Sensing & Intuition

For whatever reason, I’ve become obsessed with learning the different personality types, memorizing them, identifying them in others, and observing the interactions between them. I do this mainly for the sake of doing it, and I’ve learned that it’s easier to determine the different personalities if I have at least one person in mind to base these off of. For example, I know that my dad is INFJ, so I use my knowledge of what I know about him to see if I can identify similar traits in others.

More important than that is knowing the meanings for each letter in the personality type, and lately I’ve been confusing “sensing” and “intuitive” types. I wanted to dig deeper into these two, and here’s what I’ve learned.

Sensing personality types prefer to take in factual information. These are the type to use their past experiences, data, and concrete knowledge to understand or observe.

Intuitive personalities tend to take in information from their “sixth sense” and love to learn from the bigger picture. Patterns, imagination, and reading in between the lines all come natural to an intuitive type.

Here’s Carl Jung on the difference between the two:

“And intuition, now there is a difficulty. You don’t know, ordinarily, how intuition works so when a man has a hunch, you can’t tell exactly how he got that hunch, or where that hunch comes from. It is something funny about intuition. I will tell you a little story. I had two patients. The man was a sensation type and the woman was an intuitive type. Of course, they felt attraction, and so they took a little boat and went out to the Lake of Zurich. There were those birds that dive after fish. Then after a certain time they come up again and you can’t tell where they come out, so they began to bet. Who was the first to see the bird? Now, you would think that the one who observes reality very casually, the sensation type, would of course win out. Not at all. The woman won the bet completely. She was beating him on all points because, by intuition, she knew it before. Now, how is that possible? Well, sometimes you know you can really find out how it works by finding the intermediate links. It is a perception by intermediate links and you only get the result of that whole chain from that associations. Sometimes you succeed in finding out, but more often you don’t. So, my definition is, intuition is a perception by way or means of the unconscious. That is as near as I can get."