When I was tested in highschool, I was INTP. This fits in nicely with my adult vocation as an engineer. I have since learned the value of personal experiences and of valuable colleagues. While the number of people I will willfully associate with is usually countable on one hand, i value their input highly, and tend to select people who's interests and abilities either rival or partially overlap my own, but are never identical to. As such, I also exhibit many features of ISTJ. (My best friend lives in another state, but is also the "all knowing janitor" archetype. Including being the janitor. He is more the natural history buff and cloistered artist, where I am the science, technology, and sociology/anthropology buff and shut-in tinkerer. Our areas of interest overlap in unusual ways, such as his absolute love of cosmology and astronomy overlapping with my engineering and tech love. (lets face it. Rockets are awesome.) Recently, having been exposed to "City hall humans" in his role as the all knowing janitor, we have had some very interesting discussions about the mental processes and external behaviors of people who gravitate toward positions of power, and rely on group dynamics to attain and retain status. He approaches it from an animal behavior point of view, favoring his natural history strengths, and I approach it from the anthropological and logically deconstructive psychological point of view. I favor INTP, he favors ISTJ.)
It is very difficult to place me on the Si and Ti spectrum, since my internal cognition uses both fairly equally. I remember everything. Not just what my senses recorded, but also what I was thinking, and how I was relating the thoughts with the senses at the time of the remembered events. I remember absurd minutia about past events, including what the topic of casual conversation was, what everyone was wearing including color and style, what the weather was like, what we ate that day etc. This is not to say I have mimetic memory-- I don't. Photographic, yes-- to an extent. I can distinctly remember images seen only once if I can correlate the data. If the sensory input is incomprehensible, I have a hard time remembering it, though I will remember parts of it. If I feel something is of little significance, I will not have clear recall of it. However, things like artistic works I find interesting, schematic diagrams, and spacial relationships I can recall perfectly, as well as the relationships between objects in a memorable past event, such as distance, spacing, color, etc. I did not need to "study" science text books, because I could simply remember what was in them after reading them once. I form both explicit relationships between cognitive elements, as well as more fuzzy implicit ones with equal regularity, and do not have a real preference. I do not have difficulty with abstraction.
When confronted with constraints, I find myself drawn toward "Taking the third option", as often times I find that implicit dichotomies are actually false dichotomies. I recall that this revelation came to me when contemplating the unique properties of the category "Other" one day, about 12 years ago. (I was about 18 at the time.) "other" is such a profoundly mind blowing category when properly considered, that it deserves its own school of philosophy I think. People often seek to categorize things into concrete and and mutually exclusive categorical 'boxes', which leads to formation of these false dichotomies. Take for instance, the versatility of the class "Other" when cast in the following situations: "Male, Female, Other", "Good, Bad, Other", "Up, Down, Other", "In, Out, Other", "Chocolate, Vanilla, Other", etc. After contemplating just "What"
"Other" *really* means, I decided that it was my favorite word. Other represents the quintessentially unorthodox. It is by virtue of this unorthodoxy that it cannot be contained in a concrete category, and must be given a nondescript catch-all cognitive handle: "Other". The depths of what is contained inside this category, are endless. Why choose vanilla, or chocolate icecream, when you could have all the other millions of flavors contained in 'other'? It could be "Mint chocolate squid pistachio", or "Bacon"! The trouble, is that many people instinctively discount the "Other" category in making difficult decisions, because of its lack of concrete definition, and their own failure to truly appreciate the classification of that choice. I *TRULY* revel in my adoration of the class.
"Other" is AWESOME!
So, what personality class am I? I have an association with INTP, but I assert that I am "Other."
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Topic: If Bay Forum were a Mountain Hall, continued... FULL DISCLOSURE (Read 266281 times)