Ask Lemmy

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.

A vague thought of a ball and knowledge of what would happen. Nothing else.

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!

There's another question though. Would your mind get into all this trouble if you didn't know there would be questions coming?

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.

I love how by default most tables were wooden and the balls were mostly about baseball size

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.

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?

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.

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.

The ball rolls for a bit then stops

1. Colorless ball
2. Didn't image a gender, just the concept of a person
3. They didn't look like anything
4. I guess a perfect colorless sphere roughly the size of a tennis ball
5. 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 only knew the gender of the person and what kind of ball it was. I didn't imagine the other things at my first try.

1. The ball was red.
2. I have no idea.
3. I have no idea.
4. Like, maybe softball sized? A little bigger? I'm not sure.
5. Square. It was made of brown.

Huh. The person was off-frame. And I'm pretty sure i retroactively chose a color for the ball.

I think I might have a black-and-white imagination.

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.

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.

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.

I've noticed that after getting older, suffering several concussions, a short spat with drinking, and COVID that my ability to picture things in my mind has degraded a lot since childhood.

Does your ability to imagine things naturally decline? I remember as a lad I could vividly imagine the feeling of things. My imagination was also much more colorful. But I could never see things in 3D like some people can (I've worked with some really talented tradesmen/machinists who can like assemble or fold or machine a piece in their mind, I don't know maybe that's just practice)

I find it very interesting that the vast majority of people saw a red ball. I did too.

::: spoiler

1. red
2. Indeterminate, mostly just an arm
3. shoulder-length brown hair, androgenous body, hidden face
4. Like a rubber bouncy ball you'd get in a party bag
5. wooden, square

Mostly I already knew, but it felt like things were "filling in" as I tried to "remember" the image to answer the questions, especially around the person.

:::

The ball was red, like a red rubber ball. The person was sort of indistinct from the neck up, it was more like my view was focused on the ball itself and didn't see a face, but it was a man, wearing a white shirt and dark tie, and dark pants. The ball was about the size of a baseball, wasn't completely smooth and shiny, sort of a matte with a slight grippy texture. Table was square, wood, like a medium brown color. The ball rolled off the table and bounced a few times.

All these decisions were automatic when reading the prompt, it's what I saw.

I've just become aware of aphantasia myself, I have a few family members who have it apparently. I was talking to my BIL about it the other day, I was saying how I'm a big fan of reading, but I mostly read nonfiction. He said he doesn't read much, mostly biographies, but fiction doesn't do much for him because he can't picture anything in his head. I can picture everything in great detail when I read fiction. Its interesting because our minds work very differently

I've put some effort into improving my visualization since learning about aphantasia. Upon reading the prompt, I was able to imagine a colorless ball, but with shading to indicate a 3D shape, like a preview render in a CAD program. That's progress! It didn't have a size inherently. For the table, I could picture a white, rectangular plane hovering in a black void. If it was a normal dinner table size, then the ball was something like a softball or basketball.

And that's it. That exhausted my ability to visualize. No person, no push, no motion. Best I can do is to see the white rectangle after the ball has rolled off of the edge.

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

• 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.

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

I do not have Aphantasia, but I've always been fascinated by other people's "normal". I always loved the "is my red the same as your red" thought experiment ever since I was a kid. I have spoken to people that claim to have Aphantasia, and they describe their experience as pretty normal. Instead of seeing an image in their head, they just.... know the thing. Where most people can visualize a scene in their head, Aphantasiacs apparently just feel and understand. It doesn't seem to impair them whatsoever and they seem to be perfectly normal people otherwise. My layman's explanation is maybe it's a vestigial function of the human brain back when we needed more empathetic or intuitive responses to stimuli, similar to the theory that ADHD would have been a benefit during hunter/gather societies.

I basically fill in the details as the questions were asked. It could have been anything from a billiard ball on a pool table to a rubber ball on a dining room table. Anything unimportant is basically left "unfilled" or generic until it needs detail.

The person who pushed it was vaguely male, again no details unless the question is asked. They may as well have been a featureless mannequin.

As an aphantasia person myself, it is honestly mind boggling that people can visualise things that aren't there. Like that must be so much effort on things that aren't needed.

Suppose it means you can just have a wank and not need porn though.

Both my partner and I answered the same.

The ball was the size of a tennis ball, no colour.

The person had no gender or any distinguishing features.

The table was a standard kitchen table.

Neither of us knew what the test was about.

Neat!

I have a question OP. Do you read fiction? Recently I've been wondering if aphantasia's why some people don't, almost seen unable, to read and enjoy.

I was really surprised when I learned that the inner eye wasn't just some figure of speech, so I don't see anything, certainly no extra visual details.

Something is still happening though, I can sort of "feel out" shapes/volumes and motion, like depth perception with no visuals attached.

Background: I did this experiment with the pre-existing belief that I likely have aphantasia.

Starting with the important question, no, I didn't know the answer to these things before being asked

The ball was red, but I don't think my initial "rendering" involved a colour of a ball at all, because the colour isn't relevant to how it rolls. The ball felt cold, because that's one of the ways I understood its weightiness, and thus how it rolls. The ball was small enough to hold in one hand, but in "visualising" its size, I imagined how it would feel in my hand. The ball I imagined was a bit larger than a tennis ball and much heavier. I can imagine the force my fingers would need to exert to grasp it.

The person who pushed the ball had no gender because it wasn't relevant. When I considered the person's gender, they were a woman, but that information seems to have gotten lost when I "looked away" by considering other questions; when I reread the questions, I "forgot" what gender the ball pusher was, and this time they were man. I suspect that because the information wasn't relevant to the manner the ball was being pushed, the person pushing the ball was in a sort of superposition of gender, where they are both and/or neither man and/or woman, because it was liable to change whenever I "looked away".

The ball pusher(s) didn't look like anything unless I really pushed myself on this question and then I'm like "erm, I guess they were brunette?", but I think a similar thing happens as with the gender question — unless I have a way to remember what traits I assigned to the ball pusher, I'm just going to forget and have to regenerate the traits. I suspect that if I were actively visualising something, these details would stick together better, like paint to a canvas.

The table has a similar effect of nebulousness. My only assumption before you asked further about the table was that it was level (because the ball started at rest) and rectangular/square. When I tried to consider the table in more detail, I asked myself "what can a table be made out of". Wood comes to mind most obviously, because I have a wood table near me. Laminated particle-board is another thing. I also remember some weird, brightly coloured , super lightweight plastic tables from school. It could also be metal. It could have four legs, or it might have a central base like the dining table at my last house. It might be circular, or oval, or rhomboid. I think I just modelled it as squarish because I've learned enough mathsy-physics that I'm inclined to think of spherical cows, and having a straight edge is easier to model for mathematically, and to draw.

Brains sure are wacky, huh?

I’ve never head of this test before now. Spoiler tags to help others avoid the answers before they take the test.