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?
0·3 months ago- The ball was red and smooth and uniform and shaded like it had been drawn with colored pencil.
- the gender of the person was indeterminate, perhaps leaning female
- they did not have a definite look to describe, it was more a concept of a person. They were a featureless void-white silhouette adorned only by a similarly featureless light blue t-shirt, black pants and black hair all so generic and featureless as if they they had been hastily cut from craft paper and slapped together, but more… amorphous? Fuzzy? than cut paper. Like a weird cross between
- the ball was slightly larger than a baseball but smaller than a softball
- the table was rectangular, of beige ‘wood’ with a light grain, and very sharp edges, like out of a low poly video game. The grain even looked like a low-res texture