Ni person (NJ) will focus more on a specific aspect or attribute of a mental representation of a pineapple and see how that specific aspect links to other things. For example pineapples is for eating, you get canned slices of pineapples and those typically have a whole down the center because they're de-cored, then it reminds you of donuts, chocolate glazed donuts and now suddenly you want hot chocolate.
This is such a good description of the way my mind works it's uncanny. A recent train of thought at the psych hospital where I work overnight: a child who threw up at bedtime but then slept soundly -> bedwetting issues in patients I've worked with -> I am working on a new unit with younger kids, so bedwetting might be more prevalent -> all the different common causes of bedwetting, from abuse to medication -> whether the child is heavily medicated -> speculation about the original child's pathology simultaneous to recalling how heavily kids I've had to wake up on bedwetting precautions sleep (due to medications, mostly) -> whether if someone can sleep through wetting the bed, he can sleep through vomiting -> I need to check on this child extra often during the night to make sure he's okay. Ti checks some of that runaway speculation, but I did look in on him more often than usual. And sure, that's more or less common sense, but the way I ended up there and the reasoning behind it isn't. I often notice that I take the long way around to get to conclusions other people arrive at simply for totally different reasons. Often it's an asset in that you see things that other people don't see, and other times it's a liability because you
don't see what's "obvious." It's interesting how the train of thought flies off in some random direction, then makes its way inevitably back around to where you started, often with new insights. I always find it fascinating to talk to other NJs (especially INJs) because there will be the most random threads of conversation and it seems like we always end up going in a giant loop and ending up back at the topic that started the conversation.
Anyway, this is going to sound weird, and I realize it's coincidental and have always balked at the "psychic" INFJ description...but, though that patient did not get sick again, when I checked on him towards the morning, he had wet the bed. I can't even really pinpoint what caused the mental leap from one to the other, but it's interesting that that was instrumental in the thought process that prompted my extra concern even though it wasn't a factor in the patient's history to my knowledge.
Heh, my apologies for offering such a specific, kind of gross example! Less specifically, sometimes I'll randomly become fascinated by some everyday thing I normally take for granted -- like, say, a subway system -- and wonder who had the idea to make that and why, and how it was done and how it affected all the people involved in designing and creating it, and what it would be like if it weren't there, etc., etc. It's usually a fleeting train of thought, and most of the time it plays out in my head and I don't verbalize any of it. On the occasions that I do, I'll usually just get weird looks. This sounds so schizo when you write it all out, but the fact is that you don't verbalize or act on, like, 95% of the leaps in the process.
