What Is Intuition? Black Intuition and Novelty

Why is heightened interest in the new, in novelty (specifically even a NEED for novelty) an important and “characteristic” marker property of Ne?

Let’s start with the fact that this is indeed the case and is quite well supported experimentally. The need for novelty strongly correlates, according to questionnaire statistics, with other marker properties of Ne.
But why is this so, how can it be theoretically explained? There are three possible levels of explanation – psychological, evolutionary, and neurophysiological (in particular, through brain biochemistry). And all three groups of explanations lead to the same result, namely: the intrinsic link between Ne and the need for novelty is not unusual – it’s exactly how it should be.

Let’s start with the psychological explanation, necessarily touching a bit on the evolutionary side of the question as well.

Firstly, what is intuition (primarily Ne, but also partly Ni) in the language of brain function? It’s a reduced, weakened filtering between the unconscious sphere (which also includes all our memory) and current consciousness. Consciousness is our “current, aware present”, in which our thoughts reside and final decisions for our actions are made. The very need for something like consciousness appeared in evolution even in worms – it’s needed by all living creatures that move across the earth, choosing their path. In its most primitive and original evolutionary version, consciousness is simply a final comparator, in which alternatives are compared and a final decision is made about where to go – left or right. Moreover, this decision is not made randomly, but with practical motor output to the muscles.
Thus, consciousness is the narrow bottleneck between incoming perception and the organism’s executive organs – the muscles. The task of consciousness is to choose from two or three possible decisions (prepared beforehand in the more extensive unconscious sphere of the CNS) only one (because you can’t crawl both left and right at the same time), and to place an affirmative “signature” on that decision. (Although, quite often, the decision reaches consciousness already fully formed at the unconscious level, even then it still passes through consciousness, creating the illusion that we supposedly made that decision “consciously.”)

In fact, the largest part of all informational processing and decision preparation (well over 90%) happens not in consciousness but in the subconscious sphere. But in our unconscious, processing mechanisms are parallel (simultaneous processing along many lines), and this fundamentally distinguishes them from consciousness, where information is received and processed successively (strictly sequentially, step by step). Why does consciousness have this “inefficient” sequential feature, seemingly reflecting the flow of time? There’s no actual connection with the flow of time, but there is a connection with the sequence of goals and events. Originally, all of this developed along a “sequential path” precisely because consciousness both initially arose and further evolved as the final organ for selecting a single decision among many. Previously (in worms), the single decision voiced by consciousness was immediately translated to the muscles, and the chain – or rather, its sole link (conditionally, it can be called an elementary primary "thought") – ended there. But further evolutionary layering made this chain of decisions multi-stage, modeling an entire chain of our sequential actions. One mental decision may, instead of turning into a motor command, become the starting point for a new informational search (again, most of it occurring in the subconscious), and then again at the second stage two or three top alternatives enter consciousness, get weighed and evaluated (strictly sequentially – that’s the only way consciousness works), again leading to a new mental decision. In short, consciousness is designed by nature as the organ that reduces multiple alternatives to a single choice.
That’s why it always works sequentially, as a chain of successive unique choices, from which the sequential logic of our reasoning arises. As well as the long sequential chain of our planned actions. On the stretch between two points, i.e., between logical cause and logical effect, the subconscious – working in parallel – always invisibly assists consciousness (but its work remains unrecognized). The subconscious searches for arguments, preliminarily weighs both them and the alternative options against appropriate criteria, doing all the enormous rough work on behalf of consciousness (and much faster). The traces of this work are not recorded in consciousness; instead, only the strictly sequential chain of the selected intermediate results remains. These are the reference points of our intended actions. This is what we call our thinking.

Having dealt with consciousness, let’s return to intuition.
If the filters between memory and consciousness are “tight”, i.e., narrowly selective (a physicist might say “high-Q filters” or “filters with a narrow resonant bandwidth”), this is the case of a sensoric. A sensoric receives most of their current information not from memory, but from direct sensory perception (primarily visual). And what they occasionally need to extract from memory for conscious comparisons and evaluations comes into consciousness in a “single copy”, precisely matched to the query. All other memory associations are blocked by the filter at the border of consciousness in a sensoric’s mind – they are cleanly cut off. This is not the case with intuitives. The bandwidth of their associative filters between the unconscious and consciousness is wide – i.e., with poor selectivity. Into consciousness flows not only what strictly matches all query criteria, but also what only approximately matches a small subset of the criteria. What does this lead to? To a broad fuzziness of the associative process – to unexpected (at least to others) comparisons and associations.

That’s in terms of the thought process. But let’s not forget that access to memory occurs not only within the framework of verbal reasoning, but also, for example, when recognizing objects in the surrounding space. When we “see” the face of a familiar person, we only think we really “see” it – i.e., that the whole visual picture is supposedly taken directly from the external world through our eyes. In fact – not at all. Even the simplest physiological calculations show that the visual image contains much more data than the brain can receive through the visual system in a second. In reality, through vision, we merely RECOGNIZE the face of a specific person – we IDENTIFY it – and then most of its visual detail is COMPLETED FROM MEMORY. Memory stores many reference visual images. Mixed with signals received directly through the eyes, these reference images from memory mostly form the current visual picture we believe we actually "see" with our own eyes. For comparison, in movie frames the movements of people on the screen also seem to us to be continuous, although in reality they are actually discrete still images. Similarly, our unconscious here also completes the gaps between the frames as if it were real continuous movement. Exactly the same unconscious mechanism is at work – completing fragmentary external input using reference images drawn entirely from memory.

We didn’t accidentally switch from intuition to talking about memory-based reference images used in vision to complete supposedly “seen” visual pictures. The point is that intuitives have broad-bandwidth filters between the unconscious and consciousness, with weakened selectivity, and this affects not only the “boldness” of associations but also the quality of visual image completion using memory. Moreover, the initial process of visual identification of an object also uses similar or similarly structured filters. Therefore, intuitives have a diminished ability to recognize objects based on real sensory signals received through the eyes (their direct sensory data flow is limited, and their perceived image must be completed more from memory than in sensorics). And from the other side, this completion is, in comparison with sensorics, less accurate and more prone to errors – to “slippage” onto things that only partially resemble the original. Especially in twilight conditions, where visual input is already insufficient, this can lead to misrecognition.

These visual illusions of misidentification happen far more often in low-light conditions among intuitives – and then, instead of a soap dish at the edge of the bathtub, one might suddenly see, for example, a huge cockroach of similar size; or in simpler cases – a jar instead of a glass, a glass instead of a jar, etc., etc.
Another feature of intuitive visual perception, also stemming from imprecision in using visual memory references, is the impoverishment of the visual picture itself. It usually contains fewer nuances and fewer small details (since memory draws things in a generalized way, and the directly received visual sensory details are impoverished in intuitives). That is, their visual perceptions are coarser (and sometimes distorted, as in the above-mentioned case of twilight misrecognition illusions).

In short, both visual perception and mental associations in intuitives contain, compared to sensorics, far more random elements, and therefore turn out to be, on the one hand, less precisely detailed, but on the other – more innovative and creative (since they constantly change and add things to their perception of the real situation “from themselves”).

Unlike sensorics, intuitives don’t have such a high and impenetrable barrier between consciousness and the subconscious. If a sensoric rarely feels the presence of their unconscious sphere at all, an intuitive can sense their unconscious directly – as a kind of bustling mental fog somewhere at the edge of consciousness, where faint, dim stars of thoughts and images seem to flash and fade.
In unpleasant cases (when it comes to a shift into schizotypy), this borderline “fog” can become intrusive and irritating – experienced as a constant, uncomfortable mental buzzing on the “edge”. If it strengthens further, it can become an obsessive “echo” of one’s own thoughts, or suddenly appearing intrusive visual images, or voices “as if from the outside” heard in one’s head.
This is how our subconscious starts speaking directly with our consciousness when the wall between them (as occurs in schizophrenia and pronounced schizotypy) becomes too “thin”.

Before moving on to our final chord — the discussion of the reasons for the connection between Ne and the need for novelty — we still need to sort out the differences between white and black intuition.
Black intuition is static, while white is dynamic. Static (especially when combined with rationality) means that a person has a stable focus of attention (both singular and inert) in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain. From neuroscience, it is known that this focus of attention is maintained by local dopamine mechanisms of the prefrontal cortex. Dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter closely associated with extraversion. In extraverted statics, diffuse dopamine activity may be enhanced in various parts of the brain; while in introverted statics it will be generally reduced, but in the dorsolateral PFC it is expected to still be above average.
In dynamics, by contrast, the focus of attention is not stable and easily “shifts” to other objects and images under the influence of external impressions. From this difference comes the behavioral distinction between statics and dynamics (statics are more principled and firm in their beliefs, adapt worse), as well as the difference between static and dynamic functions, including Ne and Ni.

Ne, from one stably anchored point of focus, constantly catches associations from the subconscious with a “wide net”. Since the focus of attention is immobile or nearly immobile, this appears as a shuttle process. Consciousness casts the net into memory, pulls out some association, compares it with the criteria and interests of the focus of attention, then casts the net again from the same focal point into a slightly different, offset area, pulls out another association, and so on. Back and forth, each time returning approximately to the original point. In pure form, this process occurs in static rationals, primarily LII. In irrational ILEs, the focus of attention may be more mobile due to the fact that associations are less controllable and may arise spontaneously, somewhat modifying the focus of attention itself, and thus changing the direction of thought faster than in the case of the LII.

But even compared to the ILE, the situation is entirely different in the case of white intuition. Here, the focus of attention is even more plastic, unanchored, and easily follows each new association. As a result, the associative process appears not as a shuttle movement returning time after time to the same or a nearby starting point, but as a free wandering, where each newly emerging mental image replaces the previous focus of attention (which is weak or not inert in dynamics) and serves as a new starting point and impetus for the appearance of the next association. As a result, the originally arising image is continuously, in a chain of successive stages, easily and almost without interruption — like frames in a movie — transformed: a tree turns into a person, a person’s head into a nut, and the chain of associations forms something very similar to a dream, where the focus of attention is not fixed, and the observer’s consciousness passively drifts through a sequence of associations linked by partial similarity or situational life adjacency.

This is how the dreamlike narrative fantasies of white intuition are born. Key concepts for Ni are the role of the passive observer and the dreamlike nature of unfolding plot fantasies, which develop almost independently of the observer's will. This is especially pronounced in program white intuitives, because in creatives, the process is partially controlled (and periodically interrupted and redirected) by the program Te or Fe.
In biochemical, neurophysiological terms, white intuition is characterized by weak dopamine support in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, it can also be assumed, a general weakening of the brain’s acetylcholine mechanisms. Due to the weakening of the insulating properties of neuronal myelin sheaths (which, as is known from neuroscience, correlates with reduced acetylcholine activity), white intuitives often experience a “transfer” of excitation between neighboring neurons, which in turn increases the flow of involuntary associations by contiguity entering consciousness. Frequent associations by contiguity of events (i.e., referring to the experience of episodic memory) are another hallmark of Ni, distinguishing it from Ne associations, which are more often based on similarity — i.e., resemblance of objects according to some criterion.

And now, finally (and in conclusion), let’s move on to explaining the kinship between Ne and the need for novelty.
Have you ever wondered why all adult Ne-users are called infantiles? Because Ne, even in adulthood, ensures a certain “childishness” of perception — namely, the curiosity and openness to new things that are typical of early childhood (many IEE even retain the infantile sucking reflex into maturity).
Indeed, Ne is strongest in small children and weakens fairly quickly with age. It's no coincidence they say almost all young children under about seven are creative, and then their creative potential quickly begins to decline. Why is this so? Why did evolution “need” to pump preschoolers full of black intuition? In other words, what is the evolutionary benefit?
Small children have very limited life experience. Even their visual experience is limited, and the library of reference images in visual memory is still rather poor.
On the other hand, this early stage of human ontogenesis is a stage of intensive exploration of the surrounding world, where at every step the child encounters something new and unknown.
And this is where strong Ne comes to the rescue in understanding the world and in the accelerated accumulation of new knowledge. Let’s explain how.

Earlier, we mentioned why Ne gives rise to innovation as a product of its activity (yes — due to the large element of randomness in selecting its associations, thanks to their imprecision, the ability to find commonality with the existing not on all but only a few criteria!).
But this very same mechanism of black intuition also allows it to analyze and organize everything new it encounters in the surrounding world!
Lacking a large set of ready-made samples in accumulated personal experience, the child’s Ne easily builds very remote associations to the few things that have already been explored and internalized. It boldly generalizes the few known rules to new objects (hence the famous child word-creation, so thoroughly described by Kornei Chukovsky in his book “From Two to Five”):

— I’m mommy’s and no one else’s.
— Daddy, look how your pants are frowning!
— Grandma! You’re my best lover!
— Oh, mommy, what fat-bellied legs you have!
— Mommy, I’m such an untangler!
And she showed the string she managed to untangle.
— Once there was a shepherd named Makar. And he had a daughter — Makarona.

And children’s Ne also helps in interpreting the new, linking it to what’s known (not always correctly right away, but very often — and effectively!):
— Nanny, what kind of paradise is that?
— Oh, it’s where apples, pears, oranges, cherries…
— Got it: paradise is compote.

And now let’s ask ourselves, finally: if Ne is such a master specifically at working with new information, helping it to fit into one’s personal semantic memory (i.e., into a person’s life experience), then what will Ne do during downtime, when no new objects are nearby?
Exactly! It will search for and even invent such objects — just to continue its enjoyable activity of packaging them into our life experience!

That is where the strong connection between a person’s strong Ne and their lifelong need for novelty comes from.