What you don't know about Ne

[Bush]

I was going to post this in the Ni thread, but I wanted to search out an Ne one instead.

Extroverted Intuition - from Personalityhacker.com and Dario Nardi
You naturally find connections between disparate things in the outside world, pushing buttons and looking for patterns. By opening up to all possibilities, you are able to create connections between people, ideas, objects, or places that discover new and unheard-of ways of thinking. You love to ask the question “What if?” and few things are as satisfying as blazing a new trail, often in both a literal and metaphoric sense. While most personality types focus in on related brain regions to answer certain questions, you naturally use trans-contextual thinking to include brain regions that seem to be unrelated to the question at hand. This helps you discover unusual relationships between situations. Most people, for instance, upon hearing the words “dog” and “cat” will evoke auditory regions and perhaps some visual or memory regions. However, you get busy trying each region at a time …for instance, you suddenly imagine a story about two brothers, one of whom is faithful and sociable (like a dog) while the other is independent and quiet (like a cat)."

Guilty as charged.

I relate highly to the perspective shifting aspect of Ni especially: how you can use a zoom lens that's also sitting on a rotating camera mount. It's the mindset of examining that a can of soup will cast a rectangular shadow if a light is shined on its front, but a circular one if it's shined on its top. That has significant implications on problem-solving and navigating life in general: multiple angles on the thing, all of which have a degree of accuracy. As a skill, this is one that ought to be cultivated, as sometimes you just have to stop banging your head against the wall and look around for a door. I tend to use that mindset in problem-solving and general navigation enough that labeling it a 'preference' isn't too far off.

But linking stuff to other stuff -- one concept to another, one image to another, a kid to a cat, an entire context to an entirely different context -- it turns out, is likely my go-to. If it turns out that I understand some concept or another straight away, it's probably because I've related it to something else. I'm no genius, but I've been prompted at some seminar or class or another: "Looks like you've done this before," and the answer is sometimes 'no.' It's not that I "just know" how to do something; it's that the piece parts and the relationship among them can be abstracted enough that they're applicable to a bunch of other stuff.

So I end up seeing the world in very broad strokes, as if my vision's all blurry. I'll get the 'gist' of something (via a blurred vision) and move on, and when I come across some other blurred vision (of something else entirely) that resembles that first one, I could see relationships between the two phenomea because those blurs are similar enough that one will inform the other. The details aren't as relevant in my mind, or at least they're not part of the primary way in which I see things. (That's a problem in and of itself, though.)

And then I become friends with the 80/20 rule: the broad strokes are good enough for the application/problem at hand, and delving deeper might not yield much marginal gain and would be a waste of time. You know, like licking the bottom of a depleted well rather than moving on to another, fuller one.

 

[Sacrophagus]

But linking stuff to other stuff -- one concept to another, one image to another, a kid to a cat, an entire context to an entirely different context -- it turns out, is likely my go-to. If it turns out that I understand some concept or another straight away, it's probably because I've related it to something else. I'm no genius, but I've been prompted at some seminar or class or another: "Looks like you've done this before," and the answer is sometimes 'no.' It's not that I "just know" how to do something; it's that the piece parts and the relationship among them can be abstracted enough that they're applicable to a bunch of other stuff.

Years ago, a friend and I went to buy some video game. Once we got home, I kicked my friend's ass over and over again, and his frustratred reaction was "Man! You must've been playing this game all of your life!". We laughed our ass off.
It was funny because the game was released that same day.



Just like you know your way through the gadgets of a new car, a new phone, without really referring to any How To Use manual, or the way you know where to go once you arrive to a new uncharted place, the same applies for problems and situations as we make our own internal map to navigate through them. Our intuition being the compass.

 

[Virtual ghost]

Texbook Ne.