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?
That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I’d been asked in a way that didn’t feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.
The ball is black, the table is black, the human is black. They’re all just blobs I tell myself exist so I feel normal.
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.
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.
Table is wooden with a reddish brown stain and a glossy finish. The ball I picture is red rubber about the size of a grapefruit. “someone walks up to the table” I see a caucasian woman in her 30s with blonde hair in slacks, a long sleeve shirt and a sweater vest, she has slightly long nails. She pushes the ball with a flick of her fingers, it bounces/skips a couple times and then rolls off the end of the table. Sounds kind of like a tennis ball hitting the carpet, it bounces across the room, hits the baseboard on an adjacent wall and comes to a stop.
Everything above I wrote before even opening the follow-up questions. About the only thing I didn’t think to mention is the table is a solid top rectangular dining table about 6 by 3 feet.
The “camera angles” might be slightly weird, at first I see the ball from a point of view about an inch off the table, then as it rolls off the table I “see” from my normal standing height but I only hear the ball bounce because the table is in the way, and I see it hit the wall and come to a stop from about kneeling height.
I see things photorealistically but I don’t have peripheral vision. The way my mind parsed the sentence “someone walks up to the table and gives the ball a push” I processed “pushes the ball” first and I saw a woman’s hand reach into my field of view to push the ball, then I processed “walks up to the table” and my field of view turned to look at her.
Really interesting reading your follow up post in here. It’s so incredible to hear about how differently people can think.
I imagined the scene in detail, but to pay attention to all the details I had to think back to it and examine each part of what I imagined, if that makes any sense.
I pictured a side camera angle with a white metal table and a light blue wall behind. The ball was a soccer ball, and it was pushed by a woman’s hand wearing a gray knit sweater. Only the hand and forearm are “in frame”. Her arm comes in from the right side and pushes the ball to the left, rolling it across the table.
So my ball was the ball from toy story on a round wooden kitchen table. Probably the table from my childhood home. So the ball is yellow with a blue stripe and a big red star. It has shading and a shadow. I switched it out for a golf ball, but that didn’t seem right, so back to the bouncy ball from toy story, bigger than a baseball, smaller than a kickball. Because it’s the ball from toy story, the young man pushing it is toy story animation style. I tried switching him out for a regular human, but it just seemed wrong so I couldn’t. He goes with the ball.
Oh shit.
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.
This sounds similar to how it works for me too. I closed my eyes to try this.
I saw a very rough version of the table that’s in the room with me. The table is a low rectangular coffee table with a coarsely threaded grey throw over it going lengthways, but I saw it as a rectangular shape with a vague grey top. The ball was featureless with no colour, and was about the size of my fist, so an adult man’s fist.
I saw a low quality arm push the ball, but I really struggled to picture it, and while I knew what would happen in real life, I couldn’t picture it happening in my head.
It’s strange, as sometimes I can picture things fairly well, but other times I can’t do it at all. I have very vivid dreams on the occasions that I remember dreaming, but I can’t close my eyes and picture my family. I know what they should look like, in the same way that I know what a rotating cow should look like, but I very rarely get any sort of mental image of them.
Ironically, I was in a coma a bit over a decade ago, and while I was in it, the dreams that I had were so realistic that it took me months to get things straight in my head.
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?
Ball color and size, and table shape and color were the only things I distinctly pictured, and the ball being deformed when pushed. Everything else was still sort of abstracted and not specifically visualized, and the table color changed to improve the contrast as I imagined the scene. If I stop and really focus on the scene I think I would fill in more specific details but at my pace of reading that’s as far as it went. I think unless I have a reason to do otherwise I tend to visualize the minimum necessary.
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Maybe the ball was light blue, I smaller than a baseball maybe standard stressball sized?
I didn’t exact gender the person but did kinda imagine dude-hands because I was looking at my phone with my hands holding it. And I just imagined maybe a wood table, like a dinner table.
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!
- The ball was red and smooth and uniform and shaded like it had been painted there or 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, fuzzy, void-white silhouette adorned only by a similarly featureless light blue t-shirt, black pants and black hair, all so ill-defined it was as if they they had been hastily cut from craft paper and slapped over top the glowing form. Like the color scheme of the fitness boxing mascot, but the more simplified form of South Park Canadians, and more amorphous.
- 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. It looked distinctly like it was out of a low poly video game.
Important question: The ball and table were distinct and known but oddly not “real-life”. The person was very indistinct and the gender is merely speculation. The edges defining their arms and hands became more defined as they approached and interacted with the ball. The color and form of the clothing and hair manifested then too.
Interestingly, I “know” the visualization took place in my kitchen, in an orientation different than my actual kitchen table. I saw the light from the windows Illuminate the table and the ball, and I could tell where I was in the space watching it happen, but the kitchen wasn’t there and neither was I. The table, ball and person appeared alone in a murky dark void.
- The ball was red
- The person was of indeterminate gender, I only really saw their arm
- They were wearing a blue button up over a white shirt
- The ball is about the size of an orange, and it rolled forwards
- The table was made of wood
I had to picture it again to get the shirt color but not the rest. I can say that the background was dark, almost like a dimly lit billiards hall, and there was a light shining on the ball
