Your cognitive functions as a child

[King sns]

(Idea stemmed from the thread, "The problem with intuition")

How did your personality manifest itself when you were not yet developed?


I remember saying my first word. The reason for my first word was very ESFP in nature. Everyone around me was saying it and laughing and smiling. I wanted to make everyone around me laugh and smile again and again. I just have a fuzzy memory of my grandfather and uncles playing golf on a video game. I just kept hearing the word par! with all this excitement and laughter. I was sitting on the floor. I suddenly yelled "PAR!!!" (My first word.) I got my wish, everyone turned their head towards me and started laughing and talking excitedly, (but obviously for a different reason.)

 

[prplchknz]

I was very Fi, very much wanted to fix the world solve world hunger go back in time help a few slaves escape that sort of thing. I'd feel bad when I saw injustice in the world, I don't know why or how because at that age most kids don't give a fuck and I wasn't in an enviroment where I was exposed to that sort of thing. I was also quiet and shy and let others take the lead, I preferred sitting on the side lines than get involved.

 

[Totenkindly]

I actually remember being very introverted and Ti.

My environment wasn't really open to that, so I remember introverting even more, it was just easier so that no one would pay attention to me and cause problems. But I had very sharp judgments internally about what things were and how they fit together, and what made sense. Everything was about "what made sense" big-picture, and I really enjoyed exploring things to see if I could figure out how they worked. When I was young, I was also the one who would read the directions on everything, but as I got older, I used the directions as a guideline and meanwhile used my head to figure them out.

I was very aware of social cues growing up in my teens, and how people might perceive actions and words, but even while I sculpted an image for myself to minimize external strife and have people think well of me, I really hated the pressure of it and remember thinking a lot of it was silly, arbitrary, and meaningless.

 

[cascadeco]

I really don't remember much at all from my early childhood - most especially under age 7 or so - beyond visual images/memories, and certain memories of my feelings/impressions of various things and time periods.

And whenever I have asked my mom about what I was like as a child, she has not been forthcoming and tends to not have anything to say about it really, other than that I was a collicky (sp?) and kind of irritable baby (lol) and that as a very young toddler I was apparently really friendly to strangers and she worried about me, and that my uncle apparently told her she'd have to keep an eye on me! Oh, and she said that I could be 'sensitive' at times. Really... she's just not very descriptive or illuminating when I've asked!!

What I remember from my childhood was spending a lot of time observing things, and just thinking/contemplating. I read a lot, and was interested in various activities (all solitary, not team-oriented), but as far as me in my head - just the observing & contemplating piece. I have no recollection of specific things I said or thought, though. (Although I start recalling more of that - more specifics - from late elementary and beyond. I wonder though if in another 10 yrs my recollection of teenage thoughts will be virtually non-existant, though? haha. It's one motivation I have for journaling -- I can record all of this stuff that I know I'm going to forget. )

 

[Phantonym]

I read that intuition thread and thought to myself that how on earth these people remember such detailed things. I can't remember much of anything under the age of 5, aside from the birth of my brother at 3. From then on, there's just bits and pieces of blurry images and feelings and I can't even be sure if they really happened or if I read about them in some books. I know that I was a bossy kid, a tomboy, I read an awful lot of books between the ages of 5-10 and from then on TV suppressed everything, so my mind was constantly occupied with fictional stories and characters. I can't even be sure whether I've subconsciously suppressed most of the things because I was unhappy at the time or that it's just something normal that happened to me because I had a hard time staying in the present.

I have a feeling that I felt happy but I really can't be sure if it was real or again something a fictional character felt. Nowadays I mostly force myself to deal with the present because everything would be screwed if I didn't, but seriously, if I didn't have to, my mind would float away and never look back. And it's not because I have reason to escape the reality, it's quite the opposite, but it just happens. Even things that happened last week seem like years ago. It would be really interesting to take a look inside my mind as a kid and compare.

 

[skylights]

tbh i don't think i've changed all that much. i was extremely curious, perceptive, aesthetic, relatively quiet, liked people engaging with me, and was a little fireball when i got told i couldn't do something. benevolent rulebreaking is my MO

 

[Elfboy]

I was extremely introverted until around 14 when I all of a sudden turned into a choleric son of a bitch

 

[Virtual ghost]

For example I never understood why I am so different from everybody else and why would a child that has just started to go into elementary school had a strong wish/need to retreat from everybody else so that he can play games like this.


Game


Especially I have liked the meetings at high command.


Link1

Link2



(There is more material at the youtube links, if someone wants to watch)


The funniest thing is that I never truly understood why me or my logic is intimidating to so many people. And then the MBTI came and explain all of that quite well .



Just my two cents

 

[/DG/]

I remember saying my first word.

Holy! You win the memory award.

I don't really think I can put a type to myself, but I guess I was always quite introverted. Don't get me wrong, I loved socializing with other people, but I could just as easily retreat into my own little world and stay there. I've always liked to work with my hands (possibly Se), but I've never been an observant person at all (contradicts Se?). Oh and when I played pretend with anyone, I always had to be the boss (Te). We would normally act out things from my imagination because I liked to be in charge and I liked my imagination better than other people's. Hmm... I also really liked math because it's very objective because everything typically has a definitive answer (very S). Oh, and I was always the type of kid who'd constantly get bugged to clean out her tornado of a desk (lack of Te).

Never much cared to hold on to friends either. I don't recall them meaning terribly much to me... they'd just be around to have a good time and I'd switch my "best friend" nearly every year.

Hmmm... definitely some type of introverted sensor like I am now, but the rest is too fuzzy.

 

[ReflecTcelfeR]

I'm with phantonym on this one. I have like five vague memories and then it all disappears. I can barely remember yesterday, it's a problem.

 

[Glycerine]

I remember going into an Ni-Ti loop for hours so I could entertain myself.

 

[King sns]

Holy! You win the memory award.

I don't really think I can put a type to myself, but I guess I was always quite introverted. Don't get me wrong, I loved socializing with other people, but I could just as easily retreat into my own little world and stay there. I've always liked to work with my hands (possibly Se), but I've never been an observant person at all (contradicts Se?). Oh and when I played pretend with anyone, I always had to be the boss (Te). We would normally act out things from my imagination because I liked to be in charge and I liked my imagination better than other people's. Hmm... I also really liked math because it's very objective because everything typically has a definitive answer (very S). Oh, and I was always the type of kid who'd constantly get bugged to clean out her tornado of a desk (lack of Te).

Never much cared to hold on to friends either. I don't recall them meaning terribly much to me... they'd just be around to have a good time and I'd switch my "best friend" nearly every year.

Hmmm... definitely some type of introverted sensor like I am now, but the rest is too fuzzy.

Actually, I remember from before I could talk. (Not everything, but a few memories.) I was still an ESFP. Before I could talk, I used to laugh to make everyone around me laugh. My grandmother would say when I got older, "my God, you laughed so early that I thought you were having a seizure instead, I thought, how can a baby this young laugh?" And I do, I remember laughing in my high chair and my whole family laughing at me.

 

[King sns]

I remember going into an Ni-Ti loop for hours so I could entertain myself.

Hmm... what does that mean for a kid??

 

[/DG/]

Actually, I remember from before I could talk. (Not everything, but a few memories.) I was still an ESFP. Before I could talk, I used to laugh to make everyone around me laugh. My grandmother would say when I got older, "my God, you laughed so early that I thought you were having a seizure instead, I thought, how can a baby this young laugh?" And I do, I remember laughing in my high chair and my whole family laughing at me.

My younger brother claims to remember things when he was just an infant also. We actually have home movies from back then, but not from when I or my older brother were babies. This brings a question to mind whether or not these are false memories that you claim to have remembered, but instead you just heard about or saw them. They might be legitimate and they might now.

*edit* <I started writing a long paragraph here, but then I realized that I was just going off on a random, nonsensical tangent. Deleted. >

I'm not trying to discount your memory... I'm just writing what I'm thinking. It's probably all ramble-y and boring.

Hmm... what does that mean for a kid??

I'd like to know as well.

 

[Polaris]

As a toddler I felt very innocent and sensitive, and, largely for psychological reasons, was devoid of power or solidity; I was just a hovering cloud, drifting along in a state very much like dreaming. As with dreams, everything that came to my attention, particularly the words that people said to me, possessed a strange and barely rational significance. That same mysticism (for that's what it was: a very simple form of mysticism) followed me into my childhood, with the result that I grew up having a lot of very strange beliefs that weren't so much about the world around me as they were about this other dreamlike realm that I had access to. This led me to seem imaginative, slightly sage-like, and also very naive for believing things that everyone else thought were silly. Eventually I stopped taking that side of things so seriously, and became less what you would call mystic and more what you would call imaginative.

I was also ridiculously sensitive as a child. I remember one time spending something like an hour sobbing because a classmate of mine told our teacher that I said she (our teacher) was mean.

I also remember that after being a subdued, rather quiet person in early childhood, I became someone who was very expressive, interpersonal, and full of emotional energy, which is a trait that stayed with me into adolescence but eventually faded.

So I think my childhood followed the Ni to Fe growth pattern fairly closely.

EDIT: If I were to chart the order in which my cognitive processes started coming into their own, it would be: Ni-Fe-Ne-Ti-Fi-Te. The S processes have not really gone anywhere yet, although I feel like I'm on the brink of seeing Se break through.

 

[INTP]

like at ages x-5 i was quite heavy on Ne, but also was quite Ti, pretty much as much as someone that age can be Ti, i have been really logic mature even as really small child. when i was 6, we moved other part of the town and all my friends left behind, new kindergarten etc. i turned more I, but still had Ne, most the time hidden somewhere tho. at some point(maybe like age 10-15) there came some Si, but still pretty much in unconscious, it came out more to conscious in the age of like 17. oh and smoking weed kinda evoked my F at some point of age 16-17, but it was still quite unconscious. since then i have developed more Si and Fe

 

[Totenkindly]

I read that intuition thread and thought to myself that how on earth these people remember such detailed things. I can't remember much of anything under the age of 5, aside from the birth of my brother at 3.

Well, I don't have a lot of memories from before age 5 either... that's about when it starts for me, and I remember the birth of my sister. My recollections were focusing on the 5-10 years old segment, and I always remember looking at everything in the framework of "Does this make sense?" And if it didn't, then I wanted to understand it better until it did make sense or I could be sure it was non-sensical. I didn't realize until I got older that many people don't start with that framework any time something happens or they get a new piece of information.

And there were those intense experiences, like when I cried most of the night because I was trying to imagine eternity but my mind couldn't grasp it because it was impossibly huge. (I had already moved past death, since I could understand that.)

I have a feeling that I felt happy but I really can't be sure if it was real or again something a fictional character felt.

Sometimes it's hard to tell what we're reading back into our past vs experienced at the time. (I wondered that when reading Dave Pelzer's memoirs, including "A Boy Named Dave," for example -- much of the narrative is inundated by references that seem to be coming from the adult Dave but are attributed by the writer to the child Dave, where I honestly perceive the child Dave being more "in the moment" and not mentally articulating those things to himself at the time.)

 

[InvisibleJim]

I can remember sitting back in my high chair and eating. Have it!

 

[Thisica]

I was a very quiet toddler...According to my mum, I didn't cry much. I found it hard to communicate to others, due to the fact that my parents didn't speak much English and I was at the time, the only child in the family. I remember reading the school records which my teacher in kindergarten wrote, which included the comment that I had to try to practice saying to others "I feel _____". I did eventually learn the language, but in primary school found it hard to make friends, due to my tendency to listen more than talk. I probably daydreamed a bit during the lunch breaks. I remember a time when after we were given algebra questions in our year 3 class [which was quite early to learn about it. I was 9 at the time], I would talk to people in the schoolyard, under the huge birch trees, about how my aunty helped me solve these problems...to the amusement of others. I wasn't at all concerned with their reactions. When I attempted to make friends, though, I would often get into arguments with them over issues which they thought weren't important....of course, I no longer do that. I tended to ask myself why people perform certain social conventions, since I desired to make sense of them--such as saying "Thank you"--in compensation for the difficulty of interacting socially.

It's hard to tell, given that, whether it was a case of delayed development due to situational factors, or normal Ni to Te development. But I think it was the former, due to the above difficulties I experienced. No wonder I find it hard at times to communicate...though that would be hard to see, if you met me

 

[Kriash]

According to my mom I was a great baby. I was very outgoing and she often was worried because I would go up to random strangers and hug them and such. When I started pre-school at 3 I had a lot of problems because all I wanted to do is talk to all the other kids, and they just wanted to play. I guess I also had a bit of a temper because my family always tells this story(that I do not remember) about how at lunch at pre-school I flipped a table covered in food and bit my teacher, then ran through the building breaking things(at 4).
In kindergarten I became more introverted. I looked very androgynous even at a young age, and was quite a bit bigger in height and weight than the other kids, I began with withdraw but still got in trouble because when I kid picked on me I would bodyslam them.

I don't remember being terrible in school, but when I look through old work that my mom saved I clearly was. There were always projects and assignments from elementary school that were unfinished with notes like "Kian chooses not to do his work during class, instead he spends his time day-dreaming and doodling on the back of his papers. This is distracting to other students who don't understand why he does not have to do the assignment."

Once they wanted to put me in special ed, but I tested so high that they considered putting me up two grades, thinking I was just bored with the work. I was bored with the work, but I wouldn't have done any better in a higher grade so I stayed in 3rd.

From there on I just became more and more introverted, though at times I can seem extroverted.