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?
What happens to the ball? It rolls slowly off the table, and bounces a few times away from the table before coming to a stop.
What color was the ball? Blue
What gender was the person that pushed the ball? Male
What did they look like? Tall, average build, short brown hair with facial hair, maybe mid-30s, gray shirt, brown pants
What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? A bit smaller than a basketball, like a ball for kids or a handball.
What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Round, wood, but like the cheap laminate kind with plastic edging. Metal legs. Like a cheap table you’d see in a school or office.
I feel like I imagined a lot more detail than others. The questions were really easy for me to answer, and like a lot of unnecessary details came to mind. The guy pushed the ball because he was asked to, and he didn’t know why he was there.
- rolls off the table, bounces a bit and rolls toward a glass door, where it also bounces gently after hitting the glass door. You could see outside into a yard that had a green garden in it. And trash bins outside.
- blue
- female, I think. But I didn’t pay much attention to the person at all.
- long light brown hair, wearing a winter jacket, facing away from me. So I couldn’t see their face.
- it was a dodgeball. Blue dodgeball. Not brand new. A few scuff marks on it. I could see like, the raised bumps on it.
- it was a dark brown thin wooden table. It had a tray with a vase in the middle of it with a green plant with long grass-like leaves. There was a black, modern looking chandelier hanging from the ceiling above it. The table kind of looked like it came from IKEA lol.
The reason this is so detailed is that I just so happened to imagine the kitchen from a friend’s house. I already know everything that’s in there. It was easy to picture. And no, I didn’t come up with any of this as a result of answering the questions. I just saw it in my head.
Blue rubbery ball with small dents in it like for a dog toy.
Pushed by a man in a suit with brown hair but face of Olaf Scholz because I did read a news about him prior.
Ball had a diameter somewhat smaller than a tennis ball but bigger than a golf ball.
White table with very flat plastic top, like in a students learning room. Because I automatically associated this as some kind of experiment which I often did at school.
I could feel the table I rested on while watching the man push the ball to fall of the table.
I have a high level of imagination and work creatively all day in my free time, be it doing art or playing creative games. But this never increased in a way, I remember being able to create these same quality images in my head since I was able to read as small child.
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
- 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.
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
- rolled to the left and up a bit, fell off
- Red
- male
- only saw the arm
- tennis ball sized
- folding card table
Very similar to mine. Although for me the ball was white and rolled right
I thought it was interesting I could only see the arm, probably because I wouldn’t be able to picture the full body
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 only knew the gender of the person and what kind of ball it was. I didn’t imagine the other things at my first try.
I imagined all the details for the items, but didn’t pay attention to the person. I don’t like looking at people’s faces.
Same. Is there anyone that likes looking at people’s faces?
My adhd ass missed the “someone” so it was a first person perspective. Lmao
I love how by default most tables were wooden and the balls were mostly about baseball size
For me it was a round coffee table and it was a lanky butler wearing white gloves who gently reaches out with index and thumb and pushes the baseball sized ball forward
Apparently I’m in spooky brain mode cause mine was a crystal ball
- 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.
With all due respect, I don’t believe aphantasia is a real thing.
It does, it’s a studied and proven condition. No idea why you wouldn’t believe it lol
I have aphantasia. The reason this experiment works is because someone with aphantasia will logically think about what they’re being asked, but since they’re not really “picturing” it, they won’t have any answers about details. Color, type, and size of the ball? I have no idea, that information wasn’t relevant to my mental checklist. For me, it really does work like a checklist. My brain supplies exactly zero imagery. For some people it’s more like a spectrum, where they might be able to have a hazy picture with minimal details.
But aphantasia is 100% real. It’s just hard for people to believe it because it’s so foreign to the way they’re used to thinking, in the same way it sounds unbelievably exhausting to me that regular people are constantly creating movies in their heads.
I think my brain might just be lazy… I skipped over the entire walk to the table part. And just imagined a detached arm pushing the ball on a surface, until it rolled off the surface and that was all.
Thanks for sharing this as well! I also just imaged a detached hand + short bit of lower arm pushing the ball (for which I did imagine it to be of a gray shiny metal slightly larger than the hand)!
And I also imaged a super plain square wooden table so when the questions about the person hit I was super confused wether or not this counted as aphantasia or not (because I am fairly certain that I don’t have it…)
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?
I have aphantasia, and people really struggle to comprehend what it means or what it’s like. Now to be fair, I don’t really comprehend how people without aphantasia think or process things either.
- Were your front forks resting on the ground, or up in the air?
No idea, all I could think was that the front tire was missing, it didn’t occur to me to think how that affected the bikes position.
- Was there any other damage done to your bike or to the lock?
I didn’t think about there being any damage.
- Are there any other bikes nearby? People nearby? Security cameras that might have caught the crime?
I had just thought of a bike rack with only my bike, no people or other bikes nearby. Looking for security cameras seems obvious now that you mention it, but I didn’t think of that. If you had said “what advice would you give if your friend walked out and found their bike had been stolen/vandalized” I probably would have thought of that, but trying to think of an abstract situation is much more difficult for me.
This was fun to read. Everytime I read a new detail the scene in my head changed :)
I’m aphantasic. You can say “picture this” followed by whatever you like. It’s not possible for me in any way. Growing up I honestly thought “picture this” or “close your eyes and see” was just metaphor. I legitimately didn’t understand other people can see things.
My mind has a verbal descriptive stream, and I’m good with muscle-based or proprioceptive spacial memory, and the two combine to handle most things, but nothing visual. So like I can easily describe things from memory or from an idea, and it’ll be fully consistent, but not something I see.
If you have aphantasia, and not just hypophantasia, it makes no difference how much detail is provided, there’s a total, fundamental, inability to visualize things.
So as someone who coaches sometimes I have to ask. Can you imagine and feel body movements? Sometimes I’ll ask someone to visualize themselves performing an action before they do it.
I’d imagine thinking through the thought has around the same mental impact. But that would be interesting to research as that advise always helped me massively in tennis.
Interesting point and I’m glad you made it, with a thought (?) experiment to check.
I think I am somewhat aphantastic, but not officially diagnosed.
Tap for spoiler
- Front forks down.
- No other damage.
- No other bikes, bike racks, or even street furniture. But as I read this question I retroactively added in the bike rack and street furniture outside my hometown’s library.
- Ball rolls about two feet and stops just before it rolls off the table.
- White ball, polished surface, shiny
- Male
- Tall person, slender build, light brown hair, clean shaven, white button-up collared shirt, blue jeans.
- Ball was a bit bigger than a billiard ball, but smaller than a baseball. Smooth, and heavy. Like a white cricket ball but with no seams.
- It was one of those large common fold-up trestle tables but with a white table cloth on it.
- I knew all those without having to think about it, or choose afterwards.
To me the imagery seemed like a cheesy “how to push a ball” educational video with a paid actor to demonstrate how to push the ball in the correct manner.
Colorless ball, around the size of a tennis ball on a colorless round table. Person was colorless, genderless, and generally without any distinctive features.
What is my diagnosis?
Yep pretty much what I got
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
Yeah I had a similar struggle. I don’t think I’ve been so caught off guard by a visualization.
