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?
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.