 

However, while this guide is written with education professionals in mind, the information and insight could prove equally useful to parents, and it isn’t intended in any way to exclude them from the conversation. Many – if not all – of the manifestations of the condition that may be observed in the classroom could also be seen in the home, where hopefully an awareness and better understanding of synaesthesia, along with its association with the autistic condition, will prove useful.

Our goal is to make the information as accessible and jargon-free as possible. 

Synaesthesia has been the subject of considerable scientific scrutiny and research in recent years, and many of the findings have provided valuable insights into general neurological understanding, particularly in the fields of sensory processing, brain connectivity and cognitive development. The intention here, however, is not to dig into the neurology behind synaesthesia. Instead. the focus is on how it manifests and how a better understanding of the condition can help to capitalise on the condition's advantages and mitigate any of its downsides. 

I’m not an academic or a teaching professional – in fact, I was sort-of a journalist for about 20 years. Instead, I speak from the perspective of an end-user of both synaesthesia and autism. Since the early 2000s I have on and off helped a couple of universities with research into synaesthesia, so I have become quite well practised at articulating how the condition manifests day to day, both positively and negatively. 

The ASD diagnosis came later – I had a textbook presentation as a child, but that was in the mid-1970s and those textbooks were yet to be written. When the ASD diagnosis did come about,  what really opened my eyes was how several issues that I’ve spent a lifetime interpreting through a synaesthetic prism in fact turned out to be key ASD identifiers.
 

Around the same time, I started to notice problems my daughter, then at primary school, was having understanding basic abstract concepts. Her difficulties reflected some of my own from childhood – difficulties I had subsequently interpreted through the prism of synaesthesia, which in turn helped me formulate a DIY method of learning that wasn’t broadly reflected in mainstream teaching methods. It was this path that led me to approach schools and academics in an effort to raise awareness of synaesthesia, along with its co-occurrence with the autistic condition. The hope is that doing so might help to better serve the needs of children who process, understand and learn about the world in a slightly different way.

As someone who processes the world through the lens of synaesthesia and who is also diagnosed as autistic, I’m conscious the two conditions don’t function on separate levels; they are just my way of processing, reacting to, dealing with, understanding and learning about the world. It’s my normal, just like your normal is, for you, normal. I lived for 40 years and ‘autistic’ wasn’t even on my radar beyond an awareness of its existence and wondering on occasion what it might feel like to be autistic. It was only when life events steered me towards seeking solutions to some recurring issues that I found out more about autism – initially by accident – and was eventually diagnosed. A rollercoaster of late-diagnosis emotions is quite common, but one thing that stood out was now knowing what it feels like to be autistic: it feels completely normal. My normal.

Please note it is also the case that a lot – but not all – of the information here is written very much from my own perspective. For the most part the forms of synaesthesia my brain has chosen to adopt are relatively common within the constraints of the condition. So while the way I process the world may sound unusual to a lot of people, it is broadly representative of what many synaesthetes experience. I might be unique, but I doubt it.

Those experiences can be extremely hard to describe, though. Articulating accurately one’s own way of processing, understanding and learning about the world isn’t easy: it’s far easier, and incredibly common, to assume that everyone processes the world in the same way; as a result, we never think to discuss it. Perception is a subjective and very personal experience. The language we use and the way we express ourselves differ widely. It’s all too easy for two people to use different words to describe the same personal, subjective experience, but we can also use the same words to describe different experiences. Hopefully this website finds the right balance.