Skills vs. Cognitive Functions

There are some common misconceptions within the type community when it comes to the types and the general skills that they possess. There are few classics that comes to mind. (1) That all Se users will have great reaction times and will be good at basically any kind of physical activity. (2) That Si users are all good at trivia. (3) That all Ti users are good at solving puzzles. (4) That all Fe users have excellent social skills. The list goes on and on. Today, I want to address some of these assumptions and hopefully clear up how things actually work when it comes to the cognitive functions vs. skills.

What Is a Cognitive Function?

The cognitive functions do not inherently make any person automatically skilled at any given task. Cognitive functions are simply the way that our brain processes information and chooses to use it. Just because someone has a natural inclination toward, or chooses to process, certain types of information above others doesn’t mean that the information they are working with is always going to be put to good use.

What Is a Skill?

Skills are the learned abilities that a person can possess. These are things that we practice and hone with time and effort. While certain skills can come more naturally to some people than others, the simple fact of the matter is they will not improve at a skill without effort, practice, and time. Cognitive functions are like the base or foundation someone would use to figure out how to develop a skill. They do not mean someone will automatically have a set of skills or that they will always be good at a skill. The prioritization of certain types of information may lead someone to focus on a certain set of skills, but this does not mean they will automatically be good at the things to which they are drawn.

However, natural inclination often times leads to effort, practice, and time being poured into a certain skill set, which oftentimes, is what leads to the conflation of the two. Just because many people leading with a certain cognitive function are drawn toward certain types of information and over time develop related skills does not mean it is a rule or all people leading with said function will posses that skill set. It also does not mean that people who do not lead with that function cannot develop skills in that area.

Related Article: Cognitive Functions Do NOT Determine Skills

Let’s Take an Si User, For Example.

Si, as a cognitive function, will draw the user to create detailed personal impressions of the things that they experience. This is a far cry from the end conclusion that they are all good at trivia. So, why the connection? Somewhere along the line, the assumption was made that if you are an Si user and focus on creating detailed impressions that must mean you have a good memory because you can produce all these details about things. If you have a good memory, that must mean that you retain a lot of what you are exposed to. If you are remembering a ton of stuff you have been exposed to then you must be good at trivia!

This is how the misconceptions start. The reality is that just because Si inclines the user to store away a detailed impression, does not mean that the person has an overall good memory.

For starters, memory capacity has no correlation to what cognitive functions a person uses. The memory capabilities of an individual are based off of completely different criteria, such as genetics, what kind of activities they participate in, how well and how much they engage their mind, learned memorization techniques, etc.

Secondly, the types of detailed impressions Si provides to the user will be highly tailored to what that individual thinks is important. If they don’t expose themselves to a wide array of information and also find that information important, they will never even create any kind of impression to remember in the first place. Further, the ability to remember the impressions after they have been offered up is not controlled by Si.

You could very well have an dominant Si user who has a bad memory. They would struggle to recall anything but the most important detailed impressions to themselves. They may seem very detailed in the short term, able to offer up a detailed impression of something that just recently happened to them, but weeks from that time they may have nothing but a foggy recollection to offer, if anything at all. The use of certain cognitive functions is not restricted to only certain levels of intelligence. You do not have to have an excellent memory to be a dominant Si user.

Let’s Take Se, For Another Example

Another common assumption is that all Se users will be athletic or have good reflexes because Se draws the user to information related to the here-and-now. This tends to lead Se users to focus on the information of the present moment. This could. with time and practice, cause them to hone a skill set that allows them to have good reflexes, but it is far far away from a foregone conclusion that they will.

The problem in this arena is even more troublesome than some of the others, because to have good reflexes requires not only a trained mind, but a trained body on top of it. Even someone who has good cognitive reflexes that would allow them to see something in time to react, would without a trained body, still be too slow to properly react to what they can see.

Inversely, a trained body with the ability to react quickly enough, without a trained mind, would still fail, being unable to perceive what they need to react to in time. So, to assume that someone would automatically have a trained mind and body to the extent that they would have good reflexes just because they have a cognitive preference for Se, is in error. The Se user would have to apply their preference for in-the-moment details to the training of their mind to perceive the required elements out of all of the in-the-moment information, then train the body to react to this information, just like any other type would have to do.

Just because Se has a preference for paying attention to in-the-moment information does not mean that those who do not possess Se or have it low in their function stack cannot process that information. It means that unless they specifically need to or want to process it, they will not by default find it important and may discard it in favor of other information. De-prioritization does not mean an inability.