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?


  • @Fedizen@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    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.

  • @Godnroc@lemmy.world
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    06 months ago
    • What color was the ball? Blue
    • What gender was the person that pushed the ball? Male
    • What did they look like? Skinny, pants, dress shirt
    • What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? Blue, smooth, baseball sized
    • What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Around 2ft square, wooden, light color, four square legs

    All of this was built in my head with each part of the prompt. Pretty sure I don’t have aphantasia.

  • @AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    06 months ago
    spoiler

    I feel like I started to picture something more specific, but as soon as it asked what happens next I deliberately cleared the details from my mind and re-imagined it as generically as possible so my prediction wouldn’t be biased by anything not explicitly stated.

  • MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown
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    06 months ago
    • The ball was red and smooth and uniform and shaded like it had been drawn with colored pencil.
    • the gender of the person was indeterminate, perhaps leaning female
    • they did not have a definite look to describe, it was more a concept of a person. They were a featureless void-white silhouette adorned only by a similarly featureless light blue t-shirt, black pants and black hair all so generic and featureless as if they they had been hastily cut from craft paper and slapped together, but more… amorphous? Fuzzy? than cut paper. Like a weird cross between
    • the ball was slightly larger than a baseball but smaller than a softball
    • the table was rectangular, of beige ‘wood’ with a light grain, and very sharp edges, like out of a low poly video game. The grain even looked like a low-res texture
  • MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown
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    06 months ago
    • The ball was red and smooth and uniform and shaded like it had been painted there or drawn with colored pencil.
    • the gender of the person was indeterminate, perhaps leaning female
    • they did not have a definite look to describe, it was more a concept of a person. They were a featureless, fuzzy, void-white silhouette adorned only by a similarly featureless light blue t-shirt, black pants and black hair, all so ill-defined it was as if they they had been hastily cut from craft paper and slapped over top the glowing form. Like the color scheme of the fitness boxing mascot, but the more simplified form of South Park Canadians, and more amorphous.
    • the ball was slightly larger than a baseball but smaller than a softball
    • the table was rectangular, of beige ‘wood’ with a light grain, and very sharp edges. It looked distinctly like it was out of a low poly video game.

    Important question: The ball and table were distinct and known but oddly not “real-life”. The person was very indistinct and the gender is merely speculation. The edges defining their arms and hands became more defined as they approached and interacted with the ball. The color and form of the clothing and hair manifested then too.

    Interestingly, I “know” the visualization took place in my kitchen, in an orientation different than my actual kitchen table. I saw the light from the windows Illuminate the table and the ball, and I could tell where I was in the space watching it happen, but the kitchen wasn’t there and neither was I. The table, ball and person appeared alone in a murky dark void.

  • @ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    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.

  • tiredofsametab
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    06 months ago

    I can imagine it in the sense that I can understand what happens. There is nothing visual at all for me. My assumption was that it was roughly-tennis-ball-sized absent any other info, but it wasn’t even a person, just a hand pushing a ball (and again, just the idea and nothing visual) as no other info is relevant.

  • @masterspace@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago
    spoiler
    1. The ball started out crystal, then changed to a colourful pool ball, off-white & yellow / red,
    2. The person doing the pushing had no distinct features / might have been me in the first person / was otherwise unremarkable, most of the visualization starts after the point of pushing the ball
    3. ditto.
    4. ditto
    5. The ball was roughly pool ball sized.
    6. the table was a relatively non descript wooden (pine coloured) dining table, in a kitchen / dining room ish area with the vague sense of cabinets and a counter behind it, but these were all very blurry and non descript
  • @bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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    6 months ago

    Purple-ish

    Male? Maybe?

    Too abstract I more imagined an arm more than a whole person

    Baseballish

    Square, I dunno it was also purple. I get very like, early computer animation type vibes from the whole scene. “Ball” and “table” without any context just leaves everything kinda blank.

    I think I already knew. Maybe the gender one was a stretch.

  • @Gaspar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    06 months ago

    Sure, OK.

    Welcome to my brain
    • Red
    • Don’t know, the “camera” wasn’t panned up that high
    • All I really “saw” was jeans
    • Looked like one of those rubber balls that people like to bounce against walls, like in handball or squash. About as big across as the palm of your hand. Hollow, you could squish it without much effort.
    • one of those simple black square tables from Ikea

    That’s kind of what just popped into my head before I knew there were questions.

  • @EpeeGnome@lemm.ee
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    06 months ago

    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.

  • @sga@lemmy.world
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    06 months ago

    Maybe I am broken by all the physics thought experiments, but my image was very bare-bones

    spoiler

    I imagined a small ball (roughly of size of my fist) but only an outline, no features, I did not imagine practically anything about person - just a force (imagined impulse was parallel to table plane) - I did imagine ball rolling (considered forward rolling, as opposed to impulse on center of mass (which in a frictionless situation would make it just linearly translate, or backspin) and falling from the table after a few seconds

  • Aido
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    06 months ago

    What does it mean if the first time I pictured the ball being pushed I noticed it was sliding instead of rolling and corrected it

    • @Lesrid@lemm.ee
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      06 months ago

      Yeah I had a similar struggle. I don’t think I’ve been so caught off guard by a visualization.

  • Vanth
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    06 months ago

    Visualise (picture, imagine, whatever you want to call it)

    I ignored this portion of the instruction because it was unnecessary to answer the question of what might happen to the ball if it were pushed by someone. I didn’t visualize anything until moving on to the spoiler questions. Even then, my brain mostly went “nah, we’d just be making up something to fill in details irrelevant to the question, don’t waste the energy”.

  • @TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
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    06 months ago

    Honestly, it’s patchy.

    ‘ball on a table’ is very generic, so my brain keeps suggesting different versions. A beach ball on my grandparents’ living room table when I was a child. A fairly featureless basketball-sized sphere on a beech-like table in some kind of gallery-like environment. A tennis ball, but on little more than the concept of a table. The person, not being specified… could be anyone. In some versions it’s my own arm, POV, in others it’s like something seen out of the corner of your eye. Yeah someone came in and did a thing, I wasn’t really looking.

    The motion is more like a series of vignettes, unless I concentrate more - in which case the surrounding detail gets more abstract.

    Now, if you give me details, that’s another story.

    A fuzzy yellow tennis ball on that cheap folding card table from my childhood with the padding cut off, leaving the textured fibreboard surface. My older sister strides up and shoves the ball across the table, making the flimsy legs wobble as she does so.

    Do that, I can see the texture of the carpet and the bare walls from our shitty childhood apartment, I can downright smell the table and have the heft of the thing kinaesthetically along with the shape and visual textures. I can see the skitter and wobble of the ball across the table; my sister more an abstract bundle of mannerisms and gait, and the actual path of the ball is still more implied than observed, though.

    For the most part, my visualisation is handwave, like looking through your blind spot or your peripheral vision: the part your brain makes up to fill in the missing details. When I read a book, it’s like half-remembered cover-illustrations of the general scene: more vibe (sometimes richly textured, vivid vibe) than a literal image.