[kingdavidANC]

I've decided to borrow reddit's "ELI5" in an attempt to better my understanding of Ni. Maybe explain as though I am a gifted 5 year old, or even a 10 year old.



Shoot away.

[Abraxas]

I've decided to borrow reddit's "ELI5" in an attempt to better my understanding of Ni. Maybe explain as though I am a gifted 5 year old, or even a 10 year old.

Shoot away.

[luemb]

Systems thinking. When using Ni, you can't see a tree without also seeing it's ecosystem, you can't see a water drop without thinking of the hydrological cycle, and so on with anything that could be thought of.

[Stephen]

I'll tell you when you're older.

[ Perceiving with Ni is like seeing with electricity. You get all the same information as everyone else, but when it's inside your head, it branches out fast into so many other things that it might become, or be useful for, based on all the experiences and understandings you've had in the past. ]

[hoom]

See, there's a bit of a conundrum... in that it seems like nobody can offer a full definition to Ni. There are sources and people who have good understandings of parts of what it does, but basically nobody, from what I've seen, can capture the whole thing, which is a shame. It almost takes Ni to decipher what Ni does, and even that's not easy. So asking for a concise definition of Ni is basically impossible.

I may feel up to elaborating more on the matter later... but here are some basic principals (nowhere near all of them) that embody Ni:
1) It's often future-minded, the most naturally future-minded of all the functions I'd argue.
2) It makes connections, often between what don't seem like related constructs to outsiders. For me at least, it tends to do this passively, as naturally as breathing, which is why it took a day for me to even realize that I had Ni after reading my first description of it, it was actually a semi-characteristic 'a-ha' moment, that realization.
3) A layman might see some of Ni's work as a producer of 'a-ha', very House-like, moments. In some instances it does behave in this manner and will spark a solution out of thin air. Ni often works such that it works passively and subconsciously for a time, followed by sparking the vast majority of a solution into the consciousness all of a sudden, ie: an a-ha moment. It's not so much a 'figure out A' then 'figure out B' sort of thing, it can be very nonlinear and often provides whole solutions at once.
4) Speaking of nonlinearity, it often jumps ahead and bears in mind future events and concerns, seemingly long before others would do so. It is often implicitly used to evaluate the longevity of a solution. Ni is in many ways like a web, one connects different bits of data, implicitly, the bits of data don't need to be from the same subject, have been acquired within the same time-frame, or really have any other constraints; Ni connects, and it does so without heed for whether it's grabbing the start, middle, or end of a concept. This then deepens the understanding of the Ni user in their topic of interest without having to apply effort to have done so. Later, as needed, Ni answers.

For me, Ni is a largely implicit function. Things regarding it happen automatically, without effort or conscious thought, it will often answer questions that were never asked. It makes me future-minded, focused on the longevity of plans and goals, one reason why I knew what I wanted my college major to be, years before it was necessary, and why I won't pursue a [romantic] relationship that I don't see lasting a good long while.

The last instance I remember of 'actively and intentionally engaging' the function, which doesn't happen often by the way (as it's not necessary and mysteriously pops out answers from the subconscious most of the time anyway), was when trying to plan how to write a computer science project. I was looking for every single place I could buy efficiency in my code, and how one change in object-oriented structure could help or hurt time by a lot. One references big-O notation of data structures and algorithms, properties of contiguous versus sparse memory usage, the amount of dereferencing associated with pointers, the efficiency of the C++ STL versus your own code or C legacy code, what can be inlined, what container classes will cause cache misses, how many of those classes can be stored in the cache at once, where stack frames will pile on, what operations happen a million times versus just once (and therefore what can you strip away the complexity from), whether a C-string is better than a C++ string and is the 4 bytes of memory to hold a pointer really worth it and the associated indirection... and about a billion other things. Active Ni can juggle all those things at once and find an optimal or near-optimal solution before having started. What places I was unsure about, Ni was able to identify and I was able to write short and fast test cases that provided my answer as to what was most efficient. A few hours of planning and perhaps 25 precision test cases later, I had one of the best designs in the class. I ended up offering advice to a good number of people also working in the lab who missed various connections between their own data structures that slowed them down considerably.

Where efficiency doesn't matter, in the past I've been able to have Ni drive me through the process of writing complicated code as I write it, with barely any active forward thinking. It still turned out bloody efficient/effective. It pinpoints appropriate structural design quickly (what components should exist and how they should communicate) in my experience.



Pardon me if I've been a bit redundant... Ni sucks to explain and I've certainly not explained all of it here. I tried to provide some examples of use toward the end, but by no means are those the only instances of use, usages vary *greatly* and I cannot speak to what it does for other types, certainly not as a secondary or tertiary function.

If you'd like, I have some sites that have pretty concise and reasonable definitions of all of the cognitive functions... while the Ni definitions are, as always, incomplete, they're not inaccurate:
Keys 2 Cognition - Cognitive Processes
Cognitive Processes
(Also, when I say incomplete, I don't merely mean missing a technicality, I mean missing a pretty big chunk).

[Grits]

See, there's a bit of a conundrum... in that it seems like nobody can offer a full definition to Ni. There are sources and people who have good understandings of parts of what it does, but basically nobody, from what I've seen, can capture the whole thing, which is a shame. It almost takes Ni to decipher what Ni does, and even that's not easy. So asking for a concise definition of Ni is basically impossible.

I may feel up to elaborating more on the matter later... but here are some basic principals (nowhere near all of them) that embody Ni:
1) It's often future-minded, the most naturally future-minded of all the functions I'd argue.
2) It makes connections, often between what don't seem like related constructs to outsiders. For me at least, it tends to do this passively, as naturally as breathing, which is why it took a day for me to even realize that I had Ni after reading my first description of it, it was actually a semi-characteristic 'a-ha' moment, that realization.
3) A layman might see some of Ni's work as a producer of 'a-ha', very House-like, moments. In some instances it does behave in this manner and will spark a solution out of thin air. Ni often works such that it works passively and subconsciously for a time, followed by sparking the vast majority of a solution into the consciousness all of a sudden, ie: an a-ha moment. It's not so much a 'figure out A' then 'figure out B' sort of thing, it can be very nonlinear and often provides whole solutions at once.
4) Speaking of nonlinearity, it often jumps ahead and bears in mind future events and concerns, seemingly long before others would do so. It is often implicitly used to evaluate the longevity of a solution. Ni is in many ways like a web, one connects different bits of data, implicitly, the bits of data don't need to be from the same subject, have been acquired within the same time-frame, or really have any other constraints; Ni connects, and it does so without heed for whether it's grabbing the start, middle, or end of a concept. This then deepens the understanding of the Ni user in their topic of interest without having to apply effort to have done so. Later, as needed, Ni answers.

For me, Ni is a largely implicit function. Things regarding it happen automatically, without effort or conscious thought, it will often answer questions that were never asked. It makes me future-minded, focused on the longevity of plans and goals, one reason why I knew what I wanted my college major to be, years before it was necessary, and why I won't pursue a [romantic] relationship that I don't see lasting a good long while.

The last instance I remember of 'actively and intentionally engaging' the function, which doesn't happen often by the way (as it's not necessary and mysteriously pops out answers from the subconscious most of the time anyway), was when trying to plan how to write a computer science project. I was looking for every single place I could buy efficiency in my code, and how one change in object-oriented structure could help or hurt time by a lot. One references big-O notation of data structures and algorithms, properties of contiguous versus sparse memory usage, the amount of dereferencing associated with pointers, the efficiency of the C++ STL versus your own code or C legacy code, what can be inlined, what container classes will cause cache misses, how many of those classes can be stored in the cache at once, where stack frames will pile on, what operations happen a million times versus just once (and therefore what can you strip away the complexity from), whether a C-string is better than a C++ string and is the 4 bytes of memory to hold a pointer really worth it and the associated indirection... and about a billion other things. Active Ni can juggle all those things at once and find an optimal or near-optimal solution before having started. What places I was unsure about, Ni was able to identify and I was able to write short and fast test cases that provided my answer as to what was most efficient. A few hours of planning and perhaps 25 precision test cases later, I had one of the best designs in the class. I ended up offering advice to a good number of people also working in the lab who missed various connections between their own data structures that slowed them down considerably.

Where efficiency doesn't matter, in the past I've been able to have Ni drive me through the process of writing complicated code as I write it, with barely any active forward thinking. It still turned out bloody efficient/effective. It pinpoints appropriate structural design quickly (what components should exist and how they should communicate) in my experience.



Pardon me if I've been a bit redundant... Ni sucks to explain and I've certainly not explained all of it here. I tried to provide some examples of use toward the end, but by no means are those the only instances of use, usages vary *greatly* and I cannot speak to what it does for other types, certainly not as a secondary or tertiary function.

If you'd like, I have some sites that have pretty concise and reasonable definitions of all of the cognitive functions... while the Ni definitions are, as always, incomplete, they're not inaccurate:
Keys 2 Cognition - Cognitive Processes
Cognitive Processes
(Also, when I say incomplete, I don't merely mean missing a technicality, I mean missing a pretty big chunk).

A five year old would probably not have the attention span to read that.

[Alysaria]

All the ideas in the world are like apples and Ni is like picking them. You have a whole tree full of apples to choose from, but as you look closer, some are full of worms, rotten, not ripe enough, or just lumpy and weird. You take only the shiniest, most delicious apples - and later they get made into plan pie. ;)

[kingdavidANC]

I'll tell you when you're older.

I am now approximately an hour and a half older than when I posted this.

Perceiving with Ni is like seeing with electricity. You get all the same information as everyone else, but when it's inside your head, it branches out fast into so many other things that it might become, or be useful for, based on all the experiences and understandings you've had in the past.

Isn't Ne associated with seeing those kinds of possibilities--seeing an empty canvas as what could be painted on it?

[Stephen]

I am now approximately an hour and a half older than when I posted this.

Isn't Ne associated with seeing those kinds of possibilities--seeing an empty canvas as what could be painted on it?

Both intuitive functions are associated with a clear preference to a realm of possibilities, or alternatively worded what isn't distinctly there. To paraphrase Jung, these perceptions can't be known to be true until after the fact. The difference between Ni and Ne is in attitude. Ne addresses the object directly and is therefore bound by it, while Ni addresses the experiential perception, or the impressions surrounding it, so is bound instead by the subjectivity of the impressions. Ne's vision, in this sense, is clearer and more real, while Ni's may be more inventive in the sense that it's not bound by the object.

[lib]

Taken from a post over a year ago.
A class is devided into two - sensors and intuitives and left in opposite corners with an orange and asked to describe it.
Sensors: It's round, size of a tennis ball, orange color etc.
Intuitives: If you squeeze it you get juice for drinking or flavoring desserts or cakes. You can make shavings from the peel for marmalade or flavoring desserts and cakes.