This is a thought experiment "Ball on a Table" for detecting whether someone has Aphantasia. What do you see when you perform this experiment?
This is a thought experiment "Ball on a Table" for detecting whether someone has Aphantasia. What do you see when you perform this experiment?
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?
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Oh my! I didn't know what to expect, and I have to say... I was quite surprised by some of your answers. Also confirmed to me that I am definitely not normal
Not many replies that are indicative of Aphantasia so... here goes nothing. I tried really hard at this okay
spoiler
I don't "see" see anything when I close my eyes. I can create a very vague concept of a ball, a table, and... kind of a person in my head, but I don't actually see the scene, I used to think when people say imagining things they were just making a metaphor. Things get really funk from here... But the overall schema feels more like one of those badly drawn scenes from the hit visual novel Slay the Princess. And yes I imagined it in 2D for some reason
- Color: the ball doesn't have a color
- Gender: it wasn't even a real person; it seems like a silhouette of the hand and back of a person
- Looks: As I said, the person isn't even facing me
- Size: No idea; in retrospect it's fairly large compared to the table (diameter probably 1/2-1/3 of table?), but the table is also an abstract concept so...
- Table: no clue, it is a square table but that's it. If anything it looks like the things served on Pizza Hut pizzas
- Well I spoiled the question for myself so... but I didn't have to choose, heck I couldn't choose even if I know what the questions are
Just as an exploration with you on this. Use your same instructions for the placing and actions with one difference.
The room is pitch black, and you can't see a thing.
What do you hear?
Click for review questions:
- what did the steps of the person sound like? Can you tell what kind of shoes they have with "heal/toe" impact sounds? single thumps indicating flat footfalls? nothing?
- how long were they walking before they got to the table?
- Did the ball make any sound as it rolled on the table? What kind of sounds? What kind of table would make that sound?
- When the ball hit the floor did it bounce or fall flat? Was there an echo? Did the sound of the fall indicate you're in a tiny room or a giant room?
- How close was the person to your point of observation?
- Could you hear the person breathing?
- What else did you hear that I didn't include here?
I am not joking; the only thing I can imagine is for some bizarre reason a bowling ball noise followed by a comical noise of striking pins. I know there is a person but I couldn't imagine that person
- The person didn't walk, that wasn't the focus of what I was imagining
- The ball didn't make a sound when it rolled, but I was imagining a soft futsal ball that would make almost no noise rolling on a table. If I'd been imagining a marble or something that would have been different
- The ball bounced once a bit, then fell flat, it's how a futsal ball bounces, it's a kind of "splat" sound with no echoes. I didn't imagine walls, so the room is effectively infinite sized
- The person wasn't really part of what I was imagining. They were there to give the ball a push, but otherwise were irrelevant, so I didn't focus on them in any way
If I'd let my fantasy get "polluted" by the other questions and stories, I'd have answered differently. With all the questions about the person, I'd have invented a person and effectively "panned out" so that the person was part of what I was thinking about. Instead I went with my original visualization which just involved an effectively disembodied hand giving a ball a push. If this were a TV show or something, the only part of the person that I ever saw was the hand that gave the ball a push, everything else was "out of frame". But, I wasn't imagining a "frame", just whatever my mind's eye was focused on, which was almost entirely the ball, and not anything else.
You imagined a lot more details than I did. For me it was just the concept of a ball. And then the idea of it moving. The person and the table were left our as irrelevant.
The thought experiment I use when explaining to people about aphantasia is a much simplified version of yours: "imagine a circle", "ok", "what color is it?"
That's it. People give an answer, sometimes including more details, like texture. Then I tell them that for me the question doesn't make sense, I just imagined the idea of a circle and didn't actually "see" anything, so there's no additional detail to it.
This sounds similar to how it works for me too. I closed my eyes to try this.
I saw a very rough version of the table that's in the room with me. The table is a low rectangular coffee table with a coarsely threaded grey throw over it going lengthways, but I saw it as a rectangular shape with a vague grey top. The ball was featureless with no colour, and was about the size of my fist, so an adult man's fist.
I saw a low quality arm push the ball, but I really struggled to picture it, and while I knew what would happen in real life, I couldn't picture it happening in my head.
It's strange, as sometimes I can picture things fairly well, but other times I can't do it at all. I have very vivid dreams on the occasions that I remember dreaming, but I can't close my eyes and picture my family. I know what they should look like, in the same way that I know what a rotating cow should look like, but I very rarely get any sort of mental image of them.
Ironically, I was in a coma a bit over a decade ago, and while I was in it, the dreams that I had were so realistic that it took me months to get things straight in my head.