How acutely aware are you of your Ni? | INFJ Forum

How acutely aware are you of your Ni?

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I'm not acutely aware of Ni. I can never quite "decide" or "consciously realise" that I'm using it. It's there in the background, unconsciously collecting and synthesizing information, until later I realise that I reached a synthesis without deliberately trying to do so. It's not really my thinking that's convergent (it also is, but in a more deliberate way that can also be achieved by Ne and Ti), but my intuiting, "prior" to thinking itself in a way.

So I'm more aware of Ni "in retrospect", or by deduction. Sometimes I experience this as actually bothersome, like I wish I had a more expansive perspective instead of some kind of tunnel vision on things. It's very patent when I'm at work brainstorming with ENFPs and their combination of Ne and Te - I really feel like I operate in exactly the inverse way. But in the end we work well in tandem because I can extract the essence of their thought process and help them select the best ideas/course of action.

Another way I'm aware of Ni "by deduction" is when I can tell my mind has just done something "that sounds like Ni" as per what I've read on the internet. That involves the symbolic abstract ideation (which I can be quite conscious of, as it's the direct inspiration of my own creative writing), the lonely eureka moments, the ability - when I'm well-rested - to sort of track my reasoning as I'm thinking or talking as if I could see the physical path developing in front of me, etc.

To others though, I can seem quite "out there" at first, like very abstract and contemplative. It's only after a while that they notice how structured my thought process is, and how focused I actually am. I can go off on tangents and be conscious of doing so, coming back to the last crossroad of the path a few minutes later, again quite consciously. On the con side, again, sometimes I feel like I'm too linear and not "creative" enough in my thought patterns. It's like only a few things - symbols, really - fundamentally grab me, and I spend my life more or less circling around them, always returning to them from a different stance.
 
How acutely aware are you of it?
I'm not sure if I understand the question, or rather it seems senseless to me. I'm not aware of the functions in MBTI, there are no neat slots in my personality that can be divided and examined at will, although of course there are patterns of thought and behaviour that I prefer. But I never ever think that now I'm going to use introverted intuition. Also, it's difficult to separate the intuition and the thinking functions because they often work together.

What does it do for you?
When I was young I realized that I'm not a very methodical thinker, and it was somewhat baffling to notice that some authors suggested that there's non-verbal thinking, because I thought it's obvious to everyone. Later reading about the functions I realized that descriptions of introverted intuition often contain my main method of solving problems. It's waiting. That is, I'm not consciously going through options, there might be no pictures nor words going through my mind, and yet I will be concentrating intensely. Or sometimes I simply let time pass without concentrating, that can help as well. So if someone asks if I want to go to a party and I need to consider it, I'll concentrate and search for the right answer until it comes. I'm somewhat aware of how it works. To me it seems a bit like a jigsaw puzzle solved in chunks without a guiding picture. A car appears in the lower left corner, a tree in the upper right, a tiger somewhere in the middle. And when I've been subconsciously gathering such information for a while I become aware of it when it already makes sense. At least to me. So it's a bit like jumping from having no answer to being very certain of my opinion.

How does it affect your life?
Another question I don't understand because to give you an answer I'd have imagine my whole thinking process being different. I don't really know how others experience their functions. I do know that a lot of people would start that jigsaw puzzle from a corner, methodically find the edge pieces and go from there. They are much better at describing their thought process while it's still going on. If I try to describe the thought process, I can do it coherently once the picture is already finished and clear in my head, or alternatively I can describe the bits I have ready, in which case I seem to jump from one conclusion to another in a way that's hard to follow: "car, tiger, tree, do you understand?". And it doesn't help that the things I think about are often very abstract. Coming up with symbolic connections can be easier because of this, since there's no need for me to explicitly become aware of all the similarities to know that they exist.

How does it "come off" to others?
I partly answered this above. Once when I had to explain a project I was going to do while I was still uncertain of the form it would take, I was told that in my presentation I threw a lot of balls in the air but somehow caught them all. Also some people who are not very aware of how much they reveal about themselves through their gestures or words have thought I can see through them, which can be wonderful or frightening. People who find it frightening are the kind who think that I'm analyzing them, although in most cases I haven't really thought about them much, but simply created a picture of the personality in my head that's not merely based on how they describe themselves. This is a more complex process that involves all the functions, but introverted intuition definitely plays a huge part in creating the picture.
 
I'm not acutely aware of Ni. I can never quite "decide" or "consciously realise" that I'm using it. It's there in the background, unconsciously collecting and synthesizing information, until later I realise that I reached a synthesis without deliberately trying to do so. It's not really my thinking that's convergent (it also is, but in a more deliberate way that can also be achieved by Ne and Ti), but my intuiting, "prior" to thinking itself in a way.

So I'm more aware of Ni "in retrospect", or by deduction. Sometimes I experience this as actually bothersome, like I wish I had a more expansive perspective instead of some kind of tunnel vision on things. It's very patent when I'm at work brainstorming with ENFPs and their combination of Ne and Te - I really feel like I operate in exactly the inverse way. But in the end we work well in tandem because I can extract the essence of their thought process and help them select the best ideas/course of action.

Another way I'm aware of Ni "by deduction" is when I can tell my mind has just done something "that sounds like Ni" as per what I've read on the internet. That involves the symbolic abstract ideation (which I can be quite conscious of, as it's the direct inspiration of my own creative writing), the lonely eureka moments, the ability - when I'm well-rested - to sort of track my reasoning as I'm thinking or talking as if I could see the physical path developing in front of me, etc.

To others though, I can seem quite "out there" at first, like very abstract and contemplative. It's only after a while that they notice how structured my thought process is, and how focused I actually am. I can go off on tangents and be conscious of doing so, coming back to the last crossroad of the path a few minutes later, again quite consciously. On the con side, again, sometimes I feel like I'm too linear and not "creative" enough in my thought patterns. It's like only a few things - symbols, really - fundamentally grab me, and I spend my life more or less circling around them, always returning to them from a different stance.

Are you me? Oh wait...
 
To me it seems a bit like a jigsaw puzzle solved in chunks without a guiding picture. A car appears in the lower left corner, a tree in the upper right, a tiger somewhere in the middle. And when I've been subconsciously gathering such information for a while I become aware of it when it already makes sense. At least to me. So it's a bit like jumping from having no answer to being very certain of my opinion.

:wyotethumb:
 
"I don't know anything"
"I KNOW ALL THE ANSWERS TO EVERYTHING EVER"
 
A superpower literally.... whatever you consciously want you subconsciously get it. Often you get informations that you don't even want. Watching me from outside, I know Im using it intensly when I feel distracted, clouded, almost lost in a way. Then you revive and be like.......... oh........... I have the solution
If life would last 500 years, it would be a usefull tool, but its not.
You spend 1 minutes with anyone and already know how your relationship would go with she/him
You already know how bad the death moment will be
You loose the beautfill moments of everyday for something bigger (giant, endless)
and on and on the same line....
 
When I was young I realized that I'm not a very methodical thinker, and it was somewhat baffling to notice that some authors suggested that there's non-verbal thinking, because I thought it's obvious to everyone.

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;)
 
I am so unaware of Ni, that often I don't know if I use it at all. There are moments where I retroactively think it may have been Ni, but there is no way to be sure. It may just as well be me imagining things.

It's similar to what @Ren and @Wyote have said.
 
I am so unaware of Ni, that often I don't know if I use it at all. There are moments where I retroactively think it may have been Ni, but there is no way to be sure. It may just as well be me imagining things.

I should note that I only now after over a decade of being aware of the existence of Ni, only now do I have some vague sense of when I'm using it. It moves too quickly. I think this is how dominant functions work for everyone, they just move at such a rapid pace that grabbing it is like the coyote catching the road runner. I think it's slightly easier if your dominant function is extroverted because then you can sort of have some tangibility to it.

Ni is like having rapid symbols flashing all the time and each symbol has a whole background of information with it and meanwhile you are associating those symbols in funky ways but it all seems very normal once it's all output into an actual idea/thought/emotion. But also this is all happening at an unconscious level so even when you get a glimpse of it it doesn't make sense. It's like a bizarre encoding process that results in being right about more things than being wrong, but sometimes you're wrong because at some level you fucked up, either in the understanding of the symbol or the symbol itself or the associations.
 
I am also reminded of Rosebud as well which @Reason With Logic Filling made mention of recently. Just because you have some symbol in mind doesn't mean somebody else is even going to understand that symbol in the same way.
 
Also "symbols" isn't necessarily even a great word because they can be conceptualizations or abstract feelings.