This is more of me trying to understand how people imagine things, as I almost certainly have Aphantasia and didn’t realize until recently… If this is against community rules, please do let me know.
The original thought experiment was from the Aphantasia subreddit. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/g1e6bl/ball_on_a_table_visualization_experiment_2/
Thought experiment begins below.
Try this: Visualise (picture, imagine, whatever you want to call it) a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?
Once you're done with the above, click to review the test questions:
- What color was the ball?
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
- What did they look like?
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?
And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?
As an aphantasia person myself, it is honestly mind boggling that people can visualise things that aren’t there. Like that must be so much effort on things that aren’t needed.
Suppose it means you can just have a wank and not need porn though.
No matter how much I tried to focus, all I can see is Mickey Mouse in a magician’s cap trying to control buckets and mops.
I might have hyperfantasia.
boooooo
Love it
I’ve put some effort into improving my visualization since learning about aphantasia. Upon reading the prompt, I was able to imagine a colorless ball, but with shading to indicate a 3D shape, like a preview render in a CAD program. That’s progress! It didn’t have a size inherently. For the table, I could picture a white, rectangular plane hovering in a black void. If it was a normal dinner table size, then the ball was something like a softball or basketball.
And that’s it. That exhausted my ability to visualize. No person, no push, no motion. Best I can do is to see the white rectangle after the ball has rolled off of the edge.
The ball was red, like a red rubber ball. The person was sort of indistinct from the neck up, it was more like my view was focused on the ball itself and didn’t see a face, but it was a man, wearing a white shirt and dark tie, and dark pants. The ball was about the size of a baseball, wasn’t completely smooth and shiny, sort of a matte with a slight grippy texture. Table was square, wood, like a medium brown color. The ball rolled off the table and bounced a few times.
All these decisions were automatic when reading the prompt, it’s what I saw.
I’ve just become aware of aphantasia myself, I have a few family members who have it apparently. I was talking to my BIL about it the other day, I was saying how I’m a big fan of reading, but I mostly read nonfiction. He said he doesn’t read much, mostly biographies, but fiction doesn’t do much for him because he can’t picture anything in his head. I can picture everything in great detail when I read fiction. Its interesting because our minds work very differently
I imagined the same red, baseball-ish sized rubber ball. Not sure why that’s my default for “ball.”
+1 for a red rubberlike ball … looks like a pattern emerges
A vague thought of a ball and knowledge of what would happen. Nothing else.
Exactly. There’s no need to add more details unless that’s part of the requirements. Otherwise it makes it harder to keep track of things. Keep it simple first, then add complexity as needed.
Exactly. It rolls for a while unless it reaches an edge.
Wait a second.
- The ball had no color at all
- The person who pushed the ball didn’t even exist. It just got pushed by some invisible force. Naturally, they didn’t have an appearance.
- The ball was like… Small I guess?
- The table had no properties at all.
Do people really usually have a more vivid picture in their heads? It’s always just concepts with me. I’m confused.
I also had the “I spent 23 minutes designing this scene in blender” impression of the ball, table, and disembodied hand. The table was made of light grey, the ball was made of light grey, and the hand was made of light grey
Do people really usually have a more vivid picture in their heads?
I can’t speak for others, but I do if they’re concepts I’ve encountered before. I have “default” visualizations of things that are changed if the description warrants it.
Yeah, same with me. But I knew the ball was pushed and rolled to the edge of the table and then fell, so I feel like I got the most relevant bit.
Tbh I’ve never been good at visualising faces, recognising people I know, retracing a route I’ve taken etc. This just feels like one of those things I’ve never really been great at.
- What happens to the ball?
It slowly rolled toward the edge but stopped before falling to the ground. The path was somewhat eccentric because of the texture of the ball.
- What color was the ball?
Yellow
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
Male
- What did they look like?
Green and white track suit (why? IDK), mid 60’s Italian, chubby
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
It was one of those foam Nerf bullets, so about the size of a shooter marble
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?
It was that black IKEA table where the four metal legs screw into the corners. About 6ft by 3ft.
- And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?
The entire scene sprung into my head at once after reading that someone interacted with the ball
I imagined a sort of physics textbook diagram, not real objects. There was no person, only an arrow indicating the applied force on the ball!
That’s how I did it too. There is a sphere on a plane. A force is applied to the sphere, parallel to the plane. Neither the sphere nor the plane have a defined color, size, material, etc. Nothing specific pushed the sphere.
My job is often to mathematically model the things people say to me, and in those circumstances thinking like this is correct.
I don’t think this way when I daydream, although the visual components of my daydreams are more like the feelings I get when I look at something than like concrete mental pictures.
Hello, fellow odd brain!
I remember when I was at school (this was 6th or 7th grade) and the teacher wrote
y = xand drew a diagonal line on a Cartesian plane. At that moment, I realized that the world was made of math and I was enlightened. I’m not exaggerating - the experience revolutionized the way I could think.The interesting thing to me is that I have worked with physicists who appear to be capable of even higher levels of abstraction than I am. If I read an equation, I need to think about its geometrical representation but they claim to think directly in terms of equations. (Pure mathematics, not the letters and numbers that make up the written equation.) I believe them because they can comprehend equations much faster than I can; they and I would go to talks where the presenter just put up slide after slide of equations and I would be lost almost immediately while they were able to follow along. I don’t think that’s simply because they’re much smarter than I am, because I am otherwise generally able to match them intellectually.
I wish I had their brain type, I struggled in math to remember the formulas. I had a great time learning it, otherwise. Calculus was awesome, I had never considered measuring the rate of change of the rate of change and I got pretty excited. Set theory was great too.
Grey, female, cartoonish with that weird bob round kind of look that comes with bushy brown hair that’s slightly longer than shoulder length, slightly larger than a ping pong ball, wooden square/rectangle, no.
What does it mean if I already knew the answer to every question except what the person looked like?
Same here. I knew it was a man but nothing else. But I had a clear view of a small red rubber ball on a card table.
Huh. The person was off-frame. And I’m pretty sure i retroactively chose a color for the ball.
I think I might have a black-and-white imagination.
- small dull red rubber ball
- no obvious gender
- they looked simple, like a Simpsons character. Impression of having a body, but only actually saw their hand
- table was standard rectangular, wooden affair
My visualisation is quite chaotic, so I mostly see a jumble of overlapping objects then have to choose which one to focus on.
Surprisingly, I had a real hard time visualising the ball rolling on its own. The hand was either pushing it or it was bouncing off of the floor.
Interesting exercise!
Both my partner and I answered the same.
The ball was the size of a tennis ball, no colour.
The person had no gender or any distinguishing features.
The table was a standard kitchen table.
Neither of us knew what the test was about.
The ball had no color, the person had no gender or specific form other than vague shapes (the hand and arm being the most visualized), no memory of deciding any specific clothing, the ball was the most fleshed out part where it was the size of a softball. The table was square with vaguely wood coloring. The size was about 2 ft by 2ft maybe 3 ft high.
I did not already know most and I did not retroactively change them. I gave answers as I remembered my visualization.
I love how by default most tables were wooden and the balls were mostly about baseball size
For me it was a round coffee table and it was a lanky butler wearing white gloves who gently reaches out with index and thumb and pushes the baseball sized ball forward
Apparently I’m in spooky brain mode cause mine was a crystal ball
spoiler
Interesting, on the first sentence I actually thought of many different sizes and shapes for the ball, then realized I’d have to pick one before moving on to the next part, so it was kind of a conscious decision. I ended up with a simple grey anti-stress ball. But the table was always the same, light brown wood. All focus is on the ball so the person is just a silhouette partly out of camera but the hand is white and wearing a black sleeve. I only chose what the person looked like after the questions based on what felt right for the initial visualization, like panning out the camera.
There’s another question though. Would your mind get into all this trouble if you didn’t know there would be questions coming?
Interesting. I also had only the vaguest impression of the person pushing the ball, but I definitely caught a glimpse before the ball rolled off the table. Slacks and a blue shirt, that was about it.
It’s interesting how many people picked a brown wood table. I’d guess that’s probably the most common material and colour for tables. But I’m typing this on a black table, and yet I still pictured a brown wood one.
My ball was gray, too. With no details whatsoever, just shading. In the edge of the table, a hand came from the left of the camera view with its index finger stretched out and poked the ball, which rolled a few inches and stopped (while in other faded versions of it the ball fell off the table or rolled further over the table surface)
