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?

  • renzev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago
    • 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.

    • SybilVane@lemmy.ca
      01·
      1 month ago

      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.