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?
No matter how much I tried to focus, all I can see is Mickey Mouse in a magician’s cap trying to control buckets and mops.
I might have hyperfantasia.
boooooo
Love it
A vague thought of a ball and knowledge of what would happen. Nothing else.
Exactly. There’s no need to add more details unless that’s part of the requirements. Otherwise it makes it harder to keep track of things. Keep it simple first, then add complexity as needed.
Exactly. It rolls for a while unless it reaches an edge.
I imagined a sort of physics textbook diagram, not real objects. There was no person, only an arrow indicating the applied force on the ball!
That’s how I did it too. There is a sphere on a plane. A force is applied to the sphere, parallel to the plane. Neither the sphere nor the plane have a defined color, size, material, etc. Nothing specific pushed the sphere.
My job is often to mathematically model the things people say to me, and in those circumstances thinking like this is correct.
I don’t think this way when I daydream, although the visual components of my daydreams are more like the feelings I get when I look at something than like concrete mental pictures.
Hello, fellow odd brain!
I remember when I was at school (this was 6th or 7th grade) and the teacher wrote
y = xand drew a diagonal line on a Cartesian plane. At that moment, I realized that the world was made of math and I was enlightened. I’m not exaggerating - the experience revolutionized the way I could think.The interesting thing to me is that I have worked with physicists who appear to be capable of even higher levels of abstraction than I am. If I read an equation, I need to think about its geometrical representation but they claim to think directly in terms of equations. (Pure mathematics, not the letters and numbers that make up the written equation.) I believe them because they can comprehend equations much faster than I can; they and I would go to talks where the presenter just put up slide after slide of equations and I would be lost almost immediately while they were able to follow along. I don’t think that’s simply because they’re much smarter than I am, because I am otherwise generally able to match them intellectually.
I wish I had their brain type, I struggled in math to remember the formulas. I had a great time learning it, otherwise. Calculus was awesome, I had never considered measuring the rate of change of the rate of change and I got pretty excited. Set theory was great too.
spoiler
Interesting, on the first sentence I actually thought of many different sizes and shapes for the ball, then realized I’d have to pick one before moving on to the next part, so it was kind of a conscious decision. I ended up with a simple grey anti-stress ball. But the table was always the same, light brown wood. All focus is on the ball so the person is just a silhouette partly out of camera but the hand is white and wearing a black sleeve. I only chose what the person looked like after the questions based on what felt right for the initial visualization, like panning out the camera.
There’s another question though. Would your mind get into all this trouble if you didn’t know there would be questions coming?
Interesting. I also had only the vaguest impression of the person pushing the ball, but I definitely caught a glimpse before the ball rolled off the table. Slacks and a blue shirt, that was about it.
It’s interesting how many people picked a brown wood table. I’d guess that’s probably the most common material and colour for tables. But I’m typing this on a black table, and yet I still pictured a brown wood one.
My ball was gray, too. With no details whatsoever, just shading. In the edge of the table, a hand came from the left of the camera view with its index finger stretched out and poked the ball, which rolled a few inches and stopped (while in other faded versions of it the ball fell off the table or rolled further over the table surface)
I can visualize things in my mind, but it’s not… Clear? Like it’s not as vivid as seeing with my actual eyes. It’s like seeing images as reflections on tinted glass. Dark, murky. Muted colors. There is also an emphasis with text. I think of a ball. I imagine a red ball with the text “Ball” above or below it.
In the scenario given, I see a dark image of a red ball on a wooden table. A hand not attached to a person pushes the ball. The ball rolls across the table and falls off. There is text below describing the situation.
It’s important to know if the text was displayed in comic sans or not.
Times New Roman.
Papyrus you heathen
Nyeh-heh-heh!
For me it’s kinda unfocused, like I can imagine a ball on a table and someone giving it a push.
Only after I force myself to think a bit harder about it, I get a regular square wooden table in a kitchen-esque room, with a silver pinball on it, while a guy approaches it and gives it a small push, at the same time, the post didn’t ask me to imagine the ball falling off the table, so the ball barely rolls at all.
Dang, interesting! I have no text in mine.
It’s a clear vision of a red ball you’d play dodgeball with, on a stark, small, circular table with a wide white top and a single metal leg with a ring bottom.
The person is a fully black, like, men’s room door sign person fur me, and the ball falls off and bounces with realistic dodgeball physics and I can hear the THONK… THONK… THONK. THONK THONK THONKTHONKTHONK rollllllllll sounds as it falls. When I imagine this scenario I can also smell the ball and feel the texture of the ball and the table. The person is the only thing that isn’t realistic.
I had a wildly vivid imagination as a kid… and I’ve always had synesthesia.
So, in this experiment you’re asking people to picture a certain situation that doesn’t call for any specific details, then asking them to describe the unnecessary details they came up with: colour of the ball, etc.
I’m curious if the people who have aphantasia can picture something in their heads when it does call for all that detail.
Picture a red, 10-speed bike with drop handlebars wrapped with black handlebar tape. It’s locked to a bike rack on the street outside the library with a U-lock. You come out of the library and see that the front wheel has been stolen. Think about how that would look. Picture the position of the bike, and anything you might look for if it were your bike and you were worried. Pretend you needed to examine the situation in as much detail as possible so you could file a police report.
Questions
- Were your front forks resting on the ground, or up in the air?
- Was there any other damage done to your bike or to the lock?
- Are there any other bikes nearby? People nearby? Security cameras that might have caught the crime?
I’m aphantasic. You can say “picture this” followed by whatever you like. It’s not possible for me in any way. Growing up I honestly thought “picture this” or “close your eyes and see” was just metaphor. I legitimately didn’t understand other people can see things.
My mind has a verbal descriptive stream, and I’m good with muscle-based or proprioceptive spacial memory, and the two combine to handle most things, but nothing visual. So like I can easily describe things from memory or from an idea, and it’ll be fully consistent, but not something I see.
If you have aphantasia, and not just hypophantasia, it makes no difference how much detail is provided, there’s a total, fundamental, inability to visualize things.
So as someone who coaches sometimes I have to ask. Can you imagine and feel body movements? Sometimes I’ll ask someone to visualize themselves performing an action before they do it.
I’d imagine thinking through the thought has around the same mental impact. But that would be interesting to research as that advise always helped me massively in tennis.
In my experience people have a hard time running through a checklist in their head. That’s why just imagining the action is so helpful, since you don’t have to think as much. Or in my experience, the less you think about it the more natural the movement becomes. Like you can practice the action a bit but you need to eventually just do the action.
Not really, but typically if I can see someone else do a motion I can self-insert the movements I’d need to make to duplicate it, so that might just be a disused function for me.
Although that’s a good question, because I do have special memory that I use for a lot of things, and it involves movement, but maybe not in the same way someone else would (eg I can count the windows in my place by simulating a walk through my house and “opening windows” like I do on nice mornings, but I often forget about out-of-the-way non-opening windows because they aren’t part of my muscle memory)
If someone told you to study a ball for 20 seconds and then close your eyes, then asked you immediately after you closed your eyes what colour the ball was, could you answer? The second something disappears from your visual field, is it gone from your “mind’s eye”?
What’s interesting to me about this is that the way our visual field works involves a lot of fantasy. Like, our minds are convinced that we’re currently seeing everything in front of us and most of it is in focus. But, in reality our eyes can only really see a tiny amount of the world in full focus at once, but they’re constantly flickering around filling in details. This is why some optical illusions are so strange, because they show us that our visual systems are taking shortcuts and what we think we see isn’t actually reality. It makes me wonder if people with aphantasia actually “see” the world differently too.
I don’t have a minds eye for something to fade from, so that question doesn’t really make sense to me. I have my eyes and then when I close my eyes it’s either black or eyelid colored, nothing else, and I’m super unclear what seeing things in your mind is supposed to be like. Tho I do have super-vivid visual dreams these days (which did not happen until my late 20s, but aren’t at all uncommon for people with aphantasia) and because I only have open-eye sight and these dreams that seem totally real, I frequently have to ask people if things actually happened. It’s very disconcerting, but my understanding is that dreams are not really the same as waking minds eye anyway.
Rather than a visual representation, I’ll have a verbal description ready as soon as I see an item. So for the ball example, I’d know the ball is “small, about the size of a plum, solid pink somewhere between neon and intense salmon, smooth matte texture, looks like it might be foam”. It probably serves the same function as a visual representation, although perhaps with a bit more required specificity. I don’t really describe things to myself unless I need to, though, so I guess my thinking is sort of abstract. I know the traits something has, and can recall them, but typically don’t explicitly list them unless I’m describing for someone else.
One perk of this is I’m great at describing things I’ve seen or made up, a downside is I’m terrible when people describe things to me. Since I’ve never seen the thing being described, it is a super arbitrary list of usually non-specific features and I don’t care at all. I skip clothing descriptions in books, for example. Don’t care. But when I describe things, even made up things, I’ll run through a list of the features it needs as a minimum to be the object for my mind, which is usually vivid detail for others, as the ball example above.
Idk if I see things differently eyes-open, I don’t really think so, but that’s always been a curiosity of mine since there’s literally no way to know what other people see. I have mild impairments as a result of not being able to visualize, like I’m largely face blind - I have to pick out specific features and traits and use the combination as identifiers. I get a ton of false positives, and almost everyone “feels familiar”. Beyond that, I’m pretty sensitive to colors and patterns. Idk.
But the -way- you ask that first question makes me curious; If you close your eyes and intentionally picture something other than the ball, would you then be unable to tell me what color it was in your example? Do you, personally, require the visual representation to “know” the object?
and I’m super unclear what seeing things in your mind is supposed to be like.
It’s hard to describe, but it’s not replacing your eyesight. If I close my eyes I see black, or if there’s some bright light I see red. But, it’s like there’s another visual channel going into your brain other than the one from your eyes. Most of the time, that channel is either off, or it’s drowned out by the actual visual information which is so much more dominant. But, if your eyes are closed the fact there’s no real information coming on the “real” visual channel means you’re able to notice what the “virtual” visual channel is showing.
It’s sometimes described as your “mind’s eye”, but for me, at least, it’s not really like another eye because it’s not detailed enough for that, but it’s still as if there’s an additional visual stream of information that goes from my memory to the visual processing part of my brain. For me, it’s blurry and lacking in detail. It would be like using a slightly out of focus projector on a white wall in a well lit room. There are shapes and colours there, but they’re hard to see. But, like an image from an out-of-focus projector, if you try harder you can make out more of what it’s showing, and if you reduce other visual stimulus (like turn off the lights) you can notice more.
So for the ball example, I’d know the ball is “small, about the size of a plum, solid pink somewhere between neon and intense salmon, smooth matte texture, looks like it might be foam”.
Does this happen instantaneously for you? If I tried to come up with a description like that it would take several seconds, whether I’m doing it while actually actively looking at the object, or with my eyes closed working based on a memory of the image my eyes saw.
If you close your eyes and intentionally picture something other than the ball
Something real, or something I’m inventing with my imagination?
would you then be unable to tell me what color it was in your example?
Like, translate the image to a word? I can tell you a word, but the metal image will come first. I think I do need the visual representation to know the object. Like, if someone gives me a description of something, I’ll build a mental image based on that description. If someone asked me to describe it later, I’d probably use different words because I’d be going based on the image not on remembering the words.
In your case, if you have a memory of something that is “small, about the size of a plum, solid pink somewhere between neon and intense salmon, smooth matte texture, looks like it might be foam”, how easy is it for you to change the words you’d use to describe it? Like, say someone asked you to describe it but not to use any words related to living things, could you swap out “plum” and “salmon” without effort? Do you think you’re storing those actual words, or are you storing a concept? For example, if you’re remembering a white rock, is it “rock” you’re remembering, or is it the concept of a rock, which can match similar words like “pebble”, “stone”, etc.?
Also, I wonder how this affects your ability to remember descriptions of things that are not physically possible in our 3d world, like a Klein bottle or a hypercube. I wonder if, for you, there’s no real difference in difficulty remembering the details of a cube vs. a hypercube because you can’t picture either of them. Whereas for me, I can easily remember / picture a cube, but for a hypercube it’s hard because it’s not something I can get a real visual representation of.
Not who you asked, but yes I could answer and also yes it’s gone from my mind’s eye. I would be answering from memory.
I have no mind’s eye. Full-stop. But I have memory and can recall details without needing to see the thing.
If you can remember someone’s name after meeting them, that’s the same process it would be for me to remember their hair or shirt color.
When you say you’re answering from memory, what is it that you remember? For example. I have a plush soccer ball / football near my bed. I haven’t looked at it recently but I can remember what it looked like. I can tell you it was white with 2 black pentagon shapes near the mid-bottom (where it’s squished) and 2 more near the top. I didn’t think of the words “white” or “black” or “pentagon” until it was no longer in my field of vision, I was able to come up with those words based on the mental image I still had. What I’m remembering is the image, and I’m able to come up with words based on that image. Are you remembering the words you would use to describe it? If so, do you automatically come up with those words?
For me, if I glance at something for half a second I can take a mental snapshot of how it looks, and then with my eyes closed I can come up with a bunch of words I’d use to describe it. The mental snapshot isn’t going to be very detailed, but it’s enough to come up with maybe a dozen descriptive words over a few seconds. But, if I tried to come up with the words while looking at it, I would still need those few seconds to come up with the words. The words aren’t an automatic thing, it’s something I have to intentionally choose to generate, and it’s slow.
I’m assuming that if you have full aphantasia, you wouldn’t even be able to picture a simple shape like a triangle. So, if you want to draw a triangle, do you do it based on remembering something like the dictionary definition of a triangle and using that “recipe” to generate one? For me, I imagine the shape I want to draw, then my hand attempts to create that shape. For something simple like a triangle that’s easy. For something complex like a face it’s hard because my hand isn’t able to create something that matches what I’m imagining.
What about something like a stop sign. I assume you can’t picture a stop sign in your mind, but do you recognize one instantly without effort when you see it? If so, I wonder what details your brain is actually storing, like if it’s storing words, how many words are in the description. The other day someone posted an image of a stop sign but the “stop” text was in lowercase not uppercase. I wonder if your brain stores the word (or a symbol representing the word) “uppercase” and mine stores how the letters look, which I can interpret as being uppercase if I think about it.
It’s hard to explain how one thinks. But yeah, I think of the words to describe something and they are automatic. I can’t describe a lot of detail about anything unless I’m looking at it, but I know enough of the basics to remember things.
I think the name comparison I mentioned is probably the best I can think of. When you see a person you know, how do you remember their name? Unless you’re a person who imagines their name on their forehead in order to remember it in the first place, I assume it’s just a word you associate with that person? That’s what the details of everything are like for me.
A triangle is a shape with three sides; that’s all I need to know and I can draw it. A stop sign is a hexagon, red, with STOP in the middle.
I can’t draw anything more complex than that unless I’m looking at it. I’m pretty good at recreating images I look at, but I can’t do art from my own head for shit; it’s paralyzing to even consider doing it.
When I’m reading a book, I’ll retain the most often repeated and basic physical traits. Harry Potter had a lightning scar and glasses, Ron Weasley was red headed, and Hermione had crazy hair. If there were other descriptions in the books, they never sunk in; my brain just disregarded them. However, now I think of Daniel Radcliffe and the other actors. I can’t describe what they look like but I can recognize those people with no hesitation.
I think the name comparison I mentioned is probably the best I can think of. When you see a person you know, how do you remember their name?
I remember their name as just a fact associated with the person. However, I can’t imagine remembering someone’s name without also trying to picture their face. So, I guess it’s more like remembering the name of someone who’s like a pen pal or something. Someone I’ve never met face to face.
I was just thinking about this, and thought of podcasters that I listen to, whose faces I’ve never seen. With them, I don’t picture a face because I’ve never seen one. But, I can “hear” the sound of their voices. I’m guessing you don’t do that either?
A stop sign is a hexagon, red, with STOP in the middle.
It’s actually an octagon. But, I assume that if you see a stop sign you don’t have to count the sides, you just recognize it immediately?
What’s interesting to me is that if I read a book, part of the pleasure is that the author is describing things in a way that allows me to picture them. It seems to me like not having the ability to picture things would make the book much less interesting. Like watching a movie that didn’t have any soundtrack, just sound effects and dialogue. I guess you don’t have anything to compare it to. But, I wonder if people who have aphantasia are less likely to enjoy books and more likely to enjoy movies?
I remember their name as a fact associated with the person.
That’s how the way something looks is stored in my head.
Derp, I was exhausted last night and said the wrong shape. But yeah, I just recognize things without needing to visualize it when it isn’t around.
I’ve definitely heard other aphants talk about not enjoying books. I love reading, but I typically don’t care for authors who are overly descriptive about visual things OR I just zone out during those descriptions. Most authors I read stuck to 1-2 sentence descriptions of things and then move on to what’s actually happening. That’s fine, and I might keep 1-2 of those details in mind.
I recently drew what I imagined the layout for a building in my favorite book series to be, then went back and found the text describing it to compare. I was way closer than I expected to matching the description, except I didn’t remember the entryway was a “long hallway” because literally none of the story happens there. If the description matters to the plot, I’m more likely to retain it. If something is only described at the beginning and in a lot of detail, I probably will not retain any of it.
I cannot hear in my head either, but my partner is an aphant who can do that, so they are unconnected. That one is weird too because I have songs stuck in my head all the time and I ‘know’ what they sound like, and my brain keeps the beat with the song, but I’m not hearing it. If anything it’s more like I’m silently singing along to the song. I do tend to get snippets of songs in my head because I can’t always remember where it goes though (I write as one line from a song circles endlessly through my mind).
Can you taste or smell things that aren’t around? If not, do you still know what those things are when you do taste or smell them?
This was fun to read. Everytime I read a new detail the scene in my head changed :)
I have aphantasia, and people really struggle to comprehend what it means or what it’s like. Now to be fair, I don’t really comprehend how people without aphantasia think or process things either.
- Were your front forks resting on the ground, or up in the air?
No idea, all I could think was that the front tire was missing, it didn’t occur to me to think how that affected the bikes position.
- Was there any other damage done to your bike or to the lock?
I didn’t think about there being any damage.
- Are there any other bikes nearby? People nearby? Security cameras that might have caught the crime?
I had just thought of a bike rack with only my bike, no people or other bikes nearby. Looking for security cameras seems obvious now that you mention it, but I didn’t think of that. If you had said “what advice would you give if your friend walked out and found their bike had been stolen/vandalized” I probably would have thought of that, but trying to think of an abstract situation is much more difficult for me.
Interesting point and I’m glad you made it, with a thought (?) experiment to check.
I think I am somewhat aphantastic, but not officially diagnosed.
Tap for spoiler
- Front forks down.
- No other damage.
- No other bikes, bike racks, or even street furniture. But as I read this question I retroactively added in the bike rack and street furniture outside my hometown’s library.
Interesting, I was also thinking of a nearby library when I came up with the scenario. It sounds to me like you don’t have much aphantasia if you thought to have the forks down, most people I think just deleted the wheel and didn’t think of how that might affect the bike. Either that, or you have a lot of experience seeing bikes with stolen wheels and you naturally picture it the way you normally see it.
Have seen a lot of stolen bikes in my town, and my brother’s front wheel was nicked last week, and he sent me a forks down photo.
I also noted that as a detail for the police report part. But missed out on checking for cctv or the like. Which is odd as I usually clock them, amongst other things in physical spaces in day to day life.
Also conjuring up unnecessary details is a hyperphantasia thing, not doing it doesn’t mean you have aphantasia.
I’m sure it depends on the extent of the unnecessary details Thinking the ball is red is surely not hyperphantasia.
My mental image of the bicycle changed as each detail was added, but sometimes the detail changed the image (the handlebars were straight until you said they were dropped) and sometimes the detail didn’t exist; the dropped handlebars were wrapped in handlebar tape, but that tape didn’t have a colour (not sure how to explain that better) until you mentioned it was black. Most of the details “added” something to the scene rather than “changing” an assumed detail.
The “front forks on the ground” question was particularly interesting to me.
The bicycle started with two wheels, and front wheel just sorta disappeared from my image when you mentioned it was stolen, but the front fork remained floating in the air as if there was a wheel still supporting it. But asking the question about the forks on the ground made gravity exist, and then there had to be a reason it was floating, which became it was being held up by the U-Lock.
I seem to imagine scenes with few superfluous details that mostly includes only what is mentioned or implied by the narrative. But it’s super interesting to me what details we’re in fact implied.
The ball on the table was similar. The table was at waist height to the person, and the ball had a specific size of roughly the size of a racket ball because it had to be something that could be easily pushed. But the person pushing it was just a silhouette of a person, it had no gender, the only thing I pictured clearly was the hand that pushed the ball. It was pushed in an intentional way that made the ball roll across the table away from the “person” (as opposed to bouncing, or pushed sideways)
The table was just an elevated plane it had no texture, or even legs supporting it, (probably because there was no ground for those legs to be on,) it didn’t go on forever, you could see the end of the table, but it also didn’t have a size.
I love how by default most tables were wooden and the balls were mostly about baseball size
For me it was a round coffee table and it was a lanky butler wearing white gloves who gently reaches out with index and thumb and pushes the baseball sized ball forward
Apparently I’m in spooky brain mode cause mine was a crystal ball
- 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.
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.
I think my brain might just be lazy… I skipped over the entire walk to the table part. And just imagined a detached arm pushing the ball on a surface, until it rolled off the surface and that was all.
Thanks for sharing this as well! I also just imaged a detached hand + short bit of lower arm pushing the ball (for which I did imagine it to be of a gray shiny metal slightly larger than the hand)!
And I also imaged a super plain square wooden table so when the questions about the person hit I was super confused wether or not this counted as aphantasia or not (because I am fairly certain that I don’t have it…)
You basically just expanded on everything I imagined. I couldn’t have described it better.
With all due respect, I don’t believe aphantasia is a real thing.
It does, it’s a studied and proven condition. No idea why you wouldn’t believe it lol
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
Labels should always be used with caution, but for me, learning about aphantasia led to me reconsidering the ways in which I imagine things, and this had a beneficial impact on how I communicated with people close to me. For example, I seem to be an odd mixture of relying on visual stimuli for thinking (so I have visual reminders all over, and reading complex info is way easier for me than hearing it), but also seem to lack the ability to visualise. This means that if my partner asks “hey, do you remember which drawer the mini screwdrivers are in?”, I would usually be unable to answer, despite being able to walk in, take a glance at the drawers and go “that one, there”. We didn’t realise how frustrating this was for both of us until we reflected on the possibility of me having aphantasia. Whether I do or not doesn’t matter. More relevant is the fact that now, when he asks me questions of where things are, it’ll often be accompanied by a photograph of the location, which drastically improves my ability to recall and point to where the item is.
To some degree, I agree that it’s nonsense to assign labels when in nature and in humans, variation is the norm. Certainly it can lead to reductionism and ignoring wide swathes of that variety if one is on a quest to sort people into boxes. However, there is still a lot that we don’t know about how the brain works to process things and labels can be instructive either in researching aspects that we don’t yet understand, or for regular people like me who find benefit in a word that helps me to understand and articulate that there are ways that my partner thinks and processes information that seem to be impossible for me to emulate. “Aphantasia” helped both of us to be more accepting of these differences.
Framing a phenomenon as either real or not isn’t especially useful though, largely because of the ambiguity in the phrasing. An example in a different domain is that I’ve seen a wide variety of people claim that they don’t think autism is a real thing. This tends to be received as offensive to many people, not least of all autistic people who feel like their lived experience is being directly attacked and questioned. Sometimes it is, and their anger is justified. However, I’ve also seen the “autism isn’t a real thing” sentiment come from (often autistic) people critiquing the label and how it’s used, especially in a clinical context. They argue that it perpetuates a binary framing of autistic and not autistic, which further marginalises people who do have a diagnosis, and isolates some people who have autistic traits but are overall sub-clinical in presentation (who may have benefitted from understanding these traits from an autistic perspective). Regardless of one’s view of the arguments, it’s pretty clear that these are two very different stances that might be described by “autism isn’t a real thing”.
I make this example because debating of the utility of labels can be a great and fruitful discussion that helps to improve our understanding of the underlying phenomena and people’s experiences of them. Framing that debate as what’s real or not can lead to less productive arguments that are liable to cause offence (especially on the internet, where we’re primed to see things in a more adversarial manner)
Colorless ball, around the size of a tennis ball on a colorless round table. Person was colorless, genderless, and generally without any distinctive features.
What is my diagnosis?
Yep pretty much what I got
Since we all went with colorless, I imagine that means we weren’t doing visual stuff at all. It’s all bones.
THAT IS THE SAME DUDE WHO PUSHED MY REALISTIC BALL OFF OF MY REALISTIC TABLE
I have complete aphantasia, I can’t even visualize a ball or table, or anything else - never have been able to, I see absolutely nothing when I close my eyes and can’t visualize or see things in my head at all except when dresming. Same for my Dad. He can apparently visualize an extremely tiny amount (like the night sky but just black + stars, etc) when he’s high on thc gummies. I’ve never been high so idk if it works for me.
It took me 24 years to realize that people actually can actually see images in their head when they think about something or intentionally imagine it. I always thought that phrases like “picture it in your head” or “see in your head what it will look like” were just phrases, not that people actually can see things when they think about it.
Hmm have you been on LSD? I’m curious if your experience with it is different from someone who doesn’t have aphantasia?
Nope, haven’t done anything harder than ibuprofen tbh, never had a desire to try. I do dream visually though
I imagined it in a cartoon-ish fashion, so I think I can actually draw it out.
- Red ball
- Male
- Like Google’s default profile picture, without facial features, except he’s in gray and has a neck
- My single hand can surround more than half of it in a cross section view, so about 12cm in diameter
- Rectangular table, about 5:2, I didn’t imagine the material, but it’s plain brown, so I guess wood?
Additionally, the ball rolls parallel to the long edge of the table, and falls off the short edge. The person also have legs.
I already had these in my mind before being asked.
My brother in Christ you have described almost the exact same specs I visualized. The only difference is in the level of resolution of my “scene.” And by that, I mean essentially I did a few more render passes in my head to anchor everything you’ve written within a sort of Impressionistic, highly softened, out-of-focus backdrop. I saw hints of shadowy cabinets, the concept of a darkened kitchen out of sight. The shape and finger placement of my slightly more textured, clothed yet featureless male. The gray-brown feeling of a floor below, a dark white ceiling above, and the faded glow of sunlight through an unseen dining room window grazing one end of that oaken table.
But the basics … They’re the same, and before being asked to recall them. Damn.
I mean, people will imagine a similar thing when asked to imagine something specific. At the end of the day there’s just so many ways to imagine someone pushing a ball off a table.
More or less but person didn’t have gender because that wasn’t relevant to the subject which was the rolling ball. Ball also bounced a few times when hitting the floor.
The ball rolls for a bit then stops
- Colorless ball
- Didn’t image a gender, just the concept of a person
- They didn’t look like anything
- I guess a perfect colorless sphere roughly the size of a tennis ball
- Pretty much just a rectangular flat surface. There’s no color or material
I didn’t know much about it except the size of the ball being roughly proportional to the size of a human hand
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.
Wait a second.
- The ball had no color at all
- The person who pushed the ball didn’t even exist. It just got pushed by some invisible force. Naturally, they didn’t have an appearance.
- The ball was like… Small I guess?
- The table had no properties at all.
Do people really usually have a more vivid picture in their heads? It’s always just concepts with me. I’m confused.
I also had the “I spent 23 minutes designing this scene in blender” impression of the ball, table, and disembodied hand. The table was made of light grey, the ball was made of light grey, and the hand was made of light grey
- What happens to the ball?
It slowly rolled toward the edge but stopped before falling to the ground. The path was somewhat eccentric because of the texture of the ball.
- What color was the ball?
Yellow
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
Male
- What did they look like?
Green and white track suit (why? IDK), mid 60’s Italian, chubby
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
It was one of those foam Nerf bullets, so about the size of a shooter marble
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?
It was that black IKEA table where the four metal legs screw into the corners. About 6ft by 3ft.
- 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 entire scene sprung into my head at once after reading that someone interacted with the ball
Yeah, same with me. But I knew the ball was pushed and rolled to the edge of the table and then fell, so I feel like I got the most relevant bit.
Tbh I’ve never been good at visualising faces, recognising people I know, retracing a route I’ve taken etc. This just feels like one of those things I’ve never really been great at.
Do people really usually have a more vivid picture in their heads?
I can’t speak for others, but I do if they’re concepts I’ve encountered before. I have “default” visualizations of things that are changed if the description warrants it.
Answer:
It was a simplistic grescale scenario devoid of unnecessary features. Think a simple and fast 3D render from the 90s or something. So everything was grescale, the person had no gender (or even features), and pushed a baseball sized sphere on a simple rectangular table made of indeterminate materials. Now I can picture something more detailed if required or desired but my mind focused on the mechanics of it all and kept details to a minimum. Asking for these details afterwards doesn’t generate them retroactively.
