Intuition and Sensing, Left and Right Brain (dichotomies I hate)
So I am (slowly) working on a MBTI-related thing for my Disney post series and so am reminded once again how much I dislike the sensing vs. intuition dichotomy, so here's a rant about it. (This post is public because I'll probably be linking it when I actually post my Disney MBTI thing.)
First off, my biggest issue with intuition is trying to understand what it even means. The intuition we're talking about here is this one:
the ability to acquire knowledge without inference and/or the use of reason [...] perception via the unconscious
This notion of intuition is built on the theory of the conscious and the unconscious that was popularized by Freud. As opposed to sensing which uses the five senses (hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch) and facts + inference, intuition is a sixth sense or some kind of internal source of information that isn't necessarily grounded in the external world. Orrrr... intuition means this:
Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).
Or wait, maybe it means this:
Do you pay more attention to information that comes in through your five senses (Sensing), or do you pay more attention to the patterns and possibilities that you see in the information you receive (Intuition)?
Wait, no, maybe it means this:
Paying the most attention to impressions or the meaning and patterns of the information I get. I would rather learn by thinking a problem through than by hands-on experience. I’m interested in new things and what might be possible, so that I think more about the future than the past. I like to work with symbols or abstract theories, even if I don’t know how I will use them. I remember events more as an impression of what it was like than as actual facts or details of what happened.
(All taken from the Myer-Briggs Foundation website)
To me at least? THOSE ARE ALL DIFFERENT THINGS.
I also looked up a summary of Carl Jung's writing on intuition (which is where the MBTI types come from), but it still has the same issue:
Intuition is a way of comprehending perceptions in terms of possibilities, past experience, future goals, and unconscious processes. Intuition asks the question "What might happen, what is possible?" The implications of experience are more important to intuitives than the actual experience itself. Strongly intuitive people add meaning to their perceptions so rapidly that they often cannot separate their interpretations from the raw sensory data. Intuitives integrate new information quickly, automatically relating past experience and relevant information to immediate experience. Because it often includes unconscious material, intuitive thinking appears to proceed by leaps and bounds.
Let's make a list of these things, and try to figure out how they are correlated:
1) Intuition / sixth sense / internal, unconscious wellspring of information (as opposed to external source)
2) Seeing patterns (as opposed to... um... not seeing patterns?)
3) Adding meaning immediately (as opposed to separating observations from interpretations)
4) Seeing possibilities (imagination) (as opposed to dealing with what's real)
5) Intaking information as impressions (as opposed to remembering specific details)
6) Learning theoretically (as opposed to hands-on)
7) Concerned with the future (as opposed to the present/past)
8) Liking symbols and abstract theories (as opposed to... hating symbols and theories?)
I can kiiind of see how (1) and (4) are linked. I think it's a perversion of the original definition of intuition but you could argue that imagination and creation of things-not-in-existence need an internal source of information generation, so therefore, intuition. It's a stretch, but let's just say those are the same thing -- being intuitive means you like possibilities / new things / imagination. This links it with (7) as well because the future falls under the umbrella of "things not currently observable with your five senses" (although we've twisted the original meaning of intuition as given above). Another stretch.
I can also see how (3) and (5) are linked. Adding meaning immediately does seem like it would be connected with difficulty remembering specific details because you jumped immediately from observation to impression, rather than collecting pure information for later analysis.
And I can see how (6) and (8) are linked. These mean that you are a person who doesn't necessarily have to learn by doing. You can do thought experiments or whatever.
However, what does 1/4/7 have to do with 3/5? Being imaginative has nothing to do with whether you intake things as impressions. What does 3/5 have to do with 6/8 other than that they deal with abstract rather than concrete thinking? How you intake information doesn't have anything to do with how hands-on you have to be when learning. What does 6/8 have to do with 1/4/7? Someone can like symbolic/theoretical thinking and yet not be focused on the future or the realm of possibility. And why is 2 even listed here at all? Finding patterns has no relation to any of these unless you mean you find patterns unconsciously.
If I were to do a parody of this dichotomy, I would come up with something like, "Hey, most people can be divided into two types -- active and idle. Active people like physical activity, are proactive, can be confrontational and a bit high-strung. Idle people tend to like quiet reflective activities such as reading, tend to be more passive go-with-the-flow types, dislike confrontation and are laidback." You'd probably be like, "WTF how are those groups of traits at all related."
That is how I feel about the S vs. N dichotomy. The definition is murky and tries to encompass too much. If you were trying to describe S vs. N succinctly, I guess you could say "facts vs. ideas", which is vague, but I think, worse than that, it's a rather weird dichotomy because of course both are important and I think it's rare to find anyone who strongly neglects one in favor of the other.
Which leads me into my next issue with S vs. N, which is that the rhetoric involved in describing the whole sensing vs. intuition dichotomy often resembles that of left brain vs. right brain descriptions, which I very much dislike, mostly because they're a load of BS.
Experiments HAVE discovered that the left brain is clearly involved with language and is also associated with mathematical calculation and fact recall, while the right brain is involved with visio-spatial perception, facial recognition, and prosodic parts of language. Cool.
But somehow this has warped in popular perception into a whole slew of left brain/right brain differences and, since most of the population is right-handed (left brain dominant), books about how we need to develop our "creative right brains" more for increased success in our lives. You can often find lists like this (taken from this page):
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONSRIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONSuses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safeuses feeling
"big picture" oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking
As a left-handed person that is extremely detail-oriented and strong in math/science, much more than most right-handed people I know, I find this list just sort of ludicrous. The notion that I'm somehow more creative than left-brain-dominant people... hahaha NO. It just doesn't ring true to me at all. And again, I'm not understanding the connection between being a future-thinker and, for example, dealing with symbols and images or liking philosophy. HOW ARE THESE CORRELATED.
Notice just how many of the above dichotomies are reflected in the intuition list above. (The only exception is that (2) got listed under the left brain section, which makes sense.) This is why I hate S vs. N -- it reminds me of this new age-y notion that discipline is the enemy of creativity, facts oppress imagination, hard science is at war with soft science and the arts, we could solve so many problems by thinking outside the box, be a rebel, rise up against the system! Or something like that. Not that that that stuff isn't true (for example, highly restrictive environments CAN quash creativity), but that I personally think all those "opposites" are actually things where you can be good at BOTH individually and one doesn't hinder/inhibit the other. You need discipline AND creativity, facts AND imagination, science AND art. Or well, if you prefer one over the other, that's fine too, but it doesn't make the other part your enemy.
That's why I think S vs. N is a false dichotomy (even more false than the other ones). It just doesn't match up at all to how I view/categorize the world. (Although I may be biased and trying to apply my own personal worldview to the general world.)
Changing the topic slightly, I also want to touch on another thing that bothers me about the idea of "intuition" that also relates tangentially to left brain/right brain differences. I just find the whole idea of intuition old-fashioned, the reason being -- I was reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and I came across this:
"Oh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes!" she cried, glancing from one to the other of us, and finally, with a woman’s quick intuition, fastening upon my companion
And then later I was reading Peter Pan, and I came across this:
In his [Hook's] dark nature there was a touch of the feminine, as in all the great pirates, and it sometimes gave him intuitions. Suddenly he tried the guessing game.
I just... okay, evidently the idea of female intuition was a Thing? Still is a thing, actually, although less common of a notion as it was in the early 1900s, I'm guessing. To explain what's going on in the quotes, for the first one, the woman was meeting Holmes and Watson for the first time and was able to correctly guess which of them was Sherlock. In essence, she arrives at an answer through a hunch unexplainable by logical inference. Same with Hook -- even while being tricked by Peter Pan, he suddenly is inspired to do a guessing game, which ends up turning the tables on Pan, and this inspiration is ascribed to a "touch of the feminine" in his nature.
And nowadays, you can find spiritual, new age-y sites about embracing your natural female intuition and using your empathic powers or whatnot. The notion of a "woman's intuition" encompasses both their ability to "just know" things they shouldn't be able to know just from looking/hearing/using five senses and also their ability to read people and pick up on subtle emotional cues (empathy). I find both of these ascriptions dated and sexist. The first because the idea that women believe or do things that have no logical or physical basis is only a short hop away from the historical image of women as irrational beings; the second because the idea of women being naturally empathic and more in tune with emotions is also not that far away from the historical image of women as driven by emotion (as opposed to reason). (See also: the T vs. F dichotomy of MBTI.) (This is an article I found that goes more into this.)
And then recently, I saw this Tumblr post that sets up this dichotomy between male and female: "Men are programmed to think logically and mathematically. Where as women are programmed to think more emotionally and socially."
Well, that doesn't have anything to do with intuition (still T vs. F territory here) but it IS doing the same thing as the right brain/left brain things, which is perverting neuroscience in order to set up this dichotomy that math and logic are OPPOSITE of emotion and socialness, even if those two aptitudes may be completely unrelated and coincidental.
And like... this issue goes deeper. Well, at least for me, because I have an interest in astrology and tarot, both of which (maybe because they're also tied to the new age philosophy?) use the exact same language as S vs. N and also connect femininity with intuition, the unconscious, emotions, etc.
For example, in astrology you have the water signs, which are associated with emotion, empathy, and sensitivity, and often have words like intuitive, emotional, imaginative, nurturing, secretive, and dreamy applied to them. They make up part of the negative/introvert/feminine half of the zodiac along with earth signs (which actually might be the closest to the idea of "sensing" -- being practical and materialistic (i.e. involved with the "real world")... so that kind of undermines my argument, but stick with me here).
Cancer is ruled by the moon, seen as emotional and moody (like the moon I guess -- more on moon connections later), sensitive to the feelings of others, and deeply connected to their family. Scorpio is seen as secretive and mysterious, with the uncanny ability to read people (intuition). And then Pisces is... well... the right half of the brain table above (minus the last two items). They're seen as super intuitive, having an almost psychic connection with the world as a whole.
As for Tarot, there's the High Priestess who represents:
staying nonactive: withdrawing from involvement, allowing events to proceed without intervention, being receptive to influence, becoming calm, being passive, waiting patiently
accessing the unconscious: using your intuition, seeking guidance from within, trusting your inner voice, opening to dreams and the imagination, being aware of a larger reality
seeing the potential: understanding the possibilities, opening to what could be, seeing your hidden talents, allowing development, letting what is there flower
sensing the mystery: looking beyond the obvious, approaching a closed off area, opening to the unknown, remembering something important, sensing the secret and hidden, seeking what is concealed, acknowledging the Shadow
[...]
The High Priestess is the guardian of the unconscious. She sits in front of the thin veil of unawareness which is all that separates us from our inner landscape. She contains within herself the secrets of these realms and offers us the silent invitation, "Be still and know that I am God."
The High Priestess is the feminine principle that balances the masculine force of the Magician. The feminine archetype in the tarot is split between the High Priestess and the Empress. The High Priestess is the mysterious unknown that women often represent, especially in cultures that focus on the tangible and known. The Empress represents woman's role as the crucible of life. (source; see also: 1, 2, 3)
And then similar language pops up when you compare the Sun and Moon cards:
With Pisces as its ruling sign, the Moon is all about visions and illusions, madness, genius and poetry. At its darkest this can be a very scary card warning the querent of hidden enemies, mental illness, alcoholic blackouts or a bad drug trip. At its very best, however, the Moon is a card of genius, of mental breakthroughs, astonishing creativity, powerful magic, and intuition.
The querent who gets this card should be warned that they may be going through a time of emotional and mental trial, a time when they'll do things that seem to make sense to them, yet when they come out of it they'll wonder, "Why did I do that? It makes no sense!" Their mind will be playing tricks on them, and so this is not a good time for making decisions that require rational thought and a clear head.
The Sun is ruled by...the Sun, of course and as the Moon was your inner darkness, the wild, untamed, unconscious part of you, the Sun is your inner light, civilized and rational, yang to yin, Apollo to Diana.
The Sun promises the querent their day in the sun. Glory, triumph, simple pleasures and truths. As the moon symbolized inspiration from dreams, this card symbolizes discoveries made wide awake. This is science and math, beautifully constructed music, carefully reasoned philosophy. It is a card of intellect and youthful energy. (source)
As the moon symbolized inspiration from dreams, this card symbolizes discoveries made wide awake. This is science and math, beautifully constructed music, carefully reasoned philosophy.
Oh hey there, my old nemesis, sensing vs. intuition, consciousness vs. unconsciousness, science/math vs. poetry.
The idea of the moon for some reason being tied to mystery, the unconscious, the female, intuition, dreams, madness and lunacy (lack of reason)... While those dichotomies are very beautiful and poetic, they are also really old-fashioned and still disturbingly pervasive. They are STILL being used to promote the idea that women are "naturally worse" at math and science which is just. not. true.
And finally, my last issue with "intuition" is that I have trouble thinking of it as a trait because, well... the way we use intuition frequently is this: "develop an intuition for". I think people are more intuitive in fields they are experienced in/good at and not intuitive in fields they lack experience in, which makes the whole idea of intuition-as-personality-trait kind of nonsensical, because it's not really a personality, it's more like a skill. If we move a bit away from the more sixth sense/ESP-sounding parts of intuition (which I don't believe in, but you might), the Jung-based definition at the top basically says that intuition is when you rapidly assign meaning using past experience, with processes that are often unconscious. This makes sense. When you're really experienced in something, you can tell when something "just looks wrong" or "looks right" even before you can consciously explain what gave you that feeling. So asking if you're an intuitive person or a sensing person is analogous to asking whether you're good at doing things or bad at doing things. For which the answer is: "Well, what things do you mean?"
For example, look at this other way that intuition is used in Sherlock Holmes:
Then it was that the lust of the chase would suddenly come upon him [Sherlock], and that his brilliant reasoning power would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that of other mortals.
Sherlock Holmes is a highly detailed person, a highly logical person, who relies on his five senses and inference to arrive at all of his conclusions. He is sensing with a capital S. But his powers "rise to the level of intuition" because of expertise.
What's the difference between him and an intuitive person? Only that Sherlock can still explain his reasonings after the fact, maybe? (i.e. He CAN separate his interpretations from his initial observations.) Okay well, I suppose that makes sense. In that case, maybe this IS a cognitive difference/personality trait. I guess what MBTI is doing here is separating people who tend to explain their conclusions with "Well because X, Y, and Z" (because they are working directly off of sensory data) from the people who tend to explain their conclusions with "Well because... because!" (because they've already replaced sensory data with conclusion in their mind). But what does that difference have to do with imagination, creativity, future thinking, or abstract thinking? I will never know.
Oh and a Google search for "MBTI Sherlock Holmes" tells me that most of the Internet seems to think Sherlock is an N. BWAHAHAHAHAHA. MBTI TRAITS, YOU ARE POORLY DEFINED AND USELESS. USELESS, I SAY!!
Sorry for the poor organization of this post. I'm sure I could make it flow more logically if I took the time to rewrite it, but I've already spent way too much time on this, so...
First off, my biggest issue with intuition is trying to understand what it even means. The intuition we're talking about here is this one:
the ability to acquire knowledge without inference and/or the use of reason [...] perception via the unconscious
This notion of intuition is built on the theory of the conscious and the unconscious that was popularized by Freud. As opposed to sensing which uses the five senses (hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch) and facts + inference, intuition is a sixth sense or some kind of internal source of information that isn't necessarily grounded in the external world. Orrrr... intuition means this:
Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).
Or wait, maybe it means this:
Do you pay more attention to information that comes in through your five senses (Sensing), or do you pay more attention to the patterns and possibilities that you see in the information you receive (Intuition)?
Wait, no, maybe it means this:
Paying the most attention to impressions or the meaning and patterns of the information I get. I would rather learn by thinking a problem through than by hands-on experience. I’m interested in new things and what might be possible, so that I think more about the future than the past. I like to work with symbols or abstract theories, even if I don’t know how I will use them. I remember events more as an impression of what it was like than as actual facts or details of what happened.
(All taken from the Myer-Briggs Foundation website)
To me at least? THOSE ARE ALL DIFFERENT THINGS.
I also looked up a summary of Carl Jung's writing on intuition (which is where the MBTI types come from), but it still has the same issue:
Intuition is a way of comprehending perceptions in terms of possibilities, past experience, future goals, and unconscious processes. Intuition asks the question "What might happen, what is possible?" The implications of experience are more important to intuitives than the actual experience itself. Strongly intuitive people add meaning to their perceptions so rapidly that they often cannot separate their interpretations from the raw sensory data. Intuitives integrate new information quickly, automatically relating past experience and relevant information to immediate experience. Because it often includes unconscious material, intuitive thinking appears to proceed by leaps and bounds.
Let's make a list of these things, and try to figure out how they are correlated:
1) Intuition / sixth sense / internal, unconscious wellspring of information (as opposed to external source)
2) Seeing patterns (as opposed to... um... not seeing patterns?)
3) Adding meaning immediately (as opposed to separating observations from interpretations)
4) Seeing possibilities (imagination) (as opposed to dealing with what's real)
5) Intaking information as impressions (as opposed to remembering specific details)
6) Learning theoretically (as opposed to hands-on)
7) Concerned with the future (as opposed to the present/past)
8) Liking symbols and abstract theories (as opposed to... hating symbols and theories?)
I can kiiind of see how (1) and (4) are linked. I think it's a perversion of the original definition of intuition but you could argue that imagination and creation of things-not-in-existence need an internal source of information generation, so therefore, intuition. It's a stretch, but let's just say those are the same thing -- being intuitive means you like possibilities / new things / imagination. This links it with (7) as well because the future falls under the umbrella of "things not currently observable with your five senses" (although we've twisted the original meaning of intuition as given above). Another stretch.
I can also see how (3) and (5) are linked. Adding meaning immediately does seem like it would be connected with difficulty remembering specific details because you jumped immediately from observation to impression, rather than collecting pure information for later analysis.
And I can see how (6) and (8) are linked. These mean that you are a person who doesn't necessarily have to learn by doing. You can do thought experiments or whatever.
However, what does 1/4/7 have to do with 3/5? Being imaginative has nothing to do with whether you intake things as impressions. What does 3/5 have to do with 6/8 other than that they deal with abstract rather than concrete thinking? How you intake information doesn't have anything to do with how hands-on you have to be when learning. What does 6/8 have to do with 1/4/7? Someone can like symbolic/theoretical thinking and yet not be focused on the future or the realm of possibility. And why is 2 even listed here at all? Finding patterns has no relation to any of these unless you mean you find patterns unconsciously.
If I were to do a parody of this dichotomy, I would come up with something like, "Hey, most people can be divided into two types -- active and idle. Active people like physical activity, are proactive, can be confrontational and a bit high-strung. Idle people tend to like quiet reflective activities such as reading, tend to be more passive go-with-the-flow types, dislike confrontation and are laidback." You'd probably be like, "WTF how are those groups of traits at all related."
That is how I feel about the S vs. N dichotomy. The definition is murky and tries to encompass too much. If you were trying to describe S vs. N succinctly, I guess you could say "facts vs. ideas", which is vague, but I think, worse than that, it's a rather weird dichotomy because of course both are important and I think it's rare to find anyone who strongly neglects one in favor of the other.
Which leads me into my next issue with S vs. N, which is that the rhetoric involved in describing the whole sensing vs. intuition dichotomy often resembles that of left brain vs. right brain descriptions, which I very much dislike, mostly because they're a load of BS.
Experiments HAVE discovered that the left brain is clearly involved with language and is also associated with mathematical calculation and fact recall, while the right brain is involved with visio-spatial perception, facial recognition, and prosodic parts of language. Cool.
But somehow this has warped in popular perception into a whole slew of left brain/right brain differences and, since most of the population is right-handed (left brain dominant), books about how we need to develop our "creative right brains" more for increased success in our lives. You can often find lists like this (taken from this page):
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONSRIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONSuses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safeuses feeling
"big picture" oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking
As a left-handed person that is extremely detail-oriented and strong in math/science, much more than most right-handed people I know, I find this list just sort of ludicrous. The notion that I'm somehow more creative than left-brain-dominant people... hahaha NO. It just doesn't ring true to me at all. And again, I'm not understanding the connection between being a future-thinker and, for example, dealing with symbols and images or liking philosophy. HOW ARE THESE CORRELATED.
Notice just how many of the above dichotomies are reflected in the intuition list above. (The only exception is that (2) got listed under the left brain section, which makes sense.) This is why I hate S vs. N -- it reminds me of this new age-y notion that discipline is the enemy of creativity, facts oppress imagination, hard science is at war with soft science and the arts, we could solve so many problems by thinking outside the box, be a rebel, rise up against the system! Or something like that. Not that that that stuff isn't true (for example, highly restrictive environments CAN quash creativity), but that I personally think all those "opposites" are actually things where you can be good at BOTH individually and one doesn't hinder/inhibit the other. You need discipline AND creativity, facts AND imagination, science AND art. Or well, if you prefer one over the other, that's fine too, but it doesn't make the other part your enemy.
That's why I think S vs. N is a false dichotomy (even more false than the other ones). It just doesn't match up at all to how I view/categorize the world. (Although I may be biased and trying to apply my own personal worldview to the general world.)
Changing the topic slightly, I also want to touch on another thing that bothers me about the idea of "intuition" that also relates tangentially to left brain/right brain differences. I just find the whole idea of intuition old-fashioned, the reason being -- I was reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and I came across this:
"Oh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes!" she cried, glancing from one to the other of us, and finally, with a woman’s quick intuition, fastening upon my companion
And then later I was reading Peter Pan, and I came across this:
In his [Hook's] dark nature there was a touch of the feminine, as in all the great pirates, and it sometimes gave him intuitions. Suddenly he tried the guessing game.
I just... okay, evidently the idea of female intuition was a Thing? Still is a thing, actually, although less common of a notion as it was in the early 1900s, I'm guessing. To explain what's going on in the quotes, for the first one, the woman was meeting Holmes and Watson for the first time and was able to correctly guess which of them was Sherlock. In essence, she arrives at an answer through a hunch unexplainable by logical inference. Same with Hook -- even while being tricked by Peter Pan, he suddenly is inspired to do a guessing game, which ends up turning the tables on Pan, and this inspiration is ascribed to a "touch of the feminine" in his nature.
And nowadays, you can find spiritual, new age-y sites about embracing your natural female intuition and using your empathic powers or whatnot. The notion of a "woman's intuition" encompasses both their ability to "just know" things they shouldn't be able to know just from looking/hearing/using five senses and also their ability to read people and pick up on subtle emotional cues (empathy). I find both of these ascriptions dated and sexist. The first because the idea that women believe or do things that have no logical or physical basis is only a short hop away from the historical image of women as irrational beings; the second because the idea of women being naturally empathic and more in tune with emotions is also not that far away from the historical image of women as driven by emotion (as opposed to reason). (See also: the T vs. F dichotomy of MBTI.) (This is an article I found that goes more into this.)
And then recently, I saw this Tumblr post that sets up this dichotomy between male and female: "Men are programmed to think logically and mathematically. Where as women are programmed to think more emotionally and socially."
Well, that doesn't have anything to do with intuition (still T vs. F territory here) but it IS doing the same thing as the right brain/left brain things, which is perverting neuroscience in order to set up this dichotomy that math and logic are OPPOSITE of emotion and socialness, even if those two aptitudes may be completely unrelated and coincidental.
And like... this issue goes deeper. Well, at least for me, because I have an interest in astrology and tarot, both of which (maybe because they're also tied to the new age philosophy?) use the exact same language as S vs. N and also connect femininity with intuition, the unconscious, emotions, etc.
For example, in astrology you have the water signs, which are associated with emotion, empathy, and sensitivity, and often have words like intuitive, emotional, imaginative, nurturing, secretive, and dreamy applied to them. They make up part of the negative/introvert/feminine half of the zodiac along with earth signs (which actually might be the closest to the idea of "sensing" -- being practical and materialistic (i.e. involved with the "real world")... so that kind of undermines my argument, but stick with me here).
Cancer is ruled by the moon, seen as emotional and moody (like the moon I guess -- more on moon connections later), sensitive to the feelings of others, and deeply connected to their family. Scorpio is seen as secretive and mysterious, with the uncanny ability to read people (intuition). And then Pisces is... well... the right half of the brain table above (minus the last two items). They're seen as super intuitive, having an almost psychic connection with the world as a whole.
As for Tarot, there's the High Priestess who represents:
staying nonactive: withdrawing from involvement, allowing events to proceed without intervention, being receptive to influence, becoming calm, being passive, waiting patiently
accessing the unconscious: using your intuition, seeking guidance from within, trusting your inner voice, opening to dreams and the imagination, being aware of a larger reality
seeing the potential: understanding the possibilities, opening to what could be, seeing your hidden talents, allowing development, letting what is there flower
sensing the mystery: looking beyond the obvious, approaching a closed off area, opening to the unknown, remembering something important, sensing the secret and hidden, seeking what is concealed, acknowledging the Shadow
[...]
The High Priestess is the guardian of the unconscious. She sits in front of the thin veil of unawareness which is all that separates us from our inner landscape. She contains within herself the secrets of these realms and offers us the silent invitation, "Be still and know that I am God."
The High Priestess is the feminine principle that balances the masculine force of the Magician. The feminine archetype in the tarot is split between the High Priestess and the Empress. The High Priestess is the mysterious unknown that women often represent, especially in cultures that focus on the tangible and known. The Empress represents woman's role as the crucible of life. (source; see also: 1, 2, 3)
And then similar language pops up when you compare the Sun and Moon cards:
With Pisces as its ruling sign, the Moon is all about visions and illusions, madness, genius and poetry. At its darkest this can be a very scary card warning the querent of hidden enemies, mental illness, alcoholic blackouts or a bad drug trip. At its very best, however, the Moon is a card of genius, of mental breakthroughs, astonishing creativity, powerful magic, and intuition.
The querent who gets this card should be warned that they may be going through a time of emotional and mental trial, a time when they'll do things that seem to make sense to them, yet when they come out of it they'll wonder, "Why did I do that? It makes no sense!" Their mind will be playing tricks on them, and so this is not a good time for making decisions that require rational thought and a clear head.
The Sun is ruled by...the Sun, of course and as the Moon was your inner darkness, the wild, untamed, unconscious part of you, the Sun is your inner light, civilized and rational, yang to yin, Apollo to Diana.
The Sun promises the querent their day in the sun. Glory, triumph, simple pleasures and truths. As the moon symbolized inspiration from dreams, this card symbolizes discoveries made wide awake. This is science and math, beautifully constructed music, carefully reasoned philosophy. It is a card of intellect and youthful energy. (source)
As the moon symbolized inspiration from dreams, this card symbolizes discoveries made wide awake. This is science and math, beautifully constructed music, carefully reasoned philosophy.
Oh hey there, my old nemesis, sensing vs. intuition, consciousness vs. unconsciousness, science/math vs. poetry.
The idea of the moon for some reason being tied to mystery, the unconscious, the female, intuition, dreams, madness and lunacy (lack of reason)... While those dichotomies are very beautiful and poetic, they are also really old-fashioned and still disturbingly pervasive. They are STILL being used to promote the idea that women are "naturally worse" at math and science which is just. not. true.
And finally, my last issue with "intuition" is that I have trouble thinking of it as a trait because, well... the way we use intuition frequently is this: "develop an intuition for". I think people are more intuitive in fields they are experienced in/good at and not intuitive in fields they lack experience in, which makes the whole idea of intuition-as-personality-trait kind of nonsensical, because it's not really a personality, it's more like a skill. If we move a bit away from the more sixth sense/ESP-sounding parts of intuition (which I don't believe in, but you might), the Jung-based definition at the top basically says that intuition is when you rapidly assign meaning using past experience, with processes that are often unconscious. This makes sense. When you're really experienced in something, you can tell when something "just looks wrong" or "looks right" even before you can consciously explain what gave you that feeling. So asking if you're an intuitive person or a sensing person is analogous to asking whether you're good at doing things or bad at doing things. For which the answer is: "Well, what things do you mean?"
For example, look at this other way that intuition is used in Sherlock Holmes:
Then it was that the lust of the chase would suddenly come upon him [Sherlock], and that his brilliant reasoning power would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that of other mortals.
Sherlock Holmes is a highly detailed person, a highly logical person, who relies on his five senses and inference to arrive at all of his conclusions. He is sensing with a capital S. But his powers "rise to the level of intuition" because of expertise.
What's the difference between him and an intuitive person? Only that Sherlock can still explain his reasonings after the fact, maybe? (i.e. He CAN separate his interpretations from his initial observations.) Okay well, I suppose that makes sense. In that case, maybe this IS a cognitive difference/personality trait. I guess what MBTI is doing here is separating people who tend to explain their conclusions with "Well because X, Y, and Z" (because they are working directly off of sensory data) from the people who tend to explain their conclusions with "Well because... because!" (because they've already replaced sensory data with conclusion in their mind). But what does that difference have to do with imagination, creativity, future thinking, or abstract thinking? I will never know.
Oh and a Google search for "MBTI Sherlock Holmes" tells me that most of the Internet seems to think Sherlock is an N. BWAHAHAHAHAHA. MBTI TRAITS, YOU ARE POORLY DEFINED AND USELESS. USELESS, I SAY!!
Sorry for the poor organization of this post. I'm sure I could make it flow more logically if I took the time to rewrite it, but I've already spent way too much time on this, so...