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 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.
No matter how much I tried to focus, all I can see is Mickey Mouse in a magician’s cap trying to control buckets and mops.
I might have hyperfantasia.
- 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 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.
The ball is black, the table is black, the human is black. They’re all just blobs I tell myself exist so I feel normal.
At first I saw something silhouetted on a card table. Then Action entered the story and I had to choose an adventure after being asked what happened.
I figured how it rolls might depend on who pushed it, and I already knew that. Kevin. Why he did it was less clear. Muscle memory placed us at a table in the canteen. Sitting across from him on any ordinary day, some rolled up piece of napkin or a wad of garbage paper might present itself as a projectile to reach him across the plates and glass between us.
Tonight we were in my kitchen, together there for the first time. I’d moved the table into the corner with both leaves open to make extra space for snacks for the party. We pushed the pretzels and empties aside and sat facing each other off the edge of the table, knees nearly interlocked.
My chin was on my hand and my heart was on the ceiling. We were laughing about something when I noticed the toy baseball on the table. The stairs creaked and the sound of background chatter crept in like a breeze that chilled my spine. He flicked the ball, and it rolled fast off the edge then fell to the floor with a flat thud.
The phone on the wall behind him rang, and I clicked to review the test questions.
