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.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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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.
Color: red
Gender of pusher: undetermined
Looks of pusher: detached skinny white arm/hand
Size: roughly palm sized (full grown adult)
Table: wood, circular. Changed to black void with half pipe like pinball track upon being rolled.
After a quick visualization, that's what I got. Seeing the questions didn't change my answers
Edit: ball moved along the track for a moment before I stopped thinking about it, mostly since that train of thought made my brain switch to Sonic Spinball.
What do i have if i can't stop the ball from falling? Like the person stops it from one side and it bounces to the other and fall that way.
I also have trouble stopping clocks from spinning in my imagination
Spoiler
Colorless.
Genderless.
The forbidden lovechild of Bongo Bongo and Turnip Head.
Ping Pong sized.
Rounded wooden table.
Visualizing takes work so generally only what's needed is there. But sometimes the darker thoughts escape out from the dungeon.
spoiler-title
Am I the only one who imagined things that they interact with frecuently?
- The ball is green and its the one I got for my cat.
- Female, she gently pushed it with one finger
- It was my mom (idk why)
- About the size of a lemon.
- I just Imagined my table. Medium sized, thick with fake wood vinyl or something. I even imagined the mess that is on it.
I alredy knew, as I said, I imagined things I already know. And the ball bounced like 4 times before rolling out of the door.
What does it mean? lol
Edit: Added the spoiler thing. Quite interesting to read others replies.
I instantly saw a soccer ball on our dining room table. The push throws a glass of the table.
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The color of the ball was white with black pattern like a classic soccer ball.
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The gender was male.
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I didn't see the person clearly, only the hands pushing.
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Soccer ball
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The table in my imagination was exactly our light brown beech wood dining room table.
The points described were instantly in my head. Only for the person itself I would need to try again.
Don't know, they were an amorphous humanoid so I uh don't know for these two, baseball ish sized could fit in a palm, the platonic ideal of a wooden table. The first questions did not make me change the thing in my head. I don't think I see color in my mind eye, but I can uhhh label things with a color. Like. This ball is red, I think to myself, as the ball... continues to ball. Maybe if I imagined a specific red ball it world be redder.
- The ball was orange
- I don't remember
- I don't remember
- As big as an orange
- The ball was on a white surface
Red
Didn’t think about gender
Didn’t think about what they looked like
Ball was baseball sized
It was a square wooden table
Bonus, I imagined the ball rolling across the table and then falling off the table and bouncing a few times on the floor.
I didn’t choose any answers after reading the questions, but didn’t have an answers for the person.
I can only see still frames of random motions and detective gadget animated is the character who flicks the ball. The red ball which I then added a hammer and sickle moves with illustrative wooshes across the table bounces off of a wall into detective gadgets eye.
- Reflective metallic silver, like a ball bearing.
- genderless
- a mannequin silhouette
- about the size of a large grape? Like a superball.
- my wooden dining room table, background and all.
The focus seemed to be on picturing the table and ball, and the person pushing it was irrelevant other than to provide motive force, so I didn't spend any time to fill in their details.
My ball was blue. It's one of those dog toy soft bouncy ones. Table is rectangular, wood, with a light colored stain that's well polished. A man casually slaps the ball and I hear the sound that type of ball makes as it bounces without much force. It bounced once off the table, then off the wall onto the floor where it did the dribble bounce off the tile in the kitchen until coming to rest on the carpet in the living room. None of what I see is related to my house.
If I really wanted to, I can vanish into this world I've built for the ball. I can get lost, staring out a window or something while not actually seeing anything because I'm in my head. I have hyperphantasia. It's seen more often than aphantasia, but it's not exactly common. It's very useful for creative endeavors, but has a lot of pitfalls; usually involving spacing out at inopportune times.
- black
- male
- nothing, it was just a hand pushing the ball
- a ping pong ball
- round, wood coloured, but thin like a metal coffee table.
I did have to think about how to put it into words, but the picture was fully formed before revealing the questions.
Before reading the questions:
- The ball was uniformly gray, with a slight shine.
- The person was genderless and featureless. I only pictured their hand and arm pushing the ball. The moment of contact was indistinct, as if the arm was hiding the ball from view.
- The ball was the size of a large watermelon.
- The table was square, about 1m² , brown-gray, with four turned legs. Same material as the ball: uniformly colored and vaguely glossy.
Orange.
Dude.
Very stock photo, long dark green shirt untucked, but i had no details.
Like a big pomergranate, smaller than a football but bigger than an orange.
The table was made exclusively out of square shapes of the same dark brown, so for example no cylindrical feet. Kind of like a 3D model or the not-cheapest table at Ikea.
I had all of this before, but i didn't "see" it in the sense that people ususally mean because i have the most complete aphantasia that you can have. If you were to ask me how i saw it in my mind without litterally seeing it in my eyes, i'd have no answer. It's kinda like concepts.
My answers:
- What color was the ball? Metallic silver
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball? A woman
- What did they look like? Short straight black hair, pale skin tone, fit build, black blouse, plaid skirt, black leggings, wearing black pumps
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? Slightly larger than a baseball, slightly smaller than a softball
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Wood, square, about 1 meter/yard square, thick square legs one at each corner.
Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions? All of this was a picture before seeing the questions. Other things about the image that weren't asked were also there like:
- the room was lit from a single light bulb above the table with a wide shade. Light was cast straight down on the table/ball and extended slightly beyond the table, but I couldn't see how big the room was...until the ball rolled off the table and hit the floor. I could tell the floor was smooth wood and the walls in the room must also be of a hard material because the sound of the solid ball hitting the floor reverberated. The light showed one wall was red brick. It was indoors.
Just from scrolling through, you may have been one of the only ones to report seeing the ball-pusher as female instead of male or indeterminate/ no gender
The ball was a blue pool ball, on a wooden table that I can't describe because I suck at describing things (but I do have a visual of it). I didn't even imagine the person beyond the hand coming up to push it off.
The ball color might have been decided on the moment I read the question, I'm not sure whether it was part of my image before that. Person is still nondescript even after trying to "zoom out". I just can't seem to come up with it.
Ping pong ball on a circular wooden table. It took me a second to decide the shape. I can see the boards but I only focused on the tabletop and the ball so the environment wasn't defined. The person pushing the ball wasn't well-defined either. No shadows on the ball. If I go back and re-visualize it with more effort I can imagine the details (environment and person), but by default I don't. I steal the environment from my memories by default but can imagine something else if I try. Shadows and light are very hard to get right even when trying, unless I'm only imagining one object or purposely thinking of something specific (ie light reflecting through a glass).
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.
Under aphantasia, Wikipedia has a long list of famous people who have or had it.
How can these guys have aphantasia?
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Mark Lawrence, fantasy author[56]
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Yoon Ha Lee, science fiction author
I don't think I'm clear on what you're asking? Is it that you're confused as to how a person can be a fantasy or sci-fi author with aphantasia?
If that is what you're asking, then as someone with aphantasia, I likely can't explain how that can happen anymore than people who don't have aphantasia (like you, I presume) could explain to me what it's like to visualise things. What I can say is that whilst I don't tend to read fiction much nowadays, I used to be an avid reader of both sci-fi and fantasy. I've found that immersive writing tends to involve descriptions that involve more senses than just sight, and also that the environment can be effectively described through how characters interact within the world. A well described world might be easy to visualise, but I don't think that being able to visualise things is necessary for producing that.
Not least of all because all the best writers also read a lot, and fiction is predominantly written by and for people who don't have aphantasia. Through this, I would expect that an author with aphantasia would become proficient in writing that facilitates readers' visual imaginations, even if they themselves didn't engage with fiction in that manner.
But how would someone with aphantasia be able to describe a fictional world well?
By definition they would need to describe something that they can't visualise
I'm not sure what definition you're referring to, but I don't see any reason why visualisation is necessary.
By analogy, I used to have a friend who was born with no sense of smell. This also greatly impacted his sense of taste. Despite this, he was an excellent chef. I once asked him about this apparent contradiction and he explained that because he knew this was something he lacked (it was discovered when he was a teenager), he had put extra work into learning how. He was very reliant on recipes at the beginning, because that was more formulaic and easier to iteratively improve. He most struggled with fresh ingredients that require some level of dynamic response from the cook (onions become stronger tasting as they get older, for example), but he said he'd gotten pretty good at gauging this through other means, like texture or colour or vegetables, and finding other ways of avoiding that problem (such as using tinned tomatoes, for consistency).
I found it fascinating that his deficits in taste/smell actually led to him being an above average cook due to him targeting it for improvement— I met him at university, where many of my peers were useless at cooking for themselves at first. To this, he commented that it wasn't just the extra effort, but the very manner in which he practiced; obviously he couldn't rely on himself to test how well he'd done, so he had to recruit friends and family to help give feedback, which meant he was exposed to a wide variety of preferences and ways of understanding flavour. He also highlighted that the sampling bias in my surprise — that all the times that he had cooked for me were things he had loads of experience cooking with and so he could work from knowledge about what works. Most people who had as much cooking skill and experience as he had would be way more able to experiment with new ingredients or cuisines, whereas my friend had to stick to what he knew worked.
I wonder whether aphantasic authors might feel similar to my friend — like they're operating from recipe books, relying on formulae and methods that they know work.
Why do you think you need to visualize something to imagine or describe it? It's just a wholly different way of thinking.
- 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.
- The ball was red
- The person was of indeterminate gender, I only really saw their arm
- They were wearing a blue button up over a white shirt
- The ball is about the size of an orange, and it rolled forwards
- The table was made of wood
I had to picture it again to get the shirt color but not the rest. I can say that the background was dark, almost like a dimly lit billiards hall, and there was a light shining on the ball
What happens to the ball? It rolls slowly off the table, and bounces a few times away from the table before coming to a stop.
What color was the ball? Blue
What gender was the person that pushed the ball? Male
What did they look like? Tall, average build, short brown hair with facial hair, maybe mid-30s, gray shirt, brown pants
What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? A bit smaller than a basketball, like a ball for kids or a handball.
What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Round, wood, but like the cheap laminate kind with plastic edging. Metal legs. Like a cheap table you'd see in a school or office.
I feel like I imagined a lot more detail than others. The questions were really easy for me to answer, and like a lot of unnecessary details came to mind. The guy pushed the ball because he was asked to, and he didn't know why he was there. Probably the schizophrenia.