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?
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The interesting part is that some people are able to see.
Well maybe I’m not all that aphantasiac, I immediately came up with a woman pushing a 9-ball on a green billiards table
- What color was the ball? Blue
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball? Male
- What did they look like? Skinny, pants, dress shirt
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? Blue, smooth, baseball sized
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Around 2ft square, wooden, light color, four square legs
All of this was built in my head with each part of the prompt. Pretty sure I don’t have aphantasia.
Honestly, it’s patchy.
‘ball on a table’ is very generic, so my brain keeps suggesting different versions. A beach ball on my grandparents’ living room table when I was a child. A fairly featureless basketball-sized sphere on a beech-like table in some kind of gallery-like environment. A tennis ball, but on little more than the concept of a table. The person, not being specified… could be anyone. In some versions it’s my own arm, POV, in others it’s like something seen out of the corner of your eye. Yeah someone came in and did a thing, I wasn’t really looking.
The motion is more like a series of vignettes, unless I concentrate more - in which case the surrounding detail gets more abstract.
Now, if you give me details, that’s another story.
A fuzzy yellow tennis ball on that cheap folding card table from my childhood with the padding cut off, leaving the textured fibreboard surface. My older sister strides up and shoves the ball across the table, making the flimsy legs wobble as she does so.
Do that, I can see the texture of the carpet and the bare walls from our shitty childhood apartment, I can downright smell the table and have the heft of the thing kinaesthetically along with the shape and visual textures. I can see the skitter and wobble of the ball across the table; my sister more an abstract bundle of mannerisms and gait, and the actual path of the ball is still more implied than observed, though.
For the most part, my visualisation is handwave, like looking through your blind spot or your peripheral vision: the part your brain makes up to fill in the missing details. When I read a book, it’s like half-remembered cover-illustrations of the general scene: more vibe (sometimes richly textured, vivid vibe) than a literal image.
Purple-ish
Male? Maybe?
Too abstract I more imagined an arm more than a whole person
Baseballish
Square, I dunno it was also purple. I get very like, early computer animation type vibes from the whole scene. “Ball” and “table” without any context just leaves everything kinda blank.
I think I already knew. Maybe the gender one was a stretch.
I can imagine it in the sense that I can understand what happens. There is nothing visual at all for me. My assumption was that it was roughly-tennis-ball-sized absent any other info, but it wasn’t even a person, just a hand pushing a ball (and again, just the idea and nothing visual) as no other info is relevant.
Sure, OK.
Welcome to my brain
- Red
- Don’t know, the “camera” wasn’t panned up that high
- All I really “saw” was jeans
- Looked like one of those rubber balls that people like to bounce against walls, like in handball or squash. About as big across as the palm of your hand. Hollow, you could squish it without much effort.
- one of those simple black square tables from Ikea
That’s kind of what just popped into my head before I knew there were questions.
- 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
I already had my answers before looking through the questions. Red, no gender, mostly a lab coat, tennis ball sized, waist-high wooden rectangular table.
Oh my! I didn’t know what to expect, and I have to say… I was quite surprised by some of your answers. Also confirmed to me that I am definitely not normal
Not many replies that are indicative of Aphantasia so… here goes nothing. I tried really hard at this okay
spoiler
I don’t “see” see anything when I close my eyes. I can create a very vague concept of a ball, a table, and… kind of a person in my head, but I don’t actually see the scene, I used to think when people say imagining things they were just making a metaphor. Things get really funk from here… But the overall schema feels more like one of those badly drawn scenes from the hit visual novel Slay the Princess. And yes I imagined it in 2D for some reason
- Color: the ball doesn’t have a color
- Gender: it wasn’t even a real person; it seems like a silhouette of the hand and back of a person
- Looks: As I said, the person isn’t even facing me
- Size: No idea; in retrospect it’s fairly large compared to the table (diameter probably 1/2-1/3 of table?), but the table is also an abstract concept so…
- Table: no clue, it is a square table but that’s it. If anything it looks like the things served on Pizza Hut pizzas
- Well I spoiled the question for myself so… but I didn’t have to choose, heck I couldn’t choose even if I know what the questions are
You imagined a lot more details than I did. For me it was just the concept of a ball. And then the idea of it moving. The person and the table were left our as irrelevant.
The thought experiment I use when explaining to people about aphantasia is a much simplified version of yours: “imagine a circle”, “ok”, “what color is it?”
That’s it. People give an answer, sometimes including more details, like texture. Then I tell them that for me the question doesn’t make sense, I just imagined the idea of a circle and didn’t actually “see” anything, so there’s no additional detail to it.
Just as an exploration with you on this. Use your same instructions for the placing and actions with one difference.
The room is pitch black, and you can’t see a thing.
What do you hear?
Click for review questions:
- what did the steps of the person sound like? Can you tell what kind of shoes they have with “heal/toe” impact sounds? single thumps indicating flat footfalls? nothing?
- how long were they walking before they got to the table?
- Did the ball make any sound as it rolled on the table? What kind of sounds? What kind of table would make that sound?
- When the ball hit the floor did it bounce or fall flat? Was there an echo? Did the sound of the fall indicate you’re in a tiny room or a giant room?
- How close was the person to your point of observation?
- Could you hear the person breathing?
- What else did you hear that I didn’t include here?
- The person didn’t walk, that wasn’t the focus of what I was imagining
- The ball didn’t make a sound when it rolled, but I was imagining a soft futsal ball that would make almost no noise rolling on a table. If I’d been imagining a marble or something that would have been different
- The ball bounced once a bit, then fell flat, it’s how a futsal ball bounces, it’s a kind of “splat” sound with no echoes. I didn’t imagine walls, so the room is effectively infinite sized
- The person wasn’t really part of what I was imagining. They were there to give the ball a push, but otherwise were irrelevant, so I didn’t focus on them in any way
If I’d let my fantasy get “polluted” by the other questions and stories, I’d have answered differently. With all the questions about the person, I’d have invented a person and effectively “panned out” so that the person was part of what I was thinking about. Instead I went with my original visualization which just involved an effectively disembodied hand giving a ball a push. If this were a TV show or something, the only part of the person that I ever saw was the hand that gave the ball a push, everything else was “out of frame”. But, I wasn’t imagining a “frame”, just whatever my mind’s eye was focused on, which was almost entirely the ball, and not anything else.
I am not joking; the only thing I can imagine is for some bizarre reason a bowling ball noise followed by a comical noise of striking pins. I know there is a person but I couldn’t imagine that person
Visualise (picture, imagine, whatever you want to call it)
I ignored this portion of the instruction because it was unnecessary to answer the question of what might happen to the ball if it were pushed by someone. I didn’t visualize anything until moving on to the spoiler questions. Even then, my brain mostly went “nah, we’d just be making up something to fill in details irrelevant to the question, don’t waste the energy”.
Maybe I am broken by all the physics thought experiments, but my image was very bare-bones
spoiler
I imagined a small ball (roughly of size of my fist) but only an outline, no features, I did not imagine practically anything about person - just a force (imagined impulse was parallel to table plane) - I did imagine ball rolling (considered forward rolling, as opposed to impulse on center of mass (which in a frictionless situation would make it just linearly translate, or backspin) and falling from the table after a few seconds
In my head, a red rubber ball the size of a baseball rolls off a square wooden table and falls on the floor. A guy pushed it.
Edit: I knew ahead of time. I added more detail once I saw the quiz but I can imagine pretty vivid images.
I have hyperphantasia according to these kinds of tests (although I am not sure how accurate they are). In any case, the ball was white with a green glow it was smooth and looked like plastic but no seams where the halves were joined, male, like a large blue bird I saw in a cartoon, a bit larger than a baseball, the table was a very long rectangle shape. It was also white. The ball was pushed very hard from one end of the table to the other and then it bounced on the wall, the floor and the ceiling. The room was a bit small, with only a very small window rectangular window. It was black behind the window. The room was also rectangle shaped, with concrete grey walls. It was a bit dark, but there was some artificial light from a lamp. The bird acted very cartoonish when pushing the ball. I think that is all.
My answers:
- What color was the ball? Metallic silver
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball? A woman
- What did they look like? Short straight black hair, pale skin tone, fit build, black blouse, plaid skirt, black leggings, wearing black pumps
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? Slightly larger than a baseball, slightly smaller than a softball
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Wood, square, about 1 meter/yard square, thick square legs one at each corner.
Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions? All of this was a picture before seeing the questions. Other things about the image that weren’t asked were also there like:
- the room was lit from a single light bulb above the table with a wide shade. Light was cast straight down on the table/ball and extended slightly beyond the table, but I couldn’t see how big the room was…until the ball rolled off the table and hit the floor. I could tell the floor was smooth wood and the walls in the room must also be of a hard material because the sound of the solid ball hitting the floor reverberated. The light showed one wall was red brick. It was indoors.
