So what does Ni look like for you guys?

It helps to understand this stuff in a general way. Ni is oriented to the unconscious. Since what we see is the conscious side, Ni is guessing at what lurks beneath. In a manner of speaking, where Si tells us how things seem, Ni goes one level further, and perhaps you could say it's how they seem to seem. You can't even be sure of how they really seem, because if how they seem is what your mental processing of them is, from the point of view of Ni, Si only tells you the toy model of how they seem which your conscious self, not full self, sees.

This is why Ni can be seen as enigmatic, oriented to the paradoxical, and so on.
 
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charlatan said:
This is why Ni can be seen as enigmatic, oriented to the paradoxical, and so on.
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Yep, for my part the orientation is to the deep structure behind what seems paradoxical. My Ni intuits the scaffolding that keeps the paradoxical structure in place and seeks to understand it.
 
So, I guess this is what I'm wondering - to kind of piggyback on what I said before. @John K, I'd love to hear you weigh in as a fellow, ahem... old dude. Do we take our Ni for granted as we get older? Or maybe not take it for granted, but notice it less because we've been living with it for a really long time as opposed to a young whippersnapper who is just now really discovering how it plays out in his/her life?

I'm picturing the old crusty guy in Cowboys versus Aliens (I think????) who wasn't freaked out by pretty much anything. He had lived life for so long that he had developed this ongoing faith that things were going to work out. He'd be able to handle it even if he didn't get all stressed out about it.

I don't know. Just a thought.
 
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For me Ni is a perception and seeing is a good metaphor for it. It isn't expressed in words - I have to turn to one of the other functions to do that.

In analogy, it's as if I have an image of a landscape in my mind - it's all there but I'm more consciously aware of some parts of it than others. It's whole and self-consistent and has a deep sense of meaning and rightness. I can look around it just like you can focus visually on different parts of a real landscape that is partly in sunlight, partly in shadow. I can't describe it to anyone else very easily. I know what I mean, but not in words - to put it into words is like translating a novel into a foreign language and it's frustrating because it's hard to make it sound quite right. I'm using Ni now to see itself and it's quite hard because I'm filtering it through Ti (I think) to write this. Another way of looking at it - imagine you are standing on top of a (real) hill, overlooking a (real) wide landscape full of features, and being asked to describe it in detail to someone who can't see it.

Of course (going back to the analogy) usually I'll just bring out a relevant bit of it for you, like the rock in the middle of the GIF - but I can see the whole thing and hear the waves and feel the wind on my face and smell the salt sea, and see the light flashing in the lighthouse, and you can't so you often don't get it, which is frustrating. If you are unlucky, I'll then set off on a long, ill-prepared Ti ramble around the whole vision that'll lose you quickly. I find it so refreshing when I can talk to people who think in the same way as me and who can pick up the picture from a few hints and details. A strange thing though - I learn so much more about this inner vision when I do have to put it into effective words. The vision feeds on this and I develop and see more of the landscape's features and inner consistency that way.

It's non-judgemental. Sticking with the analogy - If you tell me that isn't a lighthouse in the GIF but a spaceship and we are looking at a view on an alien planet, I might jibe a bit at first and go a bit passive aggressive with you. In my view I'm on earth looking at an ordinary seascape that is quite self-consistent and I'm pretty invested in it. On the other hand, if I'm curious, or I don't want to upset you, and you have a consistent and interesting alternative viewpoint, then I may happily create a completely new vision in my head around that theme. If I do that then I won't bin the old one, I'll keep them both and swap between them as it suits me. It doesn't really bother me that there are two incompatible world views there - I'll have a preferred one, but that's all it is and I can live with either or both. I can have quite a few of these alternative world views in my head and I love context-shifting between them.

@JennyDaniella is so right about the beauty that Ni can bring - it can be as though you yourself are actually part of a sunset, not just a spectator. This sort of feeling sometimes just creeps up, but sometimes it can take me by surprise, and when it does it's as if it was happening again for the first time - the feeling can be stunning!
 
hauteur said:
So, I guess this is what I'm wondering - to kind of piggyback on what I said before. @John K, I'd love to hear you weigh in as a fellow, ahem... old dude. Do we take our Ni for granted as we get older? Or maybe not take it for granted, but notice it less because we've been living with it for a really long time as opposed to a young whippersnapper who is just now really discovering how it plays out in his/her life?

I'm picturing the old crusty guy in Cowboys versus Aliens (I think????) who wasn't freaked out by pretty much anything. He had lived life for so long that he had developed this ongoing faith that things were going to work out. He'd be able to handle it even if he didn't get all stressed out about it.

I don't know. Just a thought.
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Hi @hauteur - you posted almost at the same time as me so I missed your prompt. My feeling is that just about everyone whose personality develops normally over their lifetime will be wearing their dominant function like a pair of favourite old slippers by the time they get significantly into the second half of their life. I think this is true for me. The only angle on this I'd say is that N dominant people tend to be attracted to psychology and so they may well be more aware of their dominant because of this conscious interest. For myself, I didn't realise I was dominant Ni till recently, but that hasn't made the slightest difference to how I use it - it's just a very entertaining fact.

So I'd say yes, we do get more and more comfortable with our Ni as we get older. Do we become more proficient though? I'm not sure really and I suspect there are upside and downsides. A couple of examples …... My thinking is definitely slower than it was when I was younger and I'm less willing to take risks with it compared with younger folk! On the other hand it seems to me that inexperienced Ni can sometimes be lacking in focus or confidence, or it can give an illusion of certainty in a perception that is ill founded, and it may well be that we deal with these things better as we get older.
 
Infjente said:
I think I'm stuck with it, unfortunately :sweatsmile: I was a little more explorative and "free" as a child, but I think my INTP brother influenced me to prioritize Ti more. I've lived with my ENFP boyfriend for a couple of years now, from who I have learned that my intuition is definitely not always right :tearsofjoy: and he has learned trust his a little more. Maybe I should hang out more with my high Se sensor-friend? :smirk:
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Haha yes, that could definitely work! :)
 
hauteur said:
So, I guess this is what I'm wondering - to kind of piggyback on what I said before. @John K, I'd love to hear you weigh in as a fellow, ahem... old dude. Do we take our Ni for granted as we get older? Or maybe not take it for granted, but notice it less because we've been living with it for a really long time as opposed to a young whippersnapper who is just now really discovering how it plays out in his/her life?

I'm picturing the old crusty guy in Cowboys versus Aliens (I think????) who wasn't freaked out by pretty much anything. He had lived life for so long that he had developed this ongoing faith that things were going to work out. He'd be able to handle it even if he didn't get all stressed out about it.

I don't know. Just a thought.
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I think (as a fellow old dude... I say that cause a young 20 something filled out on my form that my hair was white...ugh) that as we get older, or more to that point as I got older... We develop our Ni and learn to try to confirm the information it gives as necessary... Agree? Or disagree?
 
@John K, I love the analogy. You also got me thinking when you reminded me that it is a perception function, after all. It's kind of hard to see your own perception function in action, right? Kind of like seeing your own eyes? Interesting thought...

Emanuel Goldstein said:
We develop our Ni and learn to try to confirm the information it gives as necessary... Agree? Or disagree?
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I'm not completely sure I'm tracking with that. I think "as necessary" is throwing me off. But I do think that I'm much more cautious with my Ni than I was. When I was younger, I had so much certainty. I would have a lot of confidence in my perceptions, and I wasn't all that shy about letting people know what I thought. Now, I can still feel that certainty strike, but I think I'm a lot more aware that there's often more to the story than I know. One of my favorite quotes right now is, "Certainty is the enemy of discovery."

Plus, I think I factor in other peoples' feelings a whole lot more than I used to.
 
Hello there, I'm new to the forum but felt compelled to add to this fascinating discussion.

Unlike many, I actually feel confident in describing how I experience my Ni. I would tend to use the word 'synthesis', but other appropriate terms might be 'eureka moments', 'inspiration', 'flashes of insight', &c. You could also imagine the same basic processes but in less dramatic terms (do we have a word that means 'mundane inspiration'? That would be the normal mode I think).

So normally my process is to keep taking in information or data. In academic history this means reading and making notes on interesting features, observations, &c.

Then - and this is the part which I feel is really Ni - I feel that my insights are kind of 'archived' away in the unconscious or 'put away' somewhere else for secondary processing.

I'm 'inputting' data into some invisible, but very real, 'unconscious connection making machine'.

I'll keep doing this, adding input by reading and making notes, until at some point I will have a 'eureka moment', a moment of realisation when a theory or an idea is suddenly made concrete. I can perceive that 'I'm getting there', usually long before the actual eureka moment, but it's definitely as if the processing is being done 'somewhere else'.

This processing is definitely on the order of 'making connections', 'synthesis', 'structural theories', &c., and there's definitely a visual element - placing ideas and concepts in relation to each other on a visual field.

Someone mentioned 'flowcharts', and this rings true, but it can also look like network maps, webs, &c.

In general though, it definitely feels like I'm feeding an unconscious process with data and just sort of waiting for it to produce an insight (which can be accelerated with intense pondering and daydreaming). Insights can strike at any time, but especially just before falling to sleep. I must say that I don't experience it as a 'gut feeling' or 'mystic insight', but definitely unconscious.

'Instinctive' perceptions are usually about interpersonal rather than strictly intellectual matters. For me the 'mystical' experience is always to do with judging people.
 
I actually didn't know what Ni was until recently when I researched about it. Of course the MBTI definition of intuition is easier to grasp than the mystical idea of "intuition" that's always been elusive to me. I still don't understand Ni fully, but now at least I have an idea of what it is. I'm not sure if Ni can be visualized or put in any "sense" form, since it's in subconscious, and I think it doesn't really matter how it looks like.

It's fascinating to me how Ni works though, and the best part is that it just does automatically. At least it's how I feel. I don't use it consciously, and consequently I don't see the "work in process". All I can do is to feed it with information via senses, and later on get to see the end products/results of Ni in the forms of the first impressions/initial thoughts. Anyone, please correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm still learning about this.

On the side, as this question just popped up in my mind, how can you tell which thoughts are still the results of Ni, and which are the products of Ti kicking in?
 
I also didn’t know what was going on with me until I took the MBTI test. Then, some of the things my friends were telling me kind of made sense.

I think the best representation of intuition for me are in some of the paintings by Roberto Matta, who did the work that’s my avatar right now. I just remember standing in front of one of his paintings and thinking, this is it. Though, online pictures don’t quite convey the same feeling.

https://goo.gl/images/P9A9Pb
 
Another way of looking at it - imagine you are standing on top of a (real) hill, overlooking a (real) wide landscape full of features, and being asked to describe it in detail to someone who can't see it.
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I can relate to gradations of this. I simulate spliced memory frames of my reality interface. Initially dominant isn't clarity but, invisible sensorial features embedded in adjacent state space, like in an rpg utilities kiosk. It resonates abstractly, as it's requisite for proceeding, with what becomes a gradual emergence of clearer visuals. If I'm off my Vyvanse I'm caught in the throws of wook at duh perty colors. If not I grasp successfully for feedback and promptly go about my meat world business. Thanks for reading.

Edit: btw, in the same post you mentioned "context shifting". mhm, cool.
 
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