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?
Orange.
Dude.
Very stock photo, long dark green shirt untucked, but i had no details.
Like a big pomergranate, smaller than a football but bigger than an orange.
The table was made exclusively out of square shapes of the same dark brown, so for example no cylindrical feet. Kind of like a 3D model or the not-cheapest table at Ikea.
I had all of this before, but i didn’t “see” it in the sense that people ususally mean because i have the most complete aphantasia that you can have. If you were to ask me how i saw it in my mind without litterally seeing it in my eyes, i’d have no answer. It’s kinda like concepts.
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Red. Before
Dude. After
Me. After
Baseball. Before
White card table with grey liner. Before.
Ball rolled slightly forward after being judged by the person. Stayed in the table. Before
The ball was a colorless wireframe. Color wasn’t necessary for the scenario.
The person was genderless. Gender wasn’t necessary for the scenario. They looked like a wire frame skeleton of a person.
The ball was roughly the size and density of the smallest size bowling ball.
Table surface was circular wireframe with four legs. Material wasn’t filled in as I wasn’t trying to model for friction.
My imagination doesn’t tend to fill in unnecessary details. Too much wasted processing power. I also don’t really envision things. Like, I don’t “see” them in my head. I feel out the shapes and weights and other physical properties relevant to the scenario and let my intuitive understanding of physics roll the scenario forward.
Like, I know the ball rolled until it fell off the table, it fell some distance, then bounced off the floor three or four times with a sharp crack, as I filled in that the floor was concrete as soon as I needed to know how it would bounce, and the sound it would make filled in naturally from there.
I genuinely don’t know whether how I think qualifies as aphantasia. I don’t really imagine visual stimuli, but my imagination is very thorough for sound and feel.
Background: I did this experiment with the pre-existing belief that I likely have aphantasia.
Starting with the important question, no, I didn’t know the answer to these things before being asked
The ball was red, but I don’t think my initial “rendering” involved a colour of a ball at all, because the colour isn’t relevant to how it rolls. The ball felt cold, because that’s one of the ways I understood its weightiness, and thus how it rolls. The ball was small enough to hold in one hand, but in “visualising” its size, I imagined how it would feel in my hand. The ball I imagined was a bit larger than a tennis ball and much heavier. I can imagine the force my fingers would need to exert to grasp it.
The person who pushed the ball had no gender because it wasn’t relevant. When I considered the person’s gender, they were a woman, but that information seems to have gotten lost when I “looked away” by considering other questions; when I reread the questions, I “forgot” what gender the ball pusher was, and this time they were man. I suspect that because the information wasn’t relevant to the manner the ball was being pushed, the person pushing the ball was in a sort of superposition of gender, where they are both and/or neither man and/or woman, because it was liable to change whenever I “looked away”.
The ball pusher(s) didn’t look like anything unless I really pushed myself on this question and then I’m like “erm, I guess they were brunette?”, but I think a similar thing happens as with the gender question — unless I have a way to remember what traits I assigned to the ball pusher, I’m just going to forget and have to regenerate the traits. I suspect that if I were actively visualising something, these details would stick together better, like paint to a canvas.
The table has a similar effect of nebulousness. My only assumption before you asked further about the table was that it was level (because the ball started at rest) and rectangular/square. When I tried to consider the table in more detail, I asked myself “what can a table be made out of”. Wood comes to mind most obviously, because I have a wood table near me. Laminated particle-board is another thing. I also remember some weird, brightly coloured , super lightweight plastic tables from school. It could also be metal. It could have four legs, or it might have a central base like the dining table at my last house. It might be circular, or oval, or rhomboid. I think I just modelled it as squarish because I’ve learned enough mathsy-physics that I’m inclined to think of spherical cows, and having a straight edge is easier to model for mathematically, and to draw.
Brains sure are wacky, huh?
- The ball was red
- It was a man
- They wore a t-shirt and jeans
- A small sized ball, like a stress ball
- It was a plain wooden table made out of cheap particle board or laminated wood.
I had to think of questions to these answers after they were asked. The only things that I already knew were it was a red stress ball and that it was a cheaply made wooden table. I imagined that the ball simply began rolling towards the edge of the table. The person was amorphous at best.
I don’t think I have aphantasia, but I do think I have a weak imagination. When I try to conjure an object or place, it’s always like I’m peering through a keyhole. Like an image with too much vignette. The objects are usually non-descript and are more like concepts than things.
The ball was a blue pool ball, on a wooden table that I can’t describe because I suck at describing things (but I do have a visual of it). I didn’t even imagine the person beyond the hand coming up to push it off.
The ball color might have been decided on the moment I read the question, I’m not sure whether it was part of my image before that. Person is still nondescript even after trying to “zoom out”. I just can’t seem to come up with it.
Before reading the questions I visualized an all white room, with an average square wooden table with a red ball about the size of the baseball on it and the person was a white man with black hair in a grey suit.
- Ball rolls a bit but stops before going off the edge of the table
- Red
- Male
- Avg Height/Build, Brown hair, shaved face
- Like twice the size of a marble, like a bouncy ball
- Square, wooden table, lightly stained.
Knew the answers before being asked.
Ping pong ball on a circular wooden table. It took me a second to decide the shape. I can see the boards but I only focused on the tabletop and the ball so the environment wasn’t defined. The person pushing the ball wasn’t well-defined either. No shadows on the ball. If I go back and re-visualize it with more effort I can imagine the details (environment and person), but by default I don’t. I steal the environment from my memories by default but can imagine something else if I try. Shadows and light are very hard to get right even when trying, unless I’m only imagining one object or purposely thinking of something specific (ie light reflecting through a glass).
The ball rolls for a bit then stops
- Colorless ball
- Didn’t image a gender, just the concept of a person
- They didn’t look like anything
- I guess a perfect colorless sphere roughly the size of a tennis ball
- Pretty much just a rectangular flat surface. There’s no color or material
I didn’t know much about it except the size of the ball being roughly proportional to the size of a human hand
Amateurs, all respondents imagined something new.
My mind is so efficient, it just plays something back.
Except he pushed it towards her instead of picking it up.
I’ll participate.
The ball is silver colored/metallic, grapefruit size. A man resembling my partner pushed the ball. The table is a plain square wooden shaker-style.
I began imagining as soon as I started reading, with each additional word adding detail in my mind. By the time I got to the questions it was easy to answer them.
I have a question OP. Do you read fiction? Recently I’ve been wondering if aphantasia’s why some people don’t, almost seen unable, to read and enjoy.
I have known people with aphantasia who were avid readers of fiction, and I’ve read accounts that more or less say “good writing allows me to somewhat vicariously enjoy a sense that I don’t have, perhaps similar to how deaf people can enjoy music.”. Besides that, fiction is so diverse that the necessity of visualisation ability likely varies across genres, authors, time periods etc…
My gut says that aphantasia would almost certainly affect how people would engage with fiction, but that it’s not a determinant of whether they do or not. Ditto for autism (indirectly responding to OP: I have anecdotally found that autistics are rarely ambivalent on fiction — we either can’t get enough of it, or can’t engage with it at all. Some people I have known have directly attributed their love of fiction to their autistic modes of being)
This is a good point… I strongly prefer nonfiction over fiction, but it could just be Autism. I really only read fiction if it is really, really good… but I read them in the same way as I would read a nonfiction book as well, I’d be more interested in the themes of the book
- Striped white and blue
- Male
- Casual clothing, nondescript
- About the size of a softball
- Round wooden table
All of this came before I was asked about it.
