Ask Lemmy

Under aphantasia, Wikipedia has a long list of famous people who have or had it.

How can these guys have aphantasia?

• Mark Lawrence, fantasy author[56]

• Yoon Ha Lee, science fiction author

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.

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).

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.

I instantly saw a soccer ball on our dining room table. The push throws a glass of the table.

• The color of the ball was white with black pattern like a classic soccer ball.

• The gender was male.

• I didn't see the person clearly, only the hands pushing.

• Soccer ball

• 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.

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

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.

Light blue ball

Male

Medium height dressed in a long sleeved pale blue collared work shirt, wearing jeans, with a brown belt. Brown hair. Non-descript facial features.

Tennis ball sized

A white, rectangular wooden table.

I already knew, the picture formed instantly on reading the prompt. Initially my perspective was looking directly at the ball then when I read the part about pushing it off the table my perspective shifted further back.

The ball was silver and completely reflective. The seen basically looked like that image used for ray tracing testing. No gender just a hand. Table was black

The ball falls off the edge but doesn't make a sound, effectively disappears from the scene.

Glass ball for some reason

Nondescript woman, no distinct features, blurry at the edge of perception. Vaguely wearing business clothes.

Ball was softball size

Table was featureless but the size and color of the table I'm sitting at now

red/blue stripes

none

they didn't

small pool ball

generic Simpsonesque brown, but it stopped existing towards the corners.

The blue ball won’t roll because it was on a table of clean laundry

Huh. So I imagined the ball on the table immediately as a colorless glass sphere on a white table. Before I even read the prompt to push the ball in my imagination I had already placed my index finger on the ball and was rolling it around it place like a fidgit so I just tapped the ball to push it with my index finger so the person who pushed the ball was me (non-binary) for reasons that I was already interacting with the ball anyway. I imagined this in the first person so I didn't really see myself in full. The ball itself was baseball sized and rolled a short distance, stopped and wobbled after being pushed.

I didn't think about what the table was made of but the ball itself was glass that was smooth and cold to the touch. The table was square, waist height and dining room table sized. The room these objects were in was featureless and visualization was instant upon reading.

The ball was black, made from rubber, tennis ball size. Only a hand was imagined. No particular colour or gender. The table was made from Elm.

So I cheated a little, because I'm at a table right now, so I didn't visualise the table just the ball on the table. It was about tennis size, but no texture, kind of light blue shading into lilac. The person pushing it was really just a hand.

So sounds like the only work I did was imagining the ball. I wouldn't say I knew in advance, and I wouldn't say I chose what it looked like. It just appeared and it was light blue.

Edit: the ball started rolling when pushed, but not long enough for me to know whether it fell off the table or not. But the rolling was just a concept. I can visualise things, but I can't visualise motion. Which I only discovered recently.

Small tennis sized ball whitish color on a whitish classic rectangular kitchen table. But the table is zoomed in quite much at the start so you only see the overside of it.

No specific gender, very neutral. Like a videogame character with few colors, white mostly. Now the scene is zoomed back to let you see the person walk up to the table.

Did not know. But when i read the others answers mine turned into a 1990 MTV music video where objects are immutable but displayed in lots of different ways, colors, textures, ... I also exploded it when the pwrson touched the ball for fun.

I have worked a lot in video games and scientific visualisation, so the test looks like something I'd make in a 3D engine I guess, least information possible to show the important things, the ball etc.

I can imagine and see about anything, colour, texture, forms, people, movements, but the more details the more zoomed in it gets. I can imagine you as lofi-girl looking at your phone, but expeession like "what the crap did I just read" imagining you reading this for example.

HTH

• What color was the ball? Grey.
• What gender was the person that pushed the ball? No idea, was there even a person? Couldn't really get it to move more than just rolling along.
• What did they look like? Se above, I've no idea as I couldn't really image a person.
• What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? Like a palintar in lord of the rings (commonly known as a "seeing stone" I believe?).
• What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Couldn't image a table, it just kinda layed in the emptyness.

TDLR, can't really image stuff and really can't image people, who especially not faces.

i could answer all these questions except the gender, what does that count for

(it was a white reflective crystal ball being pushed off a half-cloth-covered wooden table by a wizard with a tall hood, beard, and tits)

At my desk eating. So the table was my desk and I imagined a white ball that suddenly moved and fell down to the floor. I didn't imagine a person pushing it because that wasn't part of the deal. However when you asked the other stuff then yeah I could imagine up anything else in the same scene.

I imagined a red dodgeball on a small brown table. The person was just a thick stick figure and when the ball fell it bounced.

The color and shape I didn't actively choose, they cam be different, but I guess my brain has defaults.

The ball falling and bouncing, however, I had to actively think about, the same way I have to think about texture. I don't have to think about where the ball would stop, or how much it would bounce tho.

• gray ball, about the size of a typical dodge-ball.

• Featureless, sexless "humanoid"; like a "suggestion of a person" or a "fuzzy shadow".

• Round table. Nondescript. Most similar to one of those tall, small round tables you find in pubs. But again, featureless.

• Nothing happens when the human pushes it. The human can't push it because the human has no physical form.

Grey, female, cartoonish with that weird bob round kind of look that comes with bushy brown hair that's slightly longer than shoulder length, slightly larger than a ping pong ball, wooden square/rectangle, no.