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 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.
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.
Dang, interesting! I have no text in mine.
It’s a clear vision of a red ball you’d play dodgeball with, on a stark, small, circular table with a wide white top and a single metal leg with a ring bottom.
The person is a fully black, like, men’s room door sign person fur me, and the ball falls off and bounces with realistic dodgeball physics and I can hear the THONK… THONK… THONK. THONK THONK THONKTHONKTHONK rollllllllll sounds as it falls. When I imagine this scenario I can also smell the ball and feel the texture of the ball and the table. The person is the only thing that isn’t realistic.
I had a wildly vivid imagination as a kid… and I’ve always had synesthesia.
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 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.
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
The ball, a red ping pong ball of maybe 1.5-2 inches diameter, is on a square, concave white, glazed ceramic plate that is on a rectangular matte white table that is plastic. I have no idea why the ball is on a plate but that’s how it is when I imagine it for some reason. The entire room is white with a door on the wall that I am looking towards. The door slowly opens, and it is me (I’m a girl)! I look exactly like I do when I look at myself in photos. When I push the ball with my hand, it gets pushed off of the plate and lands on the table. It rolls toward the end of the table and bounces on the floor twice, making a noise you’d expect a ping pong ball to make when it collides with hard flooring. The whole scene looks like how a YouTube video of it being physically acted out would look like.
I already knew after I read the prompt. It was like a little YouTube video playing in my head! 😃
