The Difference Between Sensing and Intuition [N and S]

One of the most obvious differences amongst different types of people is whether someone is intuitive or sensing. Sensors favor experience and intuitives favor ideas. Plain and simple. These specific traits will typically be hard to hide. Intuition and sensing are our observing functions, meaning that they determine how we observe the world around us. We use them to take in data about our lives or organize data about our current situation. 

Which observing function do you think you have? Sensing or intuition?

Here's a hint that might help you discern which function you favor. The world is filled with sensors. A wapping 70% of people favor the sensing function, so intuitives typically feel like the weird kids. Not only are intuitives different from sensors, they are also very different from each other as well, making it hard to feel like they fit in. That's not to say that sensors can't feel left out or outcast in certain situations, they can just more easily find a common interest with other sensors, since general experience is what they favor. 

The difference between sensors and intuitive is physical vs abstract. Sensors view the world how it literally is (with the 5 senses) and intuitives view the world thru an abstract lens (with connections and patterns that they’ve made).

Here’s a good example from my own life (for the record, I am an ENFP):

My mom, brother, and husband are intuitives, as am I. My dad is a sensor. We (mom, brother, husband, and I) will sit at the dinner table for hours after dinner discussing things like the subplots of movies, theories about aliens, or the minute differences of meanings in linguistics (I am literally referencing an hour-long debate about whether blood is a “part of the body” or a “body part”). At some point, my dad will get up and leave to go watch TV. It does not interest him.

BUT if you get him talking about bourbon, he’ll talk your ear off. The color, smell, taste, distillery, mash bill. He knows everything because it’s physical. That’s how he sees the world, with his physical senses. That is the very definition of a sensor. Sensory input. 

On the contrary, Intuitives favor connection and the meaning behind things. A conversation between me and my ENTP husband is completely off the wall abstract. We often favor sitting together and talking about our ideas about life, our own constructed fantasies, or in-depth plots of movies. We care very little about going out and actually experiencing things like, a new bar in town or a bowling ally. 

Sensors also favor activities that include sensory input as well, like a party, woodworking class, or day on the town. Intuitives would rather sit around a campfire and discuss astrology.

However, everyone can do everything. It’s just a matter of what you favor and what you typically neglect that makes you an intuitive or a sensor.

And then it gets even more complicated once you add an introverted or extroverted charge to the functions.