#ni function

[fanopeia]

Naturally, the intensification of intuition often results in an extraordinary aloofness of the individual from tangible reality; he may even become a complete enigma to his immediate circle.

[cognitivedoodles]

Brain Cog Volume. 1

Here's the rest of the comic ^_^ So sorry for the long wait I got a lot of things going on IRL and forgot to post the rest of this :')

Enjoy the comic! I know it's something simple and sweet but this is a project for my Comic class. PART 1 / PART 2

[fujoshiromiya]

🤍

[tbh-entp]

xNTxs with a hot take:

[wardensantoineandevka]

genuinely, how does Antoine have the time and energy and mental space to do his job preventing himself and Evka and other Wardens and any civilians from getting cursed or killed by creatures at minimum once a week; developing and improving incendiary weaponry, often requiring finicky alchemical experiments; other relevant alchemical experiments not related to incendiaries; researching the blight on topics including its behavior, spread, and water filtration; conducting ecological surveys to determine the effects of the blight on local systems; keeping up on professional reports and correspondence

and still have time and energy and mental space for things like designing mechanical automatic doors and probably other personal projects of mechanical design, alchemical nature, and who knows what; talking to locals and transcribing their folklore; reading novels; and keeping up on personal, social correspondence

and then STILL have time and energy and mental space to maintain a blissfully happy marriage and go on dates with his wife

like, how is he doing all this and he still has the energy to be cheerful, of course Evka has to remind him to take breaks because look at this workload, when does Antoine sleep

[bat-the-misfit]

clarifying my latest post i don't mean character should always be opposite types bc

1 like in the quixote example a character can still foil another without them being opposite types

2 most people don't care about mbti and that's ok and writers shouldn't be forced to learn it bc of that

3 you shouldn't change the nature of a character just to force them to oppose another character's type bc mbti is not to force people into boxes :)

i just like it when it happens bc i'm a mbti nerd and i like the idea of foils being opposite types ok

[widowinthealps011]

I'm having a mbti crisis (fucking again, yes). I've read a lot about the differences between infj and intp, ni dom vs ti dom and each cognitive function but my head is actually exploding with so much information, which I don't even know if it gives away something and I'm just not seeing it? I don't know if the way i perceive information is logical and analytical because I do feel that it is sometimes but then again I'm all about patterns and that seems to be a recurring word in the infj archetype. I've always felt that I'm both intuition and rational, I don't really know where one begins but I just sometimes notice things and my head feels like a whole world with information that seems so useless but I can't help to gather from every single place i'm in? I don't even know, on the other side, I'm not clear minded and intuition oriented in a Ni way?? my head is all over the place and sometimes the amount of possibilities (another key word for Ne) overwhelms me HORRIBLY, like it freezes me, but I end up shutting every logical part of me to decide because otherwise i will never move on. Also I'm very much in tune with other people and sometimes it's so overwhelming to feel what other people feel and to be so conscious of every subtext in a social gathering is EXHAUSTING which is why i need so much alone time.

And lastly, i am future oriented but I don't know if it's in a Ni or Ne way. Let me give an example. Just a few seconds ago I've decided that I'm going to try and not put so many personal things in my phone because I know that a lot of people get robbed at least once in their lifes and it's very dangerous out there, especially now, so if someone were to take away my phone, all the things I care about would not be there. How would i do that? Taking pictures and printing them, keeping a journal instead of my phone notes, erase messages sometimes, etc.

I feel like with everything i wrote here It's kinda obvious but it really isn't to me, if someone has a piece of advice i would really appreciate it

[innumerablebackstages]

Os Iusti

A Playlist About Ni as a Dominant Function.

This is an unapologetical ramble that will be soon followed by a lot of even verbos-er rambles. Give the Playlist a listen if you found this somehow interesting.

A disembodied hand carrying a key is the perfect metaphor for Introverted iNtuition (Ni): the key itself represents the unfathomable knowing, but the unseen door leaves us questioning what is it that can be opened, known. What lies beyond is veiled, both to others and to the Ni-Fe themselves, until the moment of revelation. This playlist mirrors the labyrinthine and multi-dimensional nature of the Ni dominated psyche, mapping a journey that is simultaneously personal and universal.

Os Iusti, meaning “The Mouth of the Just,” speaks to Ni’s relationship with revelation. Though silent and elusive, when Ni does speak, it unveils profound truths that resonate on a mythic and symbolic level. It won't necessarily be well translated to others, though, and here arises a Cassandrian problem for the Ni-dom. This function often “sees it all coming” long before others catch up, only to be dismissed until hindsight vindicates it. How well developed the J-functions of the user are will determine how much they get out of the alluring mind palace of Ni.

We can see in Jung's Psychological Types (1921):

Inner objects appear to the intuitive perception as subjective images of things, which, though not met with in external experience, really determine the contents of the unconscious, i.e. the collective unconscious, in the last resort. Naturally, in their per se character, these contents are, not accessible to experience, a quality which they have in common with the outer object. For just as outer objects correspond only relatively with our perceptions of them, so the phenomenal forms of the inner object are also relative; products of their (to us) inaccessible essence and of the peculiar nature of the intuitive function.

that Ni is untranslatable; the things a Ni-Dom user experiences as their normal cognitive process is composed mainly by images, impressions, vague certainties. These types are very specific kind of people: I see online a tendency to broaden what it means to be Ni-Dom, but Jung is clear with it: introverted perception is aloof and loony and guides itself with impressions of the body and the imagery of absolutes. This is what is so fascinating about introverted perception functions: they deal with probability, yes, but the user experiments those probabilities as absolutes. The user will rarely focus on "all the possibilities" but on The One Possibility their powerful perception marks. We can understand the Pi functions as internal maps: one based on impressions of the body and the other, "of the soul". "The Soul" here means the archetypes of the universe. The Sun, The Warrior, The Emperor... They all masquerade as situations rise and fall over time in a never-ending cycle. A repetition. An eternal return. All closely guarded by the collective unconscious. For the introverted intuitive, the world is a constant flux of cycles that repeat themselves and can be gazed at. At least partially. As images. As impressions.

You see, the experience is as puzzling for the user as it is for our inner circle: as exhilarating as my certainties can be for me, I don't really know where they came from or what exactly do they mean. A "vibe" I get from someone can assume the form of a vivid image of them kicking someone in the balls for fun while smoking a joint. Or something less explicit: I can feel they are terrible violent people by the way they smiled. Why? Hell knows. I can just feel snakes crawling up my arms when they smile. What does that even mean? I will give you a delicate shrug. You do you, my gut told me. I trust it with my bones.

Finally, and we will follow with the songs and why they're there I promise, we need to understand something about Ni: it is narrative in nature. The impressions it deals with are composed mostly by images that serve a deeper, much bigger focal point.

Thinking on images means an acute sense of aesthetics too, of the aesthetic nature of patterns: perception means contemplation and passivity, not capable of judgement. It reminds us of The Crone, the ancient chaman who knows the secrets of the stars. Ni deals with equilibrium and divinity and the impressions evolution and society have made us grasp with the strength of a baby in need. Ni sees the egg and the snake that coils under the earth. Necessarily, a Ni-dom gets their impressions from images, because the introverted intuition deals with the disembodied triggers a sensation can awake.

Or, as Jung would eloquently put it:  

Intuition receives from the sensation only the impetus to immediate activity; it peers behind the scenes, quickly perceiving the inner image that gave rise to the specific phenomenon (…) It sees the image of a tottering man pierced through the heart by an arrow. This image fascinates the intuitive activity; it is arrested by it, and seeks to explore every detail of it.

Without further ado, the songs:

Hide - CS01 version — Dorian Concept

whispers in motion

This track is about how Ni feels. It's disorienting and elusive. It's also full of patterns. Here, it's mean to speak about the layers of abstraction behind Ni-images. This function only perceives sensorial information to generate images.

I once told a friend Ni feels like structures building themselves. Without my knowledge, action or conscious effort insights sharpen into crystalline clarity only to fragment under their own weight. Some of them don't, but I have no compromise with them. They're product of the wild energy of being a flesh machine. I judge their beauty, their soundness, their structure. And I won't ever find a way out.

The disjointed rhythms evoke this. In this moment, I become an observer, piecing together fragments of a vast structure underneath. Constantly moving from one filament to another, piecing into an unconscious web of... Something. Introverted intuition feels constantly as something that occurs outside of me, like a spider would inevitably create a web. This is a joy and a pain in the ass.

A Dark Cloud is Coming — Moby

an apocalyptic vision

This one is slow and paced and builds up to an intense ending. It's a little over the nose, isn't it? Well, the gift of prophecy can only be understood as a dangerous delusion: it bears an indistinct sense of impending doom that grows clearer with time. Yes, of course the impressions are useful. I have already stated how much I trust them... But it still gets itself into visions of doom. It feels like a constant weight on the shoulders, real or not. In a lecture, Jung (1938), speaks of a persona gifted with a second vision. Her delusions are not "of neurotic origin" and so she's not considered mentally ill. These visions, however, give her a "strong personal dissatisfaction"; she was absolutely terrified by sensations that were not entirely real and were not entirely hers.

This also delves into the very annoying, very real apocalyptic visions Ni can give the user. When under stress, they can be realistic and feel like accurate depictions of what will become reality. Here, the absolutes Pi deals with become a double-edged sword: if your always trusted perception tell you there is something off going on in the world... Will you ignore it? Exactly.

In this Album, Moby channels his reflections on contemporary life and personal torment into jagged post-punk. However, this time they emerge wrapped in a deceptive gentleness—like the smothering embrace of a down pillow, soft and suffocating all at once. This is an album about his fear of the species future. His eclectic style and the beautiful lullaby this song is felt just right.

If I Were — Vashty Bunyan

mammals yearn

My story with this song is from long ago. The first time I listened to it my hairs went up and it felt like I had discovered something of ultimate importance. I yearned. I yearned painfully and I did so because of the images in my head. The feelings they gave me. I became aware of my gut-wrenching, existentially itchy habit of contemplating (sometimes believing in) alternative realities.

Not as mere fantasy, but as something that illuminate the present and they do so because we are plagued by impressions of our past. We have developed a collective, evolutionary, memory that makes us enjoy and be terrified of basically the same things. Bunyan’s lilting voice and bittersweet lyrics imagine a world shaped by care and gentle longing. Ni yearns to align the external world with its internal tapestry of symbols. Whatever these images are, they're much more beautiful than wherever the Ni-dom is currently dwelling. Beauty, as stated before, is a main driver for the psyche of introverted intuiters.

Ni doesn’t just seek beauty; it obsesses over it, hunts it down, and then mourns its impermanence. It creates these beautiful, impossible ideals, then leaves you stuck in a world that can’t match them.

Jung, has something insightful to say about this, actually:

 it is an aesthetic problem, a question of perception, a 'sensation'. In this way, the consciousness of his own bodily existence fades from the introverted intuitive's view, as does its effect upon others. The extraverted standpoint would say of him: 'Reality has no existence for him; he gives himself up to fruitless phantasies'

I rest my case.

Forest Nativity - Francis Bebey

this tropical ape

This song is about something I mentioned before. Ni sees the snake. Why the snake? Well, as a symbol it is connected to the earth, to clay, to water, to flexibility and longevity. The snakes are one of the most ancient evolutionary enemies of primates. It also symbolizes lost of control, danger and chaos.

We fear them with such uniformity that out brain is wired to recognize snakes in less than a second (2016). What I'm saying here is our ecosystem has influenced the way our brains react and think collectively: if we all come from the same savannah, then we have the same primal fears. The same, old, tropical fears. I, personally, think archetypes primarily arise from there. From terror.

This track is about intricate rhythms connected to instinct. Here, I only want to remind you, and me, that Ni is a function born of instinct. Of music and religion as catalysts of society. No matter what we perceive, our feet are touching the jungle's soil, always —it’s that gut feeling of “there’s something off,” the perception that always feels just outside of reality, dancing on the edge of the conscious.

This constitutes, then, a liminal zone for the psyche: trapped among excel sheets and the animal impulse, broker of ties and marriages and skin boots. Ni thrives in these liminal zones. In the in-betweens. It weaves meaning from the interplay of this forest nativity. Ni fleshes out these collective memories through narratives and images, constantly exploring this... And for a Ni-Fe, that also means the human drama.

Olsen Olsen - Sigur Rós

trascending as a sweet

Sigur Rós is a band of icelandic Post-rock. Yes, cope. Their music is ethereal, and made to be beautiful: their creative process follows first the sound and then the meaning of each track. That is a familiar feeling. Stephen King, a famous Ni-Te, describes its creative process as unplanned: he just follows his internal map. What works. What can be envisioned as beautiful. Whatever beautiful means in a given situation.

Like Ni creative process, this song goes away from mundane concerns and toward the sublime. With its otherworldly vocals and expansive melodies, It is firstly concerned with creating sensations and crafting an image. The song was written in an invented language specifically for it, one that will be revisited by the band in future songs, but is just crafted to sound beautifully.

Few tracks embody both Ni tendency to transcendence in the sublime and the irony of its prison of flesh. The ending of the song, after a long descent into imagination and memories, a childhood sweet or a card game, crashes us with the familiar low roar of a supermarket.

Buzzcut Season - Lorde

detached awareness of impermanence

I will be honest, Lorde was not my favorite during most of my life, until her EP in maori came out. I had had my head up my ass all this time about an amazing artist. Buzzcut Season was a serendipity: and in this case it talks very openly to me about the inevitable detachment I feel for the world. And about how it feels to grow up when you don't think it has any meaning. About ignoring and fantasizing.

Something I already mentioned comes to play here, a weaving of opposites. I perceive collective dissonance and their inner tension between empathy and cynicism. I am weighted down by the impossibility of eternity. Lorde's detached delivery contrasts with the emotional gravity beneath the lyrics. I knew when my childhood ended with painful clarity, and I remember the details of my particular tragedies with detail. I still struggle to find myself outside of my head.

Now, this detachment is not in an emotional sense exactly. It's of a different nature. It's more of a hyper-involvement in a symbolic layer that renders the mundane world irrelevant.

This song is about Ni's tendency to detach from the present, observing it as though from a distance. Recognizing the impermanence of everything that has ever existed and the underlying patterns that shape them, yet unable to scream in horror. The Ni-dom is at deep emotional resonance with the world’s beauty, tempered by an almost clinical awareness of its fragility.

Illusion of Seclusion - Photay

I am one, or all, or nothing

I might sound like some kind of purist here, quoting fucking Jung and all, but I do think there is value in whatever insights and further readings into typology new blood has to give. The people from Cognitive Type, for example, have very interesting takes on Ni. Its creator explains that Ni's perception is translocal: meaning all information gathered, processed and burped out as an automatic castle will be working in function of an axiom.

This is why Ni can feel so disjointed from the “now”—because it’s not just analyzing the present, it’s tying it to an entire temporal and spatial continuum.

It will always have a direction, a focus, it will follow a specific narrative. While introverted sensation knows the facts in a sort of bulleted manner, introverted intuition inevitably arranges the facts as if they were part of a thematic web. Ni has, intrinsically, a direction. A focalized pull. Even the smallest data sets of the pathway must conduct towards the completion of the spider-web.

The previous gives birth to another characteristic of the Ni-dom, a certain idea of panpsychism and synchronicity. The psyche of Ni dominated people tends to think of the world as one. Or everything. Or nothing. But all of it for sure. It’s that nagging sense that every event, every detail, even the most mundane moment, serves a larger function in the grand scheme.

Beneath it´s solitary exterior, Ni is constantly weaving connections, weaving a web of meaning that reveals the unity behind apparent separations. For Ni, sometimes, all of the mental and physical objects are but buttons and shafts being pulled by the same forces since the beginning. Solitude is, then, an impossibility.

Os Iusti, WAB 30 — Anton Bruckner

divinity in beauty

This piece is the spiritual core of this playlist. I had the idea while giving this a listening. But first, Os Iusti comes from a bigger quote. It's from the bible, Psalms 34:30, and reads as follows:

The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom, and his tongue speaks what is just.

So this song is about prophecy and truth. Allow me to get a bit mystical with my creative depiction of how it feels to inhabit Ni. To keep it short: beauty is divinity. Transcendence and divinity are but tied to the same log and they flail against the absurd with savage strength. Ni doesn't exactly believe in the teleological nature of the universe, but it certainly acts based on this idea of repetition and symmetry. Bruckner's beautiful chorals address this with the grandeur it deserves, from a higher dimension.

But, it's also related to another dimension of divinity. This playlist, you might have noticed, is not only about condensing Ni, but condensing Ni as the dominant function of an INFJ. This choral piece also resonates with Fe’s moral blade. Its liturgical. It evokes my inner cathedral, where I constantly voice my questions of justice, duty, and alignment.

Although the Pi type is inward-turning in nature, this function:

has little inclination to make a moral problem of perception, since a strengthening of the judging functions is required fo this, only a slight differentiation of judgment is sufficient to shift intuitive perception from the purely aesthetic into the moral sphere (...) only a slight differentiation of judgment is sufficient to shift intuitive perception from the purely aesthetic into the moral sphere

and that:

It is different with the morally oriented intuitive. He reflects on the meaning of his vision, and is less concerned with developing its aesthetic possibilities than with the moral effects which emerge from its intrinsic significance

Yes, Ni is meditative and silent and won't necessarily make a fuss out of it. But just you wait. “Os Iusti” speaks not of human justice, but of cosmic harmony.

We Have a Map of the Piano - Múm

and the piano is everything

This one is more of a metaphor. The piano is... Well, everything. We are the pianos and our human drama is the piano too. Ni, sometimes, feels like having an internal map for everything that has happened under the sun. An hermetic, deeply confusing map. More often than not, the map of the piano will be much more important than the piano itself. The image will impose over reality and instead of grasping the deeper truth, I'll be chasing my own shadow.

In these archetypes, therefore, all experiences are represented which have happened on this planet since primeval times. The more frequent and the more intense they were, the more clearly focused they become in the archetype. The archetype would thus be, to borrow from Kant, the noumenon of the image which intuition perceives and, in perceiving, creates.

The map is, however, fucking alive. Do you know what cell membranes are made of? Oil and coloidal substances suspended in water: meaning, their very own structure is a fluid mosaic. Always changing, always different. The map is the same.

The collective unconscious doesn't work for the Ni-dom, we just glimpse at it with uncanny precision sometimes. Still its prisoners tho. Remember what I said about a map of absolutes, at the beginning? I am talking about one of its downsides: what happens when we fix in the wrong absolute? I will tell you what happens: nihilism and despair.

This song is about the use of the internal map to move around. The crystalline structures my mind creates without agency may not be entire useful, but they provide me with an unshakable sense of direction.

Soul Alphabet - Colleen

on the interpretation of shadows

If the former song was about the maps of everything, this one is specific to us Ni-Fe's. The map here turns on how we process emotions, how we process the world of people, the social economy. It's a soul alphabet because, yeah sure, we will read an entire room and pick out the weirdos, the nice, the disgusting and the arseholes in less than 15 minutes... But, then? Knowing and perceiving are absolutely nothing without their corresponding real object being affected.

A soul Alphabet means to know the exact words needed to open a door... Or it should, if the alphabet was not composed of archetypes and their implications. Yes, yes, they're useful, but seeing my boss as "The Emperor" and predicting his behaviour based on it can only take me so far.

You might have caught the problem a few songs back. Ni gives a lot on how to navigate relationships, but it also picks you apart. The belief that you already know what will happen is, very often, an obstacle to feel involved with your loved ones. With the world. And to accurately understand what is already going.

What happens when the image of the object is as heavy in your psyche as the object itself? Which one is more beautiful? Whom did I say had a fixation with beauty? Starting to get it? It, introverted intuition,

perceives all the background processes of consciousness with almost the same distinctness as extraverted sensation registers external objects. For intuition, therefore, unconscious images acquire the dignity of things (Jung, 1921)

As I have tried to convey during this entire verborrhea: Introverted intuition is both a joy AND A PAIN IN THE ASS. More often than not I will feel utterly overwhelmed by the information I'm perceiving (shadow Se much?) and will need time to understand what, in the first place, this all means for me. Yeah, sure, I know Frederick's got a crush in this german girl because of the way he looks at her. Because I get his butterflies while he smiles. I won't necessarily care, since it's an aesthetic problem first, until I have had time to judge... And it will take a while.

It's a beautiful song, tho. Having a soul alphabet in perpetual growth IS beautiful. I find human emotions so utterly beautiful in their primal savagery, and yet, I will feel removed from them. Alienated.

I know the end - Phoebe Bridgers

do you?

Yes, of course I already saw it coming. Do I care enough? Do I want to experience it anyway? The paradox of anticipating the inevitable while wrestling with an unspoken melancholy. This is one of the many dilemmas I’ve hinted at throughout this. From here on, I’m peeling back more of the darker layers of Ni.

What does it mean to know the end? Well, for the Ni user it implies both the constant sensation that the world can't really be a surprise, and an unspoken melancholy. However, do I really, really know the end? No, I don't. Ni isn’t omniscient—it’s a trickster. It feeds you archetypes and calls them truths, maps that blur the contours of reality. This song is both about sadness and stubbornness.

I've already said Ni takes archetypes too seriously. It takes its images as real objects and not machinations of the unconscious. What if the perceived end is one of these delusions? What if it's an apocalyptic vision breed by stress and insecurities? Ni craves the grand design but struggles with nuance. It clings to archetypes—its own self-made gods. Despair isn’t in not knowing. It’s in thinking you do, it’s being so sure you’re right that you refuse to look at the details.

Just like before, the illusion of knowing is a constant danger for these types. Bridgers captures this tension. The song’s crescendo mirrors this: a widening lens that swallows the world in its entirety—hopes, fears, and all—before collapsing into the emptiness of knowing.

You see, the thing is the map will definitely loose sight of the trees.

God, turn me into a flower - Weyes Blood

aren't magnolias pretty?

Ni doesn’t scream. It doesn’t need to. Ni is forceful in its own way. It demands attention—not through volume, but through gravity. This song is about surrendering to that gravity—a dissolution of self into something purer, quieter, beyond language.

“God, turn me into a flower.” A delicate, fleeting bloom, enduring for as long as it’s meant to. Let me be found by those whom are looking for the same divinity as me. Are we not flowers already, tho? Yes, God, tune me out the horror of reality.

But this isn’t a prayer for peace. It’s also a cautionary tale. The myth of Narcissus looms large here, twisted through the lens of modernity. In an age of reflections—be they digital or mental—we often mistake the image for the thing itself. As Weyes Blood laments:

You see the reflection and you want it more than the truth You yearn to be that dream you could never get to 'Cause the person on the other side has always just been you

Ni’s greatest strength is its ability to craft those reflections—shimmering visions of what could be. But therein lies its deepest flaw: the tendency to elevate these constructs above reality, turning them into prisons. We, like Narcissus, chase the reflections we’ve gazed at: the archetypes, the futures, the images of ourselves we wish were real.

What Weyes Blood offers is a counterweight. A call to soften. To stop chasing reflections and instead bloom where we are. Flowers don’t pursue their own beauty; they simply are. Maybe that’s the secret Ni longs to uncover: divinity isn’t in the vision—it’s in the act of blooming.

Suspirium - Tom Yorke

eureka!

It’s not fear, not really. It’s more like standing at the edge of something vast and unknown, staring into it, and wondering, is this mine? Can I claim this abyss? Or does it claim me? It’s a question we’re never ready for, but that’s exactly why it sticks. The light, the heat—it’s all there. But they’re inseparable from the shadow. That’s the thing about Ni, right? We see the whole thing, the light and the dark, and we can’t look away.

Sure. Just keep moving, right? Pretend you’re not aware that you’re stuck in the same dizzying cycle. Keep dancing in the waltz, behind the wall, pretending the laughter and the old songs are enough. Pretend you’re not aching to stop, to sit in the silence and ask yourself, what’s on the other side? The truth is, it’s not the spinning that keeps us going. It’s the hope that when we stop, we’ll still be okay. That we won’t unravel. That we’ll find something whole

Then there’s the final plea: “When I arrive, will you come and find me?” The search for something or someone—answers, resolution, a sense of belonging. But Yorke wraps that in a veil of uncertainty. Will we find each other, or will we just get lost in the crowd? It feels inevitable, and yet entirely unknown. There’s a mother, pulling us back. No tomorrows, no next steps—just a final moment of peace. But is that peace something we’re even allowed to feel?

In a way, it’s a beautiful mess. The waltz, the repetition, the dance between light and dark, the questions we keep asking and never quite answering. Suspirium is a swirl, a cry, a whisper, a pull—a glimpse at something both unknowable and familiar. And maybe that's the whole point.

This song doesn’t just ask you to feel—it asks you to exist. To sit with the weight of being, of moving through cycles you might not even understand, of carrying the light and the dark and everything in between. Ni doesn’t scream, it murmurs, and Suspirium is its hymn. Quiet, unrelenting, heavy with beauty and questions.

Is the darkness ours to take? I don’t know. But I do know that I will have to watch it.

Le Miroir - Alcest

toolkit for indirect knowledge

If Ni was a movie, Alcest would write the whole damn soudntrack. Their shimmering post-rock isn’t just music—it’s a vessel, an immersion into the space where reality blurs and meaning sharpens. Le Miroir is exactly what it claims to be: a mirror, but not the kind you glance into before heading out the door. It’s the kind that shows you and the world. The tool for looking in the corners.

This one is a mirror image in the shadow. Always slightly removed, a step back from reality, gazing at the world itself and at the veiled truths behind it. The shimmer of something more. But here’s the catch: is it a revelation, or just your own shadow staring back? Ni-users know this tension all too well—this need to decode the archetypes, to give form to the formless, to pull the unseen into sharp relief. But at what cost?

“C'est pourquoi je réfléchis.” The clever double meaning: Reflect light, reflect thoughts, reflect existence itself. Mirrors, they reveal, but only indirectly. There’s danger in that constant reflection. You can get lost in it, in the labyrinth of your own interpretations, mistaking the shimmering surface for the depths.

Alcest doesn’t give you answers. It doesn’t hold your hand. It hands you the mirror and asks, “What do you see?”

Je suis une image dans l'ombre un lieu vaguement ébloui (...) c'est pourquoi je réfléchis (...) tout ce qui passe tout ce qui change

Typewriter Lesson - Cornelius

collapse of meaning

Does Ni ever drown in its own depths? Oh, absolutely. Does Ni's ability to see patterns collapse under the weight of over-analysis? It does. If Ni is the all-seeing oracle of the psyche, then Typewriter Lesson is the moment the oracle stares so long into the abyss that it accidentally starts narrating the phone book. This track isn’t just music; it’s a chaotic exercise in over-interpretation.

Let’s get one thing straight: Typewriter Lesson isn’t “about” anything. And yet, that’s precisely why it feels so perfectly Ni. It’s a looping, rhythmic mechanism—clinical yet oddly hypnotic, a melody as sterile as it is strangely evocative. The problem is, Ni can’t leave it alone. It’s like a dog chasing its own tail, hearing the clacking keys and spinning them into grand metaphors: cycles of life! Patterns of communication! The machinery of the human mind!

But then you step back, and what’s left? A glorified typing exercise. Instructions, abbreviations, nonsense syllables. It’s like Cornelius handed you an IKEA manual and said, “Figure it out,” knowing full well you’d end up philosophizing about the meaning of furniture instead of actually assembling it.

And that’s the trap of Ni—this unbearable need to turn everything into a symbol, even when the thing itself is aggressively, stubbornly meaningless. If archetypes are Ni’s favorite playthings, then Typewriter Lesson is the moment it realizes it’s been playing with a piece of Ikea cardboard the whole time.

The beauty, of course, is in the collapse. The sheer absurdity of assigning meaning to something that refuses to hold it. Cornelius serves up a mirror here, reflecting back Ni’s own self-indulgence. You hear the keys, the repetitions, the structured chaos, and you think, Surely, this must mean something.

But does it? Really?

Staircase - Radiohead

tragically trapped

How much control does Ni really have over its webs of meaning? Is it weaving them out of choice, or is it compelled, trapped in a Sisyphean task of interpretation and reinterpretation? Staircase is about the Ni-dominated psyche staring into infinity, endlessly pulling threads, only to realize the whole thing is unraveling faster than it can be spun.

This song is a descent into chaos, into existential horror. Your mind is the delicate spider always spinning it's beautiful web. Non stop. Never-ending. The cyclical rhythm, the disjointed beats—they echo the way Ni perceives patterns in everything, yet never fully pins them down. Each step down this staircase only reveals more steps, more questions, more webs tangled into chaos.

But here’s the twist: if Ni assumes there’s a grand design, why doesn’t it ever reach the architect? Why the hesitation, the half-commitment? Because it, we, know there is no architect. This is also the saving grace; Ni is used to chaos. To nothingness. To provide the structure itself. See, this is my favorite, the collapse, or descent, is but an opportunity. Remember Little Finger?

Chaos is a lader

Radiohead’s layered production mirrors the Ni-user’s internal experience: dense, abstract, and vibrating with tension. The synths and fragmented percussion create a space where agency and inevitability blur. Is the staircase moving you, or are you moving the staircase? The song doesn’t answer—because Ni doesn’t answer. It just keeps spinning.

[earthling-wolf]

Ni Translocality

Ni is a function that expands the registration of an object to include its temporal totality (Pi), which is the larger episode or theme to which it belongs. It then associates this episode to all historical instances of episodes that are isomorphic to it (N), transforming the definition of the object into a thematic story that is disconnected from any particular place or time. The object is then understood as something transcending the present, as something translocal, and not following a linear, chronological path from the past while still being temporal.

Metaphors & Visual Aphorisms

The Ni function compels the individual to live a slowly paced, hands-off life of observation and reflection on the information structures of the world. First, they are data synthesizers that formulate image-encoded schemas from unconsciously woven patterns in reality. The Ni user will be very graphic in their consciousness, thinking in visuals and representing the world through visual metaphors. These dynamic but geometric relationships are registered as essential to reality's functioning and are eventually superimposed onto other life domains in a proverbial form. "A tree's branches can only grow as far up as its roots go down," "flowing water never goes stale," or "every light casts a shadow" are examples of the graphical aphorisms that may develop from this information synthesizing process. For the Ni user, the world is not comprehended through words or axioms; it is through these visual relationships that words help convey to others. Due to the abundance of symmetry observed in life, these relations are often symmetrical --as embodied in concepts like the Taoist yin-yang symbol. An elaborate worldview is inescapably developed predicated on these abstracted relationships, aimed to give life predictability and continuity of narrative. The Ni user never sees the world straightforwardly, as reality is formed from representative structures --not rational absolutes. To the Ni user, knowledge is the net awareness gained by superimposing layers of these representations on reality and mapping its landscape as far and wide as possible.

The Mind & Panpsychism

Moreover, because they view reality as representation, the Ni user will constantly experience life as a perceptual sphere built from the interactions of mind and material. The world appears as a tapestry woven together by higher forces that underpin every object and substance – causing the objects to feel like the outer shells or totems of fundamental forces. Moreover, a sense will often exist – as explored in phenomenology – that consciousness is the essential thing. In some form or another, the Ni user will come to embody the philosophy that the psyche has a degree of priority over the material. One way to imagine this is to say the world constellates itself to the Ni user as being built equally of "psyche" and of matter. Still, every Ni user will synthesize this felt sense in slightly different ways, with some believing that consciousness is the prime constituent of reality and others feeling we are co-creators of reality by our active participation in how it appears to us and how we ascribe meaning to the contents within it, which can lead magnetically to a type of panpsychism, where the Ni user views the contents of the mind seriously as entities, forces, energies and contours as perceivable as literal objects are to other people. These psychological images and forces will not only be present but will also be persistent. To them, the psyche has a steady yet fluid shape, an image, and a terrain to be explored through vision and internal perception. Moreover, while other types may arrive at similar philosophies through rationality, for the Ni user, this sensation is not something deduced but simply uncovered, as it represents the default state of their experience. This proclivity naturally leads to an interest in meditation, eastern thought, and spirituality, which emphasizes these same psychic aspects and presents a philosophy of consciousness more natively aligned to their phenomenological experience.

Narrowness & Convergence

However, for all their openness towards surreal ideas about consciousness, the Ni user is not random or unstructured in their views. They are scarcely persuaded of most things and are instead highly cautious of ideas. The Ni user will have a keen eye for identifying the improbability of things and will not be prone to jump on board with things unless their inner imagery already maps out an inescapable trajectory in that direction. The Ni user is not an inciter or generator of novel things, nor is their specialty a spontaneous creativity. Instead, it is the holistic assimilation of trends over time and a convergence of perspectives along the most reinforced trendlines. They generally see only one or a few trajectories stemming from a given situation and are magnetically drawn to the likeliest interpretations. Thus, the ideas the Ni user arrives at are not things they create but things they discover to be already "the case," often sourcing from an inside-out evaluation of being but just as well from a panoramic evaluation of society. In this way, the Ni user is a sort of investigator or excavator of the primordial imagery in themselves and society. More than any other type, the Ni user receives a linear and direct feed of the imagery of the unconscious, and because of this convergence of focus, many Ni users across time continue to re-discover and re-articulate the same things as they unearth the same territory. As Ni users from all ages inquire into questions of being, their convergent intuition guides them to parallel answers and to convey those understandings in imagery --since image is the primary means by which that information is discovered and encoded. A canonical historical archive, therefore, has developed over time in the form of symbology, the encrypted patterns and representative structures that underpin reality, as collectively uncovered over time.

Symbology

In this sense, the Ni user may often find camaraderie in the symbology laid down by previous pioneers for its capacity to articulate that felt inner content. Strange as it may seem to others to believe or seriously consider such archaic and outdated emblems, the Ni user is drawn to these old images like the Si user is drawn to information encoded in the old earth. The Ni user may not wish to be a mystic and, when not fully individuated, may shrink away from this imagery for fear of academic reprimand. Still, they may feel that their awareness style drafts them inescapably into these ideas. They emerge out of themselves when any intense investigation is done or even when no investigation is done. The realm of alchemical symbolism, the Tarot, ayurvedic medicine, and Astrology may be studied intently for their capacity to superimpose a representation of life. Shapes also contain a powerful influence over them, and they may be drawn to sacred geometry and mandalas. Numerology may also be investigated. Over time, by studying these emblems to discover their true meanings, they are slowly transformed into the likeness of those who built them. As they unearth the contents of this domain, they often become affiliated with the taxonomies used by their predecessors to try to express this underworld. However, their dabbling in these ideas may earn them a reputation as a mystic and confuse family and friends who may not understand the significance of such concepts.

Archetypes & Stereotypes

These observations form a vast archive of typicalities as the Ni user matures into their worldview. Each pattern of life is epitomized in the psyche as a general rule or process, which leads quite inescapably to the formation of stereotypes at the local level and archetypes at the universal level --both of which are used to map reality by providing a sense of predictability. In the positive sense, this stereotyping tendency makes life an iconic series of interactions between previously indexed forces and entities. The Ni user will overlay their schema onto the world and see iterations of the same substances everywhere. From this vantage point, certain social or political interactions will appear to them as clockwork, a series of eventualities stemming from two or more colliding forces. The interactions in a neighborhood may be seen through the same light, as categories are applied to each class of person, and their collisions cause transformations through a sort of necessary chemistry. However, as often captured by the negative sense of the word stereotype, this can lead to errors in perception where a pattern or schema is superimposed over a situation too prematurely. A person is anticipated to be a given way due to the symbol they represent while turning out to be quite different. Moreover, at the archetypal level, the same simplification may occur where the Ni user reduces the global situation as something emergent from a conflict between the light and dark, the masculine and feminine, an interaction of four or five elements or some other schema which neglects certain subtleties and details, which may be infuriating to those who live with the Ni user as they may feel the Ni user is oversimplifying them, or worse that they are pigeonholing people into their categories --whether of culture, class, race or gender. Many may scoff at the Ni user for depending on what they feel are outdated prejudices and not seeing things at the individual level. However, the Ni user cannot ignore what larger pattern someone or something generally belongs to and will tend to incidentally synthesize life from that lens without any actual investment or commitment to any dogma or belief system.

Synchronicity & Parapsychology

Another effect often emerging from the Ni function is a belief in synchronicity. Because of how Ni registers life through a delicate tracking of "significance" --not by the rigidity of causal chains-- the Ni user will instinctively see the value in data associations that converge in theme and motif, even when the cause is unknown. As is often the case for both intuitive processes, the pattern is recognized first without needing to have the sensory points explicitly traced, and neither does the absence of a sequential explanation make the information alignments vanish. Moreover, when Ni is especially strong, seemingly disconnected layers of existence are woven together through an entangled point, compelling many Ni users to contend with the possible existence of the acausal. Certain events or datasets may be felt as crossing different planes of reality and inexorably related even when a surface examination would see no trace between them. They may be struck by compelling evidence for the existence of extra-sensory perception or remote viewing, which allows us to see through the eyes of others or predict their thoughts. For some, relationships may be intuited to exist between oneself and previous lives. Areas of the body may be associated with certain psychic energies through emotional tapping, chakras, iridology, or palmistry. Certain recurring numbers may be felt as omens of blessings or catastrophes. If these intimations persist, they can become highly suspicious and feel that certain events will shortly happen when a given number, detail, or sign suggests a strong karmic force is at play.

-Behaviors Under Stress

Conspiracy Theories

When the Ni user falls out of mental health, their suspicions degrade further into superstitions, death omens, and a persistent state of anxiety. Life becomes chaotic and unpredictable. The world will feel utterly uncertain to them, and they will be unable to see the cause of their suffering or that of society. As they struggle to intuit their situation through perceptual projection, the misfortunes they experience are not interpreted as localized occurrences but are instead epitomized as emerging from some extra-personal force looming over all things. They will start to perceive a woven network of intentions behind everything, pulling the strings of society at large. Here, we see the Ni user fabricate conspiracy theories: extraterrestrial hypotheses, occult government sects, the imminent rise of a new world order, and the like. A sense exists that something unseen is making all this happen, and for once, the Ni user loses their non-committal nature and becomes utterly fixated on certain interpretations of life, which will cause them great difficulty in their daily lives as the Ni user may be quickly ostracized from society for their bizarre premonitions. More than a few distressed Ni users throughout history have been branded as local lunatics, eventually growing morose and resentful for what they feel is the lack of foresight and idiocy of the common person.

Apocalyptic Visions

A different effect we often see in a distressed Ni user is a series of apocalyptic visions. They may experience nightmares, either when asleep or awake, vividly depicting scenes of war, destroyed buildings, massacres, and the end of civilization. Moreover, the Ni user may experience these sudden flashes with the same level of physicality with which they experience their waking life --making it difficult to discredit them as illusions. Here, we see an unconscious projection and intrusion of their polar sensory function into their mind, causing literal sensations to trigger their nervous system without an actual cause. The relationship between intuition and sensation is a two-way street, where one can seep into the other unbidden when excessive repression is at its breaking point --allowing their intuitions to unconsciously fabricate sensory experiences that are patterned after their thematic convergence. These unsettling images may cause them to feel that their visions are pending actualities. A memento mori will settle over them. Society is on the brink of collapse; everything is headed in the worst direction, and anything short of immediate correction will lead to an irreparable catastrophe.

[umesakus]

hate when i have a great concept for a theme (or anything for that matter) but the details elude me

[weirdnerdygoat]

guys... please help... I'm getting really into typology...

[painom]

what do you think diluc's mbti is?? (I've been hyperfixiated on it sorry) in his pdb he's intj which people disagree on (personally I feel like he's isfj since there's a conviction agreement that he is)

Long story short, my gut says istj, but my brain can see the value intj. Tbh, I cannot see a single shred of fe in him. That boy absolutely reeks of tert-fi. Like his whole crusade after he found out Kaeya was a spy? Peak tert fi. If he were fe, he'd see the value in the Knights of Favonius. But he can't stand them due to a personal grudge. That's fi as fi can be. He is extremely fi to the point that it blinds him.

As for why I say si over ni, I don't really see any ni in him? Nor do I see inf-se. That being said, do I see si in him? Or inf-ne? No. LOL But going based off of vibes, he comes off as istj to me.

[cognitivedoodles]

Brain Cog Volume. 1

Hey everyone! This is a little comic project I made with my cognitive functions gjinkas. I made this in a month for a comic class at my university, hope you enjoy this :D

Credit to my friend, Kiko for helping me with coloring. I'll be posting the comics in three different parts!

READ PART ONE HERE 👇

PART 1 / PART 2

Part 2 coming soon ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

[phvle]

IN(F) — Introverted Intuition supported by Feeling

Continues to work instead of seeking treatment for failing health. Sometimes has phobias. Likes to go out, to dance, knows how to tell a stor. Experiences hypochondriac neuroses, claustrophobia. Before an important event experiences strong emotions, may lose appetite. he Is blind to his own hunger. He ponders what is the point of something, the meaning, symbolical nature. "What will this do for me?", he worries about what he can do to affect others, what are people thinking about, how society, the collective, perceives him, how his friends feel about him. He often smiles, has a cheerful nature, but it is usually fake, not so sincere. Neurotic, obsessive pedantic and egoist yet soft, friendly and welcoming. Expressive, he likes to maintain a comfortable emotional ambient, he focuses on making human relationships and Keeping everyone united. A hopeless romantic, prone to stalking crushes and compulsive overthinking They fall in love, they aren't loving, they are within limerence. "Teen love" - this is a good name for it. He idealizes everything, he doesn't has clear opinions, his beliefs are dictated by the collective: he either believes or gets skeptical about love, because he usually understands love only in a specific sense - the standard sense. When he thinks about emotions, he thinks about pop. mainstream. generalized emotions. Humanity for a long time idealized and represented love as romantic or erotic; so this type suffers from this: he easily believes in doing anything in the name of love, he would do anything for his loved ones, if he ever falls in love with someone, of course. Avoids showing his true feelings, he could be crying in one moment, and then in the other, he enters in a group, a collective, and he adapts to it, he stops crying and starts smiling, "acting". Very inclined to escapism, hallucinations, delusions and religion, ideology, existentialism and politics. He often relies on external sources, academics, he doesn't know how to explain things, so he needs to talk about his sources, he shows what people think, out of fear of being wrong. Anxious about being humiliated, he has a weak selt-esteem. The romantic dreamer likes to lay on a sofa with a book, or go to the countryside to spend time amidst nature. Many manifestations are inclined to cosplay, they like to live alternatives - finds ways to avoid boredom, uses old things and people in a new way and bringing the positive future into the present and past, staying light and hopeful in spite of anxieties. Struggles with videogames and orders: he is verv trial-and-error. He mav be cold. withdrawn. asocial. timid and extremely introverted; a gloomy figure with low confidence.

He hides his insecurities. runs into situations of trust and marriage. Intense connections. Fantasizes about people, delusional imagination of being accepted, praised. They find difficulty to express what they want, often times they do not realize what they wish in life; they ask people "how do you create interest?" because they lack actual desires and passions. Individualistic in some manner. Creates music, laments his own existence, prone to atheism, agnosticism. Diligent but unfocused, non-disciplined, often loses concentration, but he is always doing something - it could even be living in his dreams. He compares himself with other people, tends to be jealous, envious, yandere. Inclination towards mysticism and superstition, beliefs in prophetic dreams and omens. He is a person who is emotionally labile and uninhibited, does not control his own emotions, some manifestations of the type make fun of people and are sarcastic. Some versions, instead of comforting people with the warmth of his soul, begins to manipulate other people and act capricious and touchy. "Everything is wrong" and "things didn't turn out to be as desired". Many times expresses a desire to be hugged, to be protected and helped, he is weak and thinks of himself as someone "not prepared", he worries and worries. Some people of this type spend their time alone, don't have many friends (may not even have friends. He likes to dive himself in meditation. It is important to understand everything. Therefore, if you ask him about the difficult things sometimes, you can hear the answer that he understands them (only a very peculiar). It is important that everyone knew him as well. If understanding is impossible, that human self-esteem drops, so it does not like to admit that something is not understood. It is important to praise the consistency, likes to boast that he was up to something thought of himself. Often he loves to refer to some everyday stories, because nobody will not even think to check their authenticity, in general likes to refer to someone as a way to protect their reasoning. He is a person prone more to reflection than action. "If I understand correctly, then I am a good person". The fear of turning out to be incompetent greatly narrows down the areas in which the person dares to demonstrate or apply their knowledge. This type wants to solve his problems by collecting objective data. It is necessary to consult the experts, to obtain the data and results of studies, to receive objectively reliable new information. "Any unpleasant sensation or experience it's best to endure and wait over, than to seek how to improve one's state or move to another place that offers better conditions."

[baltharino]

[linkneol091]

So recently I’ve found out that I was mystyped again and that my true mbti is estp ( like functions just PERFECTLY fit with everything, and yes I’m not really extroverted) which means

That I share the same mbti type with these kings