The Mind’s Journey: Cognitive Types and Quest for Integration

Image: Athanasius Kircher's 1665 work Mundus Subterraneus

Human thought is often divided into two camps - the creative and the logical, the intuitive and the analytical. This distinction has become deeply ingrained in modern culture yet it rarely captures the full psychological reality behind how people actually think. Research into cognitive variation suggests that the human mind operates along multiple dimensions rather than fixed categories. Simon Baron-Cohen’s empathising-systemising model describes how people differ in their orientation towards understanding emotions and people on one hand, and systems and structures on the other. Empathising involves recognising and responding to the inner states of others and systemising involves analysing and constructing rule-based patterns whether in nature, technology or abstract ideas. Each of us moves between these modes though often one dominates. Some individuals display a marked empathising orientation while others show stronger systemising preferences with many falling somewhere in between (Baron-Cohen, 2003; Auyeung et al., 2006). The theory has also offered insight into atypical cognition, particularly in autism spectrum conditions where systemising tends to be pronounced and empathising relatively lower, a pattern Baron-Cohen (2002) termed the ‘extreme male brain’ profile. This framework gives a more nuanced view of cognition than the familiar division between ‘creative’ and ‘logical’ thinkers.

Temple Grandin’s work expands this understanding by showing that even within the systemising tendency there are distinct cognitive styles. Drawing on personal experience and empirical observation she distinguishes between object visualisers and pattern or ‘visual-spatial’ thinkers. Object visualisers think through vivid, sensory imagery, excelling in design, visual art and hands-on creative work. Pattern visualisers reason through abstract relationships and systemic structures often gravitating toward mathematics, engineering or music (Grandin, 2022). This model - empathisers, object visualisers and pattern visualisers offers a richer cognitive taxonomy. It also reframes creativity as a broader capacity, the object visualiser creates through tangible images while the pattern visualiser creates through conceptual or structural insight. In this sense, creativity and logic are not opposites but complementary forms of imagination - one sensory, the other systemic.

From a Jungian perspective, these distinctions resonate with the four psychological functions (1921/1971) - Thinking, Feeling, Sensation and Intuition, each expressed through introverted or extraverted attitudes. Pattern visualisers, with their focus on systems and abstract order, resemble intuitive-thinking types whose cognition operates through patterns and symbols. Object visualisers align more closely with sensation-thinking or sensation-intuitive types grounded in immediate perception and concrete form. Empathisers correspond to the feeling function and are oriented towards emotional understanding and human values. Jung warned that over-identification with any one function leads to imbalance and rigidity. Individuation process requires engagement with the less developed or unconscious functions. Thus, the empathiser might grow through cultivating logical or sensory awareness while the pattern visualiser might deepen through emotional attunement or aesthetic experience.

Viewed through the lens of the Hero’s Journey, this process of integration mirrors the archetypal path of transformation. Each cognitive type begins in the comfort of its dominant function - the empathiser in the world of relationships, the systemiser in the world of structures until life presents challenges that require the development of its opposite. This crossing of thresholds represents the call to adventure, a movement beyond one’s habitual mode of understanding into the unknown territory of the psyche. The empathiser must learn to engage structure and logic, the systemiser must enter the realm of feeling and human connection. Through struggle and adaptation, each return with a new synthesis of opposites that parallels the hero’s return with the elixir of self-knowledge.

Empirical findings show that while cognitive differences can be measured objectively, people often experience themselves as more balanced or integrated than data would suggest. This discrepancy between subjective unity and objective asymmetry may reveal a deeper psychological principle - the psyche’s innate drive towards equilibrium. The tension between empathising and systemising, between image and pattern can be understood as a modern reflection of the archetypal polarity between logos and eros, reason and relationship which Jung regarded as fundamental to the human condition.

Reframing the creative-logical divide through the combined lenses of Baron-Cohen’s theory, Grandin’s typology and Jung’s model of psychological types reveals that these modes are not oppositional but dialogical. To think creatively is not to abandon logic, to think logically is not to give up on imagination. Both are necessary movements in the psyche’s ongoing quest for integration. Like the hero returning from the journey transformed, the balanced mind unites its diverse functions into a dynamic whole.

References

Auyeung, B., Wheelwright, S., Allison, C., Atkinson, M., & Samarawickrema, N. (2006). Measuring empathising and systemising with a large US sample. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(10), 1509–1517. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-006-0199-9

Baron-Cohen, S. (2002). The essential difference: Men, women and the extreme male brain. London: Penguin.

Baron-Cohen, S. (2003). The extreme male brain theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(4), 163–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00035-7

Grandin, T. (2022). Visual thinking: The hidden gifts of people who think in pictures, patterns, and abstractions. London: Rider.

Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types (H. G. Baynes, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)