The first place I'll start is "N" or "Intuition". Right off the bat, they've missed the mark because intuition begins with an I. But "Introverted" is already taken for "I" in the formulary, so N it is. This word was always the hardest for me to grasp because it doesn't mean what you and I think it means in the MB formulary. I will explain how "N" works (for me). The supposed "opposite" spectrum is the unfortunately-named "Sensing" (or S) which is an even worse word than using "iNtuitive" to describe this dimension in the MB formation.
I am extremely intuitive and I test highly on the MB scale for N. I am easily 90+% "iNtuitive" on these tests. The opposite parameter in this dimension would be "Sensing" and I rank at less than 10% for that dimension. What does that mean, in practical purposes? For me, it means that I use leaps of faith or invisible processing ideas or data. This means that when I'm confronted with a challenge or a question, I often find myself jumping ahead or looking at the end results without stopping to consider the middle (or sometimes even the beginning. This seems strange to an outsider who knows me as very logical and organised. But internally it is consistent because these "leaps" come from a place that I trust to experience or knowledge even if it isn't visible to me.
As an example, when confronted with a maze on a piece of paper with an entrance A and exit B, I will often look at B and start to process the path backward. Or, if I am forced to start at A, I'll immediately get impatient and say to myself, "yes, yes, start at A, who cares, let's see what's going on at B." In extreme cases, I might even dismiss the entire maze itself and say, "I'm out of the maze at B! Why do I care how to solve the maze? What's next!" The internal processes that I use to make decisions and calculations are the maze and my conscious mind just sees an idea start at A and end at B and I trust it. I don't check how the actual path from A to B works. Or, embarrassingly, if it works at all.
To give another illustration of how intuition works for me, take a scenario where I'm presented with a trick question. The trick question is designed to make you think along one line of thinking and then switch to another (perhaps in the use of a pun or obfuscation). I generally am not deceived by the tricks these possess because in many cases I'm already planning ahead for the outcome. When I was younger, I had fine-tuned this process so well that I would subconsciously finish people's sentences in my head. I would grasp how the ideas were forming and map out how the words would flow into the person's mouth as they spoke. I would only be right about 50% of the time, but the other 50% of the time I could magically deduce the end of an idea or sentence from its beginning.
Let's also consider a node (which in this case is just a circle) with an arrow pointing into the circle. There are three arrows pointing out of the circle in other directions. Label the inbound edge A and the outbound ones B, C, and D. I will often look at this scenario and say "Aha, D is the right answer." How do I know this? How is it possible? Often, it will just "seem right". Someone else might say, "But how can you know it's D? Why not B or C? What is different about D that you choose it?" I don't know. I'm not bothered by this missing information. D is right. I intuit it. It matches some experience from a previous memory. It has a similar shape to something I'm imagining. It "rings a bell".
This intuition works well as long as I stay within my direct experience and meet problems or questions I've solved before. But it also does help in the opposite direction, or in the negative space. For example, just as I'll say, "D looks right" I can also say, "B looks wrong". How does it look wrong? What is unique about B that doesn't match my internal wiring? How can I magically deduce B is wrong? I don't know, ask someone else. I'm busy looking at how D leads to another edge R.
And what happens when I'm wrong about D? Often, I'll have to be forced to see the error of my ways. I'll make an excuse like "Oh, I thought it was this..." or "It reminded me of that..." or "I guess I didn't notice that..." or "I forgot about this..." I then have to reorganise my thoughts a bit by analysing the problem again and re-classifying the scenario so the next time I see it I won't be tripped up. For example, I'll say to myself, "Ok, so if A goes to B, C, or D, it's D usually except if B comes first, then it's B. Got it." And I'll happily choose B next time except that the correct path will be C then. And I'll just fine-tune the model one more time.
The best part about the node illustration is that a "Sensing" person will often be stuck at A. I will be quickly rattling off discussions about why B and C are bad choices and clearly D is correct while most people are still wondering why they have to start at A and what does A mean anyway?
As a consequence, I often find myself having to work problems backward. I spend about 10% of my time intuiting an answer from vague starting conditions and then spend 90% of the time trying to make the solution match back to the original problem. Even if I'm correct about my intuition, others around me are not able to follow the logic and I am not able to express how the logic plays out. I don't like to use the terms "rational" and "irrational" (unless we're describing real numbers) but to others it seems irrational that I could jump to a conclusion with a leap of faith that sometimes seems quite large.
How to reconcile these leap of faith with my hard-edged determination to be correct and infallible? That is where the T comes into play which I'll describe next.
