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?
A vague thought of a ball and knowledge of what would happen. Nothing else.
Exactly. There’s no need to add more details unless that’s part of the requirements. Otherwise it makes it harder to keep track of things. Keep it simple first, then add complexity as needed.
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!
I remember when I was at school (this was 6th or 7th grade) and the teacher wrote
y = xand drew a diagonal line on a Cartesian plane. At that moment, I realized that the world was made of math and I was enlightened. I’m not exaggerating - the experience revolutionized the way I could think.The interesting thing to me is that I have worked with physicists who appear to be capable of even higher levels of abstraction than I am. If I read an equation, I need to think about its geometrical representation but they claim to think directly in terms of equations. (Pure mathematics, not the letters and numbers that make up the written equation.) I believe them because they can comprehend equations much faster than I can; they and I would go to talks where the presenter just put up slide after slide of equations and I would be lost almost immediately while they were able to follow along. I don’t think that’s simply because they’re much smarter than I am, because I am otherwise generally able to match them intellectually.
I wish I had their brain type, I struggled in math to remember the formulas. I had a great time learning it, otherwise. Calculus was awesome, I had never considered measuring the rate of change of the rate of change and I got pretty excited. Set theory was great too.
So, in this experiment you’re asking people to picture a certain situation that doesn’t call for any specific details, then asking them to describe the unnecessary details they came up with: colour of the ball, etc.
I’m curious if the people who have aphantasia can picture something in their heads when it does call for all that detail.
Picture a red, 10-speed bike with drop handlebars wrapped with black handlebar tape. It’s locked to a bike rack on the street outside the library with a U-lock. You come out of the library and see that the front wheel has been stolen. Think about how that would look. Picture the position of the bike, and anything you might look for if it were your bike and you were worried. Pretend you needed to examine the situation in as much detail as possible so you could file a police report.
Questions
- Were your front forks resting on the ground, or up in the air?
- Was there any other damage done to your bike or to the lock?
- Are there any other bikes nearby? People nearby? Security cameras that might have caught the crime?
My mental image of the bicycle changed as each detail was added, but sometimes the detail changed the image (the handlebars were straight until you said they were dropped) and sometimes the detail didn’t exist; the dropped handlebars were wrapped in handlebar tape, but that tape didn’t have a colour (not sure how to explain that better) until you mentioned it was black. Most of the details “added” something to the scene rather than “changing” an assumed detail.
The “front forks on the ground” question was particularly interesting to me.
The bicycle started with two wheels, and front wheel just sorta disappeared from my image when you mentioned it was stolen, but the front fork remained floating in the air as if there was a wheel still supporting it. But asking the question about the forks on the ground made gravity exist, and then there had to be a reason it was floating, which became it was being held up by the U-Lock.
I seem to imagine scenes with few superfluous details that mostly includes only what is mentioned or implied by the narrative. But it’s super interesting to me what details we’re in fact implied.
The ball on the table was similar. The table was at waist height to the person, and the ball had a specific size of roughly the size of a racket ball because it had to be something that could be easily pushed. But the person pushing it was just a silhouette of a person, it had no gender, the only thing I pictured clearly was the hand that pushed the ball. It was pushed in an intentional way that made the ball roll across the table away from the “person” (as opposed to bouncing, or pushed sideways)
The table was just an elevated plane it had no texture, or even legs supporting it, (probably because there was no ground for those legs to be on,) it didn’t go on forever, you could see the end of the table, but it also didn’t have a size.
Also conjuring up unnecessary details is a hyperphantasia thing, not doing it doesn’t mean you have aphantasia.
I’m sure it depends on the extent of the unnecessary details Thinking the ball is red is surely not hyperphantasia.
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
I’ve noticed that after getting older, suffering several concussions, a short spat with drinking, and COVID that my ability to picture things in my mind has degraded a lot since childhood.
Does your ability to imagine things naturally decline? I remember as a lad I could vividly imagine the feeling of things. My imagination was also much more colorful. But I could never see things in 3D like some people can (I’ve worked with some really talented tradesmen/machinists who can like assemble or fold or machine a piece in their mind, I don’t know maybe that’s just practice)
I have complete aphantasia, I can’t even visualize a ball or table, or anything else - never have been able to, I see absolutely nothing when I close my eyes and can’t visualize or see things in my head at all except when dresming. Same for my Dad. He can apparently visualize an extremely tiny amount (like the night sky but just black + stars, etc) when he’s high on thc gummies. I’ve never been high so idk if it works for me.
It took me 24 years to realize that people actually can actually see images in their head when they think about something or intentionally imagine it. I always thought that phrases like “picture it in your head” or “see in your head what it will look like” were just phrases, not that people actually can see things when they think about it.
Hmm have you been on LSD? I’m curious if your experience with it is different from someone who doesn’t have aphantasia?
Nope, haven’t done anything harder than ibuprofen tbh, never had a desire to try. I do dream visually though
I imagined it in a cartoon-ish fashion, so I think I can actually draw it out.
- Red ball
- Male
- Like Google’s default profile picture, without facial features, except he’s in gray and has a neck
- My single hand can surround more than half of it in a cross section view, so about 12cm in diameter
- Rectangular table, about 5:2, I didn’t imagine the material, but it’s plain brown, so I guess wood?
Additionally, the ball rolls parallel to the long edge of the table, and falls off the short edge. The person also have legs.
I already had these in my mind before being asked.
My brother in Christ you have described almost the exact same specs I visualized. The only difference is in the level of resolution of my “scene.” And by that, I mean essentially I did a few more render passes in my head to anchor everything you’ve written within a sort of Impressionistic, highly softened, out-of-focus backdrop. I saw hints of shadowy cabinets, the concept of a darkened kitchen out of sight. The shape and finger placement of my slightly more textured, clothed yet featureless male. The gray-brown feeling of a floor below, a dark white ceiling above, and the faded glow of sunlight through an unseen dining room window grazing one end of that oaken table.
But the basics … They’re the same, and before being asked to recall them. Damn.
I mean, people will imagine a similar thing when asked to imagine something specific. At the end of the day there’s just so many ways to imagine someone pushing a ball off a table.
More or less but person didn’t have gender because that wasn’t relevant to the subject which was the rolling ball. Ball also bounced a few times when hitting the floor.
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.
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
This test was unexpected for me. I love fiction, especially fantasy. I love playing tabletop RPGs. I play solo RPGs and try to imagine the events in my head. I daydream a lot.
But I didn’t have an answer for any of the questions. I believe it’s because I took a utilitarian view to the exercise. I assumed it was about the ball being pushed and the motion of the ball and all of the information the questions asked about was irrelevant. But, I don’t know. I’m also autistic.
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- What happens to the ball? It rolls of the side of the table.
- Color: I didn’t imagine a specific color
- Gender: I didn’t imagine a specific gender. Most of the person was “out of the frame”
- What did they look like: Again, most of the person was out of the frame, they were just kind of a gray silhouette
- What size was the ball? Like a dodgeball I guess?
- What about the table? Very minimalist square table made up of five rectangular prisms (the surface and four legs). No specific material, uniform texture. I imagined everything in isometric perspective.
This is what I recall from my first time imagining the scenario, I’d have to imagine some more if I wanted to give specific answers.
With all due respect, I don’t believe aphantasia is a real thing. The way people imagine things is so varied, weird, strange, and unique that I don’t think it makes sense assigning labels. Different people will give varying levels of detail to different parts of their imagination based on their past experiences and knowledge.If you ask someone to imagine a chessboard, someone who plays chess might imagine a specific opening or valid board state, while someone who doesn’t might just have a vague blob of chess pieces on a board.
Even with your ball on a table experiment, the experiences people have had throughout the day may give more or less detail to the imagined scenario. I’m fairly certain that the reason I imagined everything so abstractly is because recently I found an artwork with a similar minimalist isometric style that I liked a lot, so it’s kind of floating around in my subconsciousness and affecting how I imagine things.
I was really surprised when I learned that the inner eye wasn’t just some figure of speech, so I don’t see anything, certainly no extra visual details.
Something is still happening though, I can sort of “feel out” shapes/volumes and motion, like depth perception with no visuals attached.
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
OK today I learned I may have aphantasia.
It suffices to say, the follow up questions were bizarre to me.
- What color was the ball?
I didn’t see a color in my visualization, but I know it was red.
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
They were genderless; more of a concept of a person than an image of one.
- What did they look like?
Like…an area of visual space that my mind attached the identifier “Person” to.
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
A little smaller than a tennis ball, but bigger than a ping pong ball.
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?
I didn’t see either property in my visualization, but it’s wooden and round.
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?
Lol. Well, I guess I botched that one. Obviously I did not know before being asked these questions, for most of the answers.
What does it mean if the first time I pictured the ball being pushed I noticed it was sliding instead of rolling and corrected it
Neat!
spoiler
- Red. It was rubber.
- Male.
- Tall, thin. I don’t remember a face, but he was wearing an old-fashioned formal shirt and sport jacket. The cuff of the shirt was unbuttoned and folded back. He also wore a wide-brimmed black hat. (I’m currently watching an episode of Hell on Wheels which probably influenced that.)
- Large for an apple, small for a canteloupe.
- Square, dinner-table-hieight. Dark-stained wood. I’m no woodworker, so I wouldn’t know what kind of wood it was, but I’ve got a couple of bookcases of the same wood and staining.
Aside from that, I can say it took place in an old cabin and in the background, I saw an open doorway to a… foyer? The door to the outside was open. It was very sunny. And I saw green grass outside.
And, I knew all those things before I got to the questions. I just had to consult/replay the scene in my head to get all the answers.
Seems fair to say I don’t have aphantasia.
