Some Clusters of Scientific Thinking Tending Toward Intuition of Possibilities (Ne)

1) Broad Curiosity Toward Everything New and Incomprehensible

Property: Broad curiosity toward everything new and incomprehensible

Number of questions: 27

N responses: 46378

Numbers in the type profile - deviations of arithmetic means from the population mean in fractions of a standard deviation.

1. I am strongly attracted and excited by any mystery and novelty.
2. A hidden possibility, mystery, and novelty are more interesting to me than comfort.
3. A world in which everything is known and there is nothing to learn or unravel would be more frightening to me than being a paralytic confined to a chair.
4. Curiosity is my main gift.
5. I like receiving an excess of information so that I can explore it with my imagination.
6. My imagination constantly wants something unusual and often deliberately seeks out all kinds of paradoxes.
7. I am strongly attracted to everything new, unfamiliar, and unknown.
8. When I encounter something new and unusual, I always linger on it and enjoy grappling with its secrets until I have studied and understood them: during that time I am prepared to forget about food and all kinds of other goals and tasks.
9. I strive to go where no human foot has trodden.
10. I strive to go where there are hidden possibilities.
11. If I cannot find stimulating food for my curiosity, I lapse into drowsiness, dozing, and hibernation.
12. I am more curious and inquisitive than most other people.
13. I am more curious than others - for me, an excess of information to study and comprehend is always better than a shortage of it.
14. Everything I say is always interesting, and for me the principle of interest always takes precedence over usefulness.
15. I am one of those who are drawn to unexplored regions and new lands.
16. I often think about various mysteries of nature.
17. Throughout my life I have always been, and remain, interested in many different things from very different fields of knowledge that are in no way connected with one another.
18. Questions of the origin of the universe and life, evolution, historical development, and the future prospects of civilization preoccupy me more than other questions.
19. “Wild” ideas that run counter to the experience of academic science should be encouraged and welcomed in every possible way.
20. Unlike my peers, I have more curiosity and more “childlike” perception.
21. I am often curious about subjects that are completely unrelated to my “long-running” interests.
22. I have a very strongly developed research instinct.
23. Among the boys and girls in my class, I was one of the two or three most inquisitive.
24. I would not begrudge spending a couple of days getting to the bottom of why a downpour begins specifically after a lightning strike.

25. If a job is poorly paid, I know in advance that it will not interest me.
26. I am very conservative in the sphere of my interests; it is rather difficult to arouse my interest in some novelty unfamiliar to me.
27. Satisfying a real need is more important to me than satisfying curiosity.

Why is curiosity important in science? It is probably unnecessary to explain this. It is worth noting only that an excessive surplus of curiosity toward the new is also harmful to science. This is the case when yet another new stimulus can easily distract from the previous one, displace it, and extinguish the previous interest. This is harmful in science, because professional scientists are not little birds that are allowed to flit easily from branch to branch. For this reason, ILEs with an intensified program function (ILEs of the terminal subtype) are also not particularly frequent guests in science.

2) Ecstatic Experiences from the Frequently Arising Sensation of Discovery, Revelation

Property: Ecstatic experiences from the frequently arising sensation of discovery, revelation

Number of questions: 5

N responses: 14847

Numbers in the type profile - deviations of arithmetic means from the population mean in fractions of a standard deviation.

1. Investigating something, even something partly familiar, always captivates me with joy and pleasant sensations.
2. I often experience ecstasy from the sensation of learning something fundamentally new.
3. I often experience inspiration from the feeling that I have made a sudden discovery for myself, grasped some new, central, and very important thought.
4. I often experience inspiration from a feeling of discovery, of comprehending something important.
5. Every week, or even every day, several times I have the feeling that I have suddenly discovered something worthwhile and useful.

What purpose do experiences of ecstasy from the feeling of approaching a discovery and from the sensation of a “revelation” breaking outward serve? This is a dopamine reinforcement mechanism that provides and sustains interest in engaging in science.

3) Ability to Quickly Identify Common, Unifying Features in a Series of Phenomena, Find Common Mechanisms in Them, and Identify a Common Typical Core (Through Alternation of Structural Analysis with Associative Search and Drawing Parallels)

Property: Ability to quickly identify common, unifying features in a series of phenomena and find their common typical core

Number of questions: 13

N responses: 45586

Numbers in the type profile - deviations of arithmetic means from the population mean in fractions of a standard deviation.

1. I can easily discern similar features in phenomena of different levels.
2. I regard the discovery of universal, time-independent laws as my task.
3. I constantly have a strong thirst for knowledge of deep laws and objective root causes.
4. I easily grasp what is most important in the inner essence of any object.
5. I like and am able to trace identical features in phenomena from different domains.
6. My imagination constantly strips away from mentally examined objects and phenomena everything except a single feature common to all these phenomena, and from this commonality new ideas, hypotheses, and discoveries then arise in me.
7. I find the main and general regularities in what is happening faster than others do.
8. I easily and often generate hypotheses and general suppositions on the basis of particular observations.
9. Immediately, without additional reflection, I grasp the holistic interrelationship among words, facts, and different objects.
10. I like to find and identify something typical and common in people and objects that makes these people or objects similar.
11. My favorite activity is penetrating the unchanging essence of things and phenomena.
12. At school I liked detecting interrelationships between facts so that one thing could easily be recalled and derived through another, while the need to memorize by rote poorly connected facts and dates always irritated me greatly.

13. I tend to see not society as a whole, but specific people; not a forest, but individual trees; not a generalizing theory, but concrete facts.

Without this property, there is nothing at all to do in science (if we are talking about scientists rather than support staff).

As we can see from the attached table for this last property, the ability to see commonality between objects or phenomena depends on two functions: Ti and Ne. Conversely, strengthened Fi and Si (and, to some extent, Fe together with Se) hinder this ability. Therefore, people with “fragmented thinking” (unable to see the forest for the trees and therefore believing that each tree is unique and stands on its own) – most often, these are representatives of the Socials club. Although it occasionally happens (as can also be seen from the table) that individual representatives of SLI, LSE, and IEI suffer from the same affliction.

There are many such examples, including among “professional socionists.” Consider, for example, the head of one well-known commercial organization engaged in “Michurinist socionics” (his program function is Si, he is far removed from Ti, and in everyday life he may very well be a courteous and exceptionally pleasant person). We will not give his surname, but many will apparently guess whom we mean. To this day, in his statements he systematically rejects the commonality between the factors of the “Big Five” and the principal socionic traits, readily ignoring the indisputable fact (which has repeatedly been demonstrated to him in discussions by many different people) that they are built on the same properties and even, specifically, on diagnostic questionnaire items that are identical in meaning. For commercial reasons, it is more convenient for him this way – to keep socionics isolated from mainstream science, while thinking that is “fragmented” because of weak Ti and Ne (or, more precisely, locally isolated thinking) allows him to do this quite sincerely as well, without being particularly disingenuous.

V. L. Talanov