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?
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
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?
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.
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.
My ball was gray, too. With no details whatsoever, just shading. In the edge of the table, a hand came from the left of the camera view with its index finger stretched out and poked the ball, which rolled a few inches and stopped (while in other faded versions of it the ball fell off the table or rolled further over the table surface)
spoiler-title
Am I the only one who imagined things that they interact with frecuently?
- The ball is green and its the one I got for my cat.
- Female, she gently pushed it with one finger
- It was my mom (idk why)
- About the size of a lemon.
- I just Imagined my table. Medium sized, thick with fake wood vinyl or something. I even imagined the mess that is on it.
I alredy knew, as I said, I imagined things I already know. And the ball bounced like 4 times before rolling out of the door.
What does it mean? lol
Edit: Added the spoiler thing. Quite interesting to read others replies.
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.
Orange
Male
He was a server in a black waistcoat, white shirt. He was brushing the ball off the table before setting plates down.
It was a ball from a kid’s ball pit, so a little bigger than a baseball, smaller than a softball.
The table was round, with a red gingham table cloth.
The orange ball on the red gingham table cloth were there immediately, once instructed to visualize a person pushing it, it only made sense that it was a server, since the table seemed restauranty.
My answers:
- What color was the ball? Red
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?: seen from the bust, but a masculine physique
- What did they look like?: Grey shirt, light skinned, clean nails, hands looks slightly worn.
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?: Tennis ball size. Smooth and has a good bounce, but sounds solid.
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Rectangle. Wooden. Smooth, but had a knot in it.
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?
I already knew? . I had to visualize it first to answer any 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.
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.
OK today I learned I may have aphantasia.
It suffices to say, the follow up questions were bizarre to me.
Under aphantasia, Wikipedia has a long list of famous people who have or had it.
How can these guys have aphantasia?
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Mark Lawrence, fantasy author[56]
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Yoon Ha Lee, science fiction author
I don’t think I’m clear on what you’re asking? Is it that you’re confused as to how a person can be a fantasy or sci-fi author with aphantasia?
If that is what you’re asking, then as someone with aphantasia, I likely can’t explain how that can happen anymore than people who don’t have aphantasia (like you, I presume) could explain to me what it’s like to visualise things. What I can say is that whilst I don’t tend to read fiction much nowadays, I used to be an avid reader of both sci-fi and fantasy. I’ve found that immersive writing tends to involve descriptions that involve more senses than just sight, and also that the environment can be effectively described through how characters interact within the world. A well described world might be easy to visualise, but I don’t think that being able to visualise things is necessary for producing that.
Not least of all because all the best writers also read a lot, and fiction is predominantly written by and for people who don’t have aphantasia. Through this, I would expect that an author with aphantasia would become proficient in writing that facilitates readers’ visual imaginations, even if they themselves didn’t engage with fiction in that manner.
But how would someone with aphantasia be able to describe a fictional world well?
By definition they would need to describe something that they can’t visualise
I’m not sure what definition you’re referring to, but I don’t see any reason why visualisation is necessary.
By analogy, I used to have a friend who was born with no sense of smell. This also greatly impacted his sense of taste. Despite this, he was an excellent chef. I once asked him about this apparent contradiction and he explained that because he knew this was something he lacked (it was discovered when he was a teenager), he had put extra work into learning how. He was very reliant on recipes at the beginning, because that was more formulaic and easier to iteratively improve. He most struggled with fresh ingredients that require some level of dynamic response from the cook (onions become stronger tasting as they get older, for example), but he said he’d gotten pretty good at gauging this through other means, like texture or colour or vegetables, and finding other ways of avoiding that problem (such as using tinned tomatoes, for consistency).
I found it fascinating that his deficits in taste/smell actually led to him being an above average cook due to him targeting it for improvement— I met him at university, where many of my peers were useless at cooking for themselves at first. To this, he commented that it wasn’t just the extra effort, but the very manner in which he practiced; obviously he couldn’t rely on himself to test how well he’d done, so he had to recruit friends and family to help give feedback, which meant he was exposed to a wide variety of preferences and ways of understanding flavour. He also highlighted that the sampling bias in my surprise — that all the times that he had cooked for me were things he had loads of experience cooking with and so he could work from knowledge about what works. Most people who had as much cooking skill and experience as he had would be way more able to experiment with new ingredients or cuisines, whereas my friend had to stick to what he knew worked.
I wonder whether aphantasic authors might feel similar to my friend — like they’re operating from recipe books, relying on formulae and methods that they know work.
Why do you think you need to visualize something to imagine or describe it? It’s just a wholly different way of thinking.
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The ball falls off the edge but doesn’t make a sound, effectively disappears from the scene.
Glass ball for some reason
Nondescript woman, no distinct features, blurry at the edge of perception. Vaguely wearing business clothes.
Ball was softball size
Table was featureless but the size and color of the table I’m sitting at now
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.
- Reflective metallic silver, like a ball bearing.
- genderless
- a mannequin silhouette
- about the size of a large grape? Like a superball.
- my wooden dining room table, background and all.
The focus seemed to be on picturing the table and ball, and the person pushing it was irrelevant other than to provide motive force, so I didn’t spend any time to fill in their details.
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.
Oh shit.
