Sensation and Intuition

I have some ideas that might either help to clear this up or muddy it further. We'll see. I feel like I have a pretty clear internal understanding of how Si works/what the experience of it is like. But unfortunately my understanding is mostly nonverbal and I don't feel like I've exactly found the right words for it yet.

I think of Si's data organization as one that's based on the traces that all of my interactions with the objective world have left on my mind-body. In other words, it's an internal view of the world that's informed by the history of how my whole being has reacted to the accumulation of its past encounters with external reality. The Discrete bits of information about the world it holds are the caricatured details of all these past encounters; the traces on the mind-body is the underlying structure of how they're recalled and indexed. (I hope this makes sense!)

Here's sort of an exaggerated scenario to explain what I mean:

Let's suppose I have chronic pain in my ankle. When I focus on the pain, perhaps I recall a narrative about how that pain came to be: maybe I was walking through the forest on a sunny autumn day and tripped over the root of an aspen tree. Perhaps I suffered a sprain from which I never fully recovered. Now, if someone asked me about the circumstances of the day when I sprained my ankle, I might be able to recall hundreds of discrete details surrounding the event e.g. --It happened three years ago on September 7th, at about 2 in the afternoon. --It was on Crooked Tree Mountain, where I'd been hiking through the forest for about 45 minutes. The reason I might remember all these details is because the situation left a big, obvious trace on my mind & body. Maybe I had been hiking on the exact same mountain three days earlier, but nothing bad had happened on that earlier trip: it didn't leave a distinct enough impression for me to find that memory, in particular.

Most of the time, Si's operation is not quite so obvious. Here's an example from my life that's much more obscure & difficult to explain. I can remember how I learned to count to 20 as a little kid because each of the numbers left a slightly different visual-somatic impression on me. The single-digits were generally brighter and more energized; the numbers from 15 through 20 were deep, dark-colored and calm. Because I was so young/impressionable and hadn't yet learned this information, it etched traces into that formed the path I still use to retrieve this data. I've reinforced them so much over the years by retrieving this information again and again. I know this sounds sorta crazy but I can't find a better way to explain it right now.

But if you look at a lot of Si-heavies, they often seem to have very good memories for certain information, and rather lousy memories for other.

Why is this? We are good at remembering information that left concrete traces on us, whatever that is. If Si is like a record-player, the grooves on the record are like the somatic traces from which it retrieves its stored data. The stored data is like is the music--the details and narratives.


Here's a way I sometimes think about S vs. N, but it's kind of roundabout and I'm not sure if it addresses this topic directly.