I just had an experience that I thought was quite telling regarding S/N differences. I was talking to my sister, ENTJ, and my friend Dave, ISTJ. I was saying that I usually can't picture people's appearances in my mind if they're not around for a couple of days or more, but that I can vividly recall their 'essence'.
Dave looked really stumped like he didn't know what I meant. I tried to explain: "If someone's sitting next to you, and you close your eyes, can't you
sense that there's someone there, even though you can't see or hear them or actually feel them touching you or anything? If they get up and walk out, even if they do it absolutely silently and your eyes are closed, can't you
feel that they're not there any more?"
My sister was nodding a lot, while Dave was just scowling and looking at me like I was some kind of crackpot.
My sister then said, "Haven't you ever had that Dave? Like you can close your eyes and 'summon up' the person's essence, like you can 'see' their soul, who they are, and really feel their personality, as real as if you could reach out your hand and touch them, even though you can't SEE anything?"
My sister and I agreed that neither of us can very easily picture people's faces in detail in our minds, and that we think it's because we're never paying attention to those details anyway and using our minds to 'see' rather than our eyes. I was avoiding using the word 'intuition' because I didn't want to bias the conversation and my sister doesn't know about MBTI - But she used the word herself, she said "I rely on my intuition really, more than what I can see - you can never go by what you see, so I tend not to pay much attention to it".
And Dave just made WTF faces and seemed torn as to whether he thought we were crazy or if he felt a bit worried that he was inadequate in some way because he couldn't do this thing we were talking about doing so easily.
It's weird, because this conversation happened because my dad just died on Sunday, and it got started cos we were saying how his face is one of the few faces - as well as my daughter's - that we really can clearly picture all the time in our minds. We talked about how it's strange that they both had in common Asperger's Syndrome, and speculated on whether that lack of 'connection' from their side meant that our intuition was a bit stumped as to grasping the essence of them (or because of our lack of understanding of ASD until recent years), and so we tended to rely more on our senses with them, as we had little else to go by. A bit like a Betazoid being 'stumped' by Data
What do you guys think?