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?
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.
deleted by creator
I’ve never head of this test before now. Spoiler tags to help others avoid the answers before they take the test.
Tap for spoiler
The ball was somehow chrome but not reflective, and bigger than a large marble. The table was a flat plane with no features. The person pushing the table had no features. There were no other features within this thought space
I can visualize things in my mind, but it’s not… Clear? Like it’s not as vivid as seeing with my actual eyes. It’s like seeing images as reflections on tinted glass. Dark, murky. Muted colors. There is also an emphasis with text. I think of a ball. I imagine a red ball with the text “Ball” above or below it.
In the scenario given, I see a dark image of a red ball on a wooden table. A hand not attached to a person pushes the ball. The ball rolls across the table and falls off. There is text below describing the situation.
It’s important to know if the text was displayed in comic sans or not.
Times New Roman.
Papyrus you heathen
Nyeh-heh-heh!
For me it’s kinda unfocused, like I can imagine a ball on a table and someone giving it a push.
Only after I force myself to think a bit harder about it, I get a regular square wooden table in a kitchen-esque room, with a silver pinball on it, while a guy approaches it and gives it a small push, at the same time, the post didn’t ask me to imagine the ball falling off the table, so the ball barely rolls at all.
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?
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.
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.
I fantasized all the details as they were asked in the prompt, but didn’t give an identity to the ball-pusher until the quiz asked for it.
The ball was white/light gray. It has the surface texture of plaster of Paris, but it is somewhat lighter than would be appropriate for its canteloupe-like size.
I don’t think I actually pictured a whole person as pushing the ball, more likely it was a disembodied hand or the general sensation of pushing it myself.
I remember being specifically intrigued that I pictured the ball rolling back towards the center of the table and pondering why I had chosen the table to be slightly concave. I don’t remember more attributes of the table, but I have the feeling that has more to do with inattention to its details rather than not picturing them at the time.
I imagine that, based on the framing of the story, my interpretation was to picture the sphere as a literal entity, but the person as the “concept of a push”… The table probably lied somewhere in the middle.
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
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
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.
spoiler
- The ball started out crystal, then changed to a colourful pool ball, off-white & yellow / red,
- The person doing the pushing had no distinct features / might have been me in the first person / was otherwise unremarkable, most of the visualization starts after the point of pushing the ball
- ditto.
- ditto
- The ball was roughly pool ball sized.
- the table was a relatively non descript wooden (pine coloured) dining table, in a kitchen / dining room ish area with the vague sense of cabinets and a counter behind it, but these were all very blurry and non descript
spoiler
I feel like I started to picture something more specific, but as soon as it asked what happens next I deliberately cleared the details from my mind and re-imagined it as generically as possible so my prediction wouldn’t be biased by anything not explicitly stated.
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 don't have aphantasia, but a rather vivid imagination sometimes. Also, a lot of my answers were indirectly influenced by my immediate surroundings:
- What color was the ball? - Red
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball? - Male
- What did they look like? - I only imagined seeing the person up to the waist, approaching the table and giving a push to the ball. I pictured him with social attire.
- What size is the ball? - Tennis ball, but very smooth. It was smack dab in the middle of the table, too.
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? - Round glass.
A question for those of you who have, or suspect you have aphantasia, how are your dreams like? Can you imagine and “hear” sounds?
I recall dreams the same way as I recall real events. There are no actual images or sounds that I can “see” or “hear” in my mind as I think back on the events, but I know I’ve seen and heard those things. So it’s difficult to answer the question. Did I “see” things in my sleep, but remember them only as ideas, or were they just ideas in the dream too? I tend to think it was the former.
how are your dreams like
Pretty sure I dream normally. Can’t discern faces but I know I can see things.
Can you imagine and “hear” sounds?
Basically how I function. If I’m thinking of a song I know decently well or heard recently it’s like a live show I can control. Just with the lights off.
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.
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.
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.
