Ask Lemmy

I don't literally SEE it like I would with my eyes but:

Red ball

Clown, no idea of gender

Again, clown

Ball smaller than tennis ball, bigger than golf ball

The table I am sitting at and looking at right now.

And no, I can and do imagine how things look. It's a different sort of knowing/imagining than actual physical vision or dreaming though. Which led me to be confused about what exactly aphantasia is.

• Small push, ball rolls a very short distance and stops
• No color
• Male, maybe an extension of myself doing the push
• I did not visualize a complete person, only a suggestion of a body, and a arm/hand to push the ball
• Size of two fists together
• I did not visualize a full table, more like a camera view of a tabletop. Nondescript wood finish.

Did I already know? Sort of... My brain rotated through multiple possible imaginings. It worked forward, then reversed the logic to complete the scene. Nothing was set in stone: My brain decided that the ball would not roll off the table. Why? The ball has an uneven surface, it wobbled when stopping. Why? Because it has a surface like a soccer ball. Why? Because that was the first "look" my brain landed on that answered the question. I recall rotating through different colors and finishes, but after my brain imagined the ball stopping I had to come up with a why.

It's a gentle push so the ball rolls for a second before falling off the edge of the table and bouncing away on the floor.

Ball Color: Bright red

Pusher Gender: Masculine

Pusher appearance: Caucasian, Tan suit, head was out of frame

Ball size: Tennis ball sized, but smooth with a seam around the middle

Table appearance: A square, short end table on a white studio backdrop. Dark wood with a glossy coating.

The important question: I can confidently say every question I already knew and was just describing what I was seeing, with the exception of maybe the pushers clothing. After reading the question my focus shifted to it and it visually resolved and I described it. Looked and felt almost the exact same way that you might not notice the details of an object in your peripheral because the focus of the scene was the ball, and then at a prompt, shifting your gaze and taking note of that object at the edge. It was framed like some kind of ball demonstration physics video.

• What color was the ball?
  Grey, I suppose? It wasn't important until this question so it was kind of colorless, even though I could picture it.

• What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
  Androgynous.

• What did they look like?
  Nondescript.

• What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
  A bit larger than a softball.

• What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?
  It was a rectangular table. It shifted from being smooth and grey to a lightly finished maple, then back again.

• Important question:
  I didn't really think about these details until asked.

Very interesting!

It was a billiards/pool ball, but no idea which one as I just associate balls on tables with playing pool.

No idea on gender, formless concept.

No idea on looks, just a concept.

Whatever size a pool ball is, 2-3 inches? Just a concept though.

It is a pool table with green felt and a raised edge and six pockets because that is what a pool table is. Can't really see it. Just aware of it's general properties and how the felt and wood feels.

Eveey detail is based ona pool tabke and ball because my first thought about balls on tables is playing pool. Without the table detail I wouldn't have anything at all to work with.

OK today I learned I may have aphantasia.

It suffices to say, the follow up questions were bizarre to me.

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.

• What color was the ball? Grey.
• What gender was the person that pushed the ball? No idea, was there even a person? Couldn't really get it to move more than just rolling along.
• What did they look like? Se above, I've no idea as I couldn't really image a person.
• What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? Like a palintar in lord of the rings (commonly known as a "seeing stone" I believe?).
• What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Couldn't image a table, it just kinda layed in the emptyness.

TDLR, can't really image stuff and really can't image people, who especially not faces.

Blue

Gender-nondescript, like a drawing in a school book

See above

Tennis ball size

Square, particle board like Ikea furniture

Some of them I extrapolated upon after seeing the questions because having unknowns in your mind's eye is not uncomfortable to people with intellectual integrity

What I don't like about this experiment is that being hyperphantic doesn't necessarily mean "you need photographic visualizations of every scenario at all times". My mind conjures scenarios differently depending on context.

I can imagine myself barely being able to see a ball on a table, let alone a person moving into view.

I can see the ball having a glossy, low-res texture alla 1980s CGI, with the ball being pushed by a polygon figure, moving without any real animation and limply falling off the table with no gravitational speed.

I can picture a worn, shiny leather baseball sitting on an old coffee table, stained walnut. The person is Mark Wahlberg and he has a smirk on his face as he lazily finger-flicks the ball, which only barely makes it to the edge of the table before just being able to tip off the edge, bouncing twice with a heavy bomp-bomp and rolling unevenly for a couple seconds. Mark winces because his finger hurts now. I could also imagine the flavor of the baseball and what it would smell like.

The point is that an aphantic might only be able to visualize this scenario at best as well as the first description, or perhaps not even at all and they can only 'know' of the movements in the scene with zero visual or otherwise relation to it.

Hyperphantics generally can conjure near limitless detail and they can retain that information visually for long periods of time without much effort.

Red. Before

Dude. After

Me. After

Baseball. Before

White card table with grey liner. Before.

Ball rolled slightly forward after being judged by the person. Stayed in the table. Before

The ball was a colorless wireframe. Color wasn't necessary for the scenario.

The person was genderless. Gender wasn't necessary for the scenario. They looked like a wire frame skeleton of a person.

The ball was roughly the size and density of the smallest size bowling ball.

Table surface was circular wireframe with four legs. Material wasn't filled in as I wasn't trying to model for friction.

My imagination doesn't tend to fill in unnecessary details. Too much wasted processing power. I also don't really envision things. Like, I don't "see" them in my head. I feel out the shapes and weights and other physical properties relevant to the scenario and let my intuitive understanding of physics roll the scenario forward.

Like, I know the ball rolled until it fell off the table, it fell some distance, then bounced off the floor three or four times with a sharp crack, as I filled in that the floor was concrete as soon as I needed to know how it would bounce, and the sound it would make filled in naturally from there.

I genuinely don't know whether how I think qualifies as aphantasia. I don't really imagine visual stimuli, but my imagination is very thorough for sound and feel.

In my head, a red rubber ball the size of a baseball rolls off a square wooden table and falls on the floor. A guy pushed it.

Edit: I knew ahead of time. I added more detail once I saw the quiz but I can imagine pretty vivid images.

That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I'd been asked in a way that didn't feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.

1. The ball was red
2. It was a man
3. They wore a t-shirt and jeans
4. A small sized ball, like a stress ball
5. It was a plain wooden table made out of cheap particle board or laminated wood.

I had to think of questions to these answers after they were asked. The only things that I already knew were it was a red stress ball and that it was a cheaply made wooden table. I imagined that the ball simply began rolling towards the edge of the table. The person was amorphous at best.

I don't think I have aphantasia, but I do think I have a weak imagination. When I try to conjure an object or place, it's always like I'm peering through a keyhole. Like an image with too much vignette. The objects are usually non-descript and are more like concepts than things.

I'll participate.

The ball is silver colored/metallic, grapefruit size. A man resembling my partner pushed the ball. The table is a plain square wooden shaker-style.

I began imagining as soon as I started reading, with each additional word adding detail in my mind. By the time I got to the questions it was easy to answer them.

Blue rubbery ball with small dents in it like for a dog toy.

Pushed by a man in a suit with brown hair but face of Olaf Scholz because I did read a news about him prior.

Ball had a diameter somewhat smaller than a tennis ball but bigger than a golf ball.

White table with very flat plastic top, like in a students learning room. Because I automatically associated this as some kind of experiment which I often did at school.

I could feel the table I rested on while watching the man push the ball to fall of the table.

I have a high level of imagination and work creatively all day in my free time, be it doing art or playing creative games. But this never increased in a way, I remember being able to create these same quality images in my head since I was able to read as small child.

Visualizing takes work so generally only what's needed is there. But sometimes the darker thoughts escape out from the dungeon.

Small tennis sized ball whitish color on a whitish classic rectangular kitchen table. But the table is zoomed in quite much at the start so you only see the overside of it.

No specific gender, very neutral. Like a videogame character with few colors, white mostly. Now the scene is zoomed back to let you see the person walk up to the table.

Did not know. But when i read the others answers mine turned into a 1990 MTV music video where objects are immutable but displayed in lots of different ways, colors, textures, ... I also exploded it when the pwrson touched the ball for fun.

I have worked a lot in video games and scientific visualisation, so the test looks like something I'd make in a 3D engine I guess, least information possible to show the important things, the ball etc.

I can imagine and see about anything, colour, texture, forms, people, movements, but the more details the more zoomed in it gets. I can imagine you as lofi-girl looking at your phone, but expeession like "what the crap did I just read" imagining you reading this for example.

HTH

Edit: Added the spoiler thing. Quite interesting to read others replies.

The ball was black, made from rubber, tennis ball size. Only a hand was imagined. No particular colour or gender. The table was made from Elm.

So I cheated a little, because I'm at a table right now, so I didn't visualise the table just the ball on the table. It was about tennis size, but no texture, kind of light blue shading into lilac. The person pushing it was really just a hand.

So sounds like the only work I did was imagining the ball. I wouldn't say I knew in advance, and I wouldn't say I chose what it looked like. It just appeared and it was light blue.

Edit: the ball started rolling when pushed, but not long enough for me to know whether it fell off the table or not. But the rolling was just a concept. I can visualise things, but I can't visualise motion. Which I only discovered recently.

Everything was shadows with rainbow outlines, basically.

I think this is a fun exercise, but Idk I'm oblivious to a lot of things excepts shapes and interactions. More telling is my dreams tend to fall into two categories:

Objects without details but with crisp, colorful outlines and dark scenes with illuminated spacces where the more fleshed out areas that are illuminated.

And my ability to imagine is similar- if no lighting condition is given my mental image is shadows with rainbow outlines. If the instructions include lighting the details are more robust: A cat will have a color, a ball will be plain and white and softball sized.

Huh. So I imagined the ball on the table immediately as a colorless glass sphere on a white table. Before I even read the prompt to push the ball in my imagination I had already placed my index finger on the ball and was rolling it around it place like a fidgit so I just tapped the ball to push it with my index finger so the person who pushed the ball was me (non-binary) for reasons that I was already interacting with the ball anyway. I imagined this in the first person so I didn't really see myself in full. The ball itself was baseball sized and rolled a short distance, stopped and wobbled after being pushed.

I didn't think about what the table was made of but the ball itself was glass that was smooth and cold to the touch. The table was square, waist height and dining room table sized. The room these objects were in was featureless and visualization was instant upon reading.