Ask Lemmy

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)

• Ball rolls about two feet and stops just before it rolls off the table.
• White ball, polished surface, shiny
• Male
• Tall person, slender build, light brown hair, clean shaven, white button-up collared shirt, blue jeans.
• Ball was a bit bigger than a billiard ball, but smaller than a baseball. Smooth, and heavy. Like a white cricket ball but with no seams.
• It was one of those large common fold-up trestle tables but with a white table cloth on it.
• I knew all those without having to think about it, or choose afterwards.

To me the imagery seemed like a cheesy "how to push a ball" educational video with a paid actor to demonstrate how to push the ball in the correct manner.

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.

• 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 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.

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.

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?

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

I have hyperphantasia according to these kinds of tests (although I am not sure how accurate they are). In any case, the ball was white with a green glow it was smooth and looked like plastic but no seams where the halves were joined, male, like a large blue bird I saw in a cartoon, a bit larger than a baseball, the table was a very long rectangle shape. It was also white. The ball was pushed very hard from one end of the table to the other and then it bounced on the wall, the floor and the ceiling. The room was a bit small, with only a very small window rectangular window. It was black behind the window. The room was also rectangle shaped, with concrete grey walls. It was a bit dark, but there was some artificial light from a lamp. The bird acted very cartoonish when pushing the ball. I think that is all.

Weird. I’ve been thinking a lot about my aphantasia recently.

The closest I can describe what I imagined, was the feeling that those things happened.

For example. That vibe you get when you feel someone is just behind you. You can’t see them, but you know it. If I imagine someone behind me, I get the same uncomfortable feeling and an urge to look behind me.

1. White/colourless ball. And honestly, more of a circle viewed from a perfect side on angle.
2. I didn't visualise a person only the effect of their push on the ball. And like another poster corrected the slide to a roll.
3. See above.
4. Ball was of uncertain size. It was viewed side on, and no other objects to give a sense of scale. Maybe tennis ball sized, but I think that's retroactive.
5. Table was rectangular and wooden. But no legs. Unsure of the thickness.

Included the timely-ness of the details in my answers above.

• The ball was orange
• I don't remember
• I don't remember
• As big as an orange
• The ball was on a white surface

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.

The scene was like an example reel from a video game, greenscale-ish translucent humanoid mannequin standing in a pseudo void, with a nondescript rectangular table of a similar greenscale-ish semi translucent material, and only the ball is "finished" as it is the camera focus. It is approximately between baseball and softball size, smooth, but I did not pay attention to the color. There is an "interaction/activation" sound effect as the mannequin kinda leans over and lightly pushed the ball to cause it to roll. It rolls to a stop on the table top, and this action loops.

The center of focus pulled back as I read the questions, more becoming aware of them than choosing them, and the scene changed with a camera pull out as part of the "ball is pushed" tutorial clip.

I have realized how much growing up as a gamer as influenced my perspective.

• The ball was a futsal ball, so white with green markings
• I didn't see the person who pushed the ball, just their hand, I was concentrating on the ball
• The table was at about the height of a typical dining room table, it was plain wood about 1cm thick with a dark top and had fairly thin black metal legs

I already knew the answers, for the most part. The questions didn't cause me to add more detail, but they did cause me to reflect on the details I had chosen. So, for example, I never looked at the person who pushed the ball. Because of that, I couldn't fill in any details about their looks or gender. But I did clearly see the hand giving the ball a push, and I think the hand belonged to someone white. Having said that, I did have to stop and think about the answer for the table. The table was part of what I imagined seeing, but it wasn't the focus of my attention. I realized I could think about what I had imagined and the details came to me. But, it's possible that I didn't actually dream them up until I was asked the question.

Also, nobody asked, but the ball fell down and hit a white surface (something like white tiles) and bounced the way a futsal ball bounces, which is to say mostly a soft "thud".

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

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.

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.

Sure, OK.

• White

• Not in shot, just a hand

• The arm was the same complexion as my own

• Tennis ball sized but made of that stuff billard balls are made of, smooth and shiny

• Classic oblong wooden table, looks like that cheap ikea pine with a clear grain

• The ball rolls along the table with again, the same sound you get with a billard or similar rigid ball rolling along a solid surface, upon falling off the table it hits the floor (pale orange ceramic tiles) and bounces a few times in that satisfying way that produces an ever increasing frequency until it stops.

• I already knew and did not have to chose after being asked the questions.

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!

• Orange *No gender. *Bald mannequin, like the outlines of people in bathroom stalls. *Baseball *Square wooden table.

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.

• yellow
• male
• round face, beard, brown hair, mid 20s (I think probably some internet-famous person whose name I don't remember)
• small plastic ball filled with air
• a simple square table with a natural wood top and legs

That was my first thought. But then (before reading the questions) I also imagined other similar scenarios like with a soccer ball and my desk at work, lol.

My experience with this experiment was kind of like when they play memory flashbacks in movies, I could see the ball being pushed and falling, but with jump cuts and the timing was off. Detail-wise I'd say it was kinda like what you got from AI image generation when Dall-E first came out two-ish years ago.

I don't think I have the most visual imagination out there but if aphantasia is one end of the scale I'm pretty far to the other side.

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.

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.