Indeed, it’s ironic how it’s labeled “time”, when Ni seems to transcend any bounds, and time is the greatest one. If Se opposes it, it’s exactly because Se is “the right time”, which is the only time there is. Dual elements complement each other, if you have something, anything, then its opposite is missing, neti-neti law, but socionists like to twist things, as in calling the timeless function “time”. Btw.

Yes, I agree it’s about recognizing pattern. Aylen’s analysis was poignant and it made me feel Ni’s essence pretty well, but I’d translate (poorly) what I grasped from her words just like that, “recognizing patterns”, because if you can delve deep and grasp the underlying structure of something (a function that Jung associates to Ni, but that socionics associates to Ti!) so much so to recognize how things will develop, then yes, you could say that Ni elaborates and recognizes, looks for, studies the patterns and the structure of whatever is crossing their mind.

To do this you need a lot of “meditating”, not in the spiritual sense or any new age bs, but just a lot of time spent alone in your own head, pondering things, playing them over and over, dreaming of other possibilities, and especially, looking for the source of things… this process is characteristic of Ni, and probably why it got the label of “time”, since it likes to reconstruct things from the scratch, just to have an idea of how, and why, they work. These processes are indispensable to be able to develop any insight in the world.

There are aspects in common with all of the other introverted functions: Ni looks peaceful outside, like Si, while actually it often hides an internal turmoil; it looks like Fi, in that it doesn’t express its internal turmoils, but chances are that Fi has no “real” internal turmoil at all (); and it looks like Ti for its will to understand the world, but with the difference that Ni doesn’t advance a strict vision to anything, while Ti are overly categorical.