Ne vs. Ni: A Simplistic Example

This article is going to be more of a story than an actual technical article, but the story does show a reasonably good example of simplistic Ne vs. Ni. It’s in these simplistic examples that we can more easily break down how each function is actually operating because it’s easy to wrap your head around what is happening, unlike when used in a dominant setting where what’s happening is much more complex. So! on to the story.

Here is the setting. Mara and I were watching the show Black Clover together on some Saturday. The show, though hyped up as supposedly being the next big thing, in my opinion fell pretty flat. Still, we had invested some time watching it so we persisted under the impression that it would improve. Being that the show was boring me, I began mocking the characters and their behavior. One particular thing I did is what we will focus on. Being an inferior Ne user, my mind took the main character’s name ‘Asta’ and went “that kinda sounds like Pasta.” Thus, from that point forward, his name was forever changed, and he became known as Pasta.

Some time later, we were having a discussion about the show. I’m sure it was something in relation to the characters, their types, and how underdeveloped the personalities were in the show. In the course of our discussion, Mara wasn’t able to pull the name Asta. As she sat there trying desperately to think of his name so I would know what character she was talking about. After some stuttering, she suddenly proclaimed, “You know… Noodle boy!” My mock nickname of Pasta had basically supplanted an association with noodles to the character in Mara’s mind through the use of her Tertiary Ni.

So, lets break down what happened and how it relates to the way Ne works versus the way that Ni works. My Ne tied two completely unrelated things together. The string of relation was merely that the words Asta and Pasta sounded similar. So while logically, there is nothing to connect those two things, they tie together phonetically, which is all Ne needed to make a connection. (As mentioned, this is an incredibly simplistic example.) It’s not that everything Ne ties together is entirely random; it’s more that the connection won’t always be based in any kind of conventional logic, per say. An Ne connection will be externally abstract yet more clearly linked than an Ni connection only because it’s externally based, hence objective.

Now let’s look at what happened in Mara’s brain. Her low Ni/lack of Si was struggling to recall Asta’s actual name, so instead, she referenced the impression of his name that she had stored away by hearing the nickname “Pasta” over and over again. Pasta in her mind translated to noodles, so when she was mentally grasping for a name to call him by, she produced Noodle Boy. This is an example of the way Ni stores away abstract information. She couldn’t pull Asta or Pasta, only the impression (noodles). Unlike an Ne connection, Mara’s Ni connection was internal and subjective, entirely inside her mind.

NOTE: If I referenced the character as ‘Pasta’ from Black Clover, most people would realize that I was actually talking about Asta, because the two sound similar. This is an external connection. However, if Mara were to say Noodle Boy in reference to Black Clover, nobody would know what she was talking about, because there’s clearly a missing link between the connection that she made.

In closing…

Obviously, as mentioned, this is an incredibly simplistic example, and these two functions are much more complex than that. (We are lower users of these functions, after all.) However, I hope this example can help provide you with a basic understanding of the difference in how Ni and Ne operate.