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?
The ball was red, like a red rubber ball. The person was sort of indistinct from the neck up, it was more like my view was focused on the ball itself and didn’t see a face, but it was a man, wearing a white shirt and dark tie, and dark pants. The ball was about the size of a baseball, wasn’t completely smooth and shiny, sort of a matte with a slight grippy texture. Table was square, wood, like a medium brown color. The ball rolled off the table and bounced a few times.
All these decisions were automatic when reading the prompt, it’s what I saw.
I’ve just become aware of aphantasia myself, I have a few family members who have it apparently. I was talking to my BIL about it the other day, I was saying how I’m a big fan of reading, but I mostly read nonfiction. He said he doesn’t read much, mostly biographies, but fiction doesn’t do much for him because he can’t picture anything in his head. I can picture everything in great detail when I read fiction. Its interesting because our minds work very differently
I imagined the same red, baseball-ish sized rubber ball. Not sure why that’s my default for “ball.”