Intuition and Sensing, Left and Right Brain (dichotomies I hate)

[chacusha]

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.)

Comments

[chacusha]

Re Sherlock Holmes:
Hm... yeah, I see the similarity in Sherlock's thought process and the N description. But like... it says "from long habit" i.e. earlier when he does deduction it would look like A -> B -> C -> D -> conclusion, and now because he's practiced at it, it looks like A -> [blur] -> conclusion. This gets me back to the question of "So... if you're a fast thinker you're an N? And if you're slow you're an S?" That doesn't make any sense to me. Or is it that N's tend to go from A -> [blur] -> conclusion in most situations, regardless of accuracy, meaning that Sherlock is most likely not an N?

I've never tried to figure out his MBTI, but I would gauge that his method of collecting data is very S but the Science of Deduction he's known for is actually very N, if that makes sense? It's the chain of logic that's so fast as to appear as if he knows it based on feeling alone:
And here too, I would disagree that the science of deduction is an N thing. To me it seems highly S, although I'm still operating on my original psychological definition of S and N. Similar to what I said at the beginning of this comment, I don't see the connection between deduction/critical thinking and N, since I think it's more like an "everybody does it" thing. Like, for me, what makes Sherlock an S is not his deduction ability (this is S/N-neutral) but his attention to minute details of the physical world. But is that really an S thing...?

(Lol, this is kind of why I'm like FACEPALM at the whole S/N thing because two people can take the same definitions and arrive at opposite conclusions.)

Whew, long reply!

[sunflower_mynah]

The problem is - and I say this as a devoted fan of ACD and various Sherlock incarnations: that you're never really sure how Sherlock got to the point where he's this good. He could be an N with a very developed S function, so that he's able to lucidly do the backwards-explanation, as it were; he could be a S with a very developed N function, so that he's learnt to join the dots INCREDIBLY quickly. So I'll agree on the S/N neutral.

Attention to minute details of the physical world... I have no idea on that one. He picks up on a lot of things, but that could be both N and S; he could just be genuinely easily overloaded and unable to switch it off (in which case it's purely a physical thing that happens to serve him well in his work; that would be like asking if eidetic memory is S/N.)