I'm glad it's not just me who thinks of it like that - people generally look at me as though I'm mad.
My mum went
when I tried explaining this to her and said it sounded exhausting...
This is partly why I got into personality typing - it made me feel as if it was ok to have my intp-ish "oddities." All of my family are sensors, and none are istp.
I don't know if you could train the Ne quality. I wish I could train the quality of keeping my thoughts on task!
Maybe you could try to take one thing you're really interested in and try to relate everything to that, and then relate them through that. e.g. you're interested in history? Relating Twin Towers should be easy, and go into maybe the origins of tennis and tennis balls and their construction and the industrial revolution. Eventually, I think you'd have to come across something that was similar both ways. Something like physics would be really good to relate things.
I do have a lot of fun when doing the connection with seemingly unrelated objects, and I assume that's because I'm letting that thought process play around, so I think those would be good for practice.
Anyways, original thread! I first saw it three hours ago and spent those hours going through every interview question for google/microsoft/etc I can find, if that gives you any idea. I started reading books on chess when I was 14, so I've been practicing that a whopping few years, but I love love
love chess. I also like sudoku, but I've never been very good at it. I like it enough to complete a book and spend a few hours straight working on puzzles, though. I really like Rubik's cubes if I have the algorithms - my spatial reasoning is bad enough so that I find it hard to work out a logical way to do it and end up guessing and that's no fun. I also love math, although it's a weaker academic point.
Although I am essentially interested in everything - if you had asked this about literature, physics, or philosophy, my answer would have been similarly rant-y. So, depending on your purpose in asking this, you may want to take it with a grain of salt.