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 visualized a blue ball the size of a tennis ball being pushed forward on a flat white surface by a shadowy figure with only the hand being visually clear. Upon the follow-up question, I believe that it solidified the gender in my mind to be male and also prompted me to think about the surface of the table edges in relation to where the figure stood. However, my main focus was on the blue ball and the hand pushing it forward over a white surface.
Grey, female, cartoonish with that weird bob round kind of look that comes with bushy brown hair that’s slightly longer than shoulder length, slightly larger than a ping pong ball, wooden square/rectangle, no.
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gray ball, about the size of a typical dodge-ball.
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Featureless, sexless “humanoid”; like a “suggestion of a person” or a “fuzzy shadow”.
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Round table. Nondescript. Most similar to one of those tall, small round tables you find in pubs. But again, featureless.
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Nothing happens when the human pushes it. The human can’t push it because the human has no physical form.
- small dull red rubber ball
- no obvious gender
- they looked simple, like a Simpsons character. Impression of having a body, but only actually saw their hand
- table was standard rectangular, wooden affair
My visualisation is quite chaotic, so I mostly see a jumble of overlapping objects then have to choose which one to focus on.
Surprisingly, I had a real hard time visualising the ball rolling on its own. The hand was either pushing it or it was bouncing off of the floor.
Interesting exercise!
I imagined a red dodgeball on a small brown table. The person was just a thick stick figure and when the ball fell it bounced.
The color and shape I didn’t actively choose, they cam be different, but I guess my brain has defaults.
The ball falling and bouncing, however, I had to actively think about, the same way I have to think about texture. I don’t have to think about where the ball would stop, or how much it would bounce tho.
