Knew the answers before being asked.
I had to think of questions to these answers after they were asked. The only things that I already knew were it was a red stress ball and that it was a cheaply made wooden table. I imagined that the ball simply began rolling towards the edge of the table. The person was amorphous at best.
I don't think I have aphantasia, but I do think I have a weak imagination. When I try to conjure an object or place, it's always like I'm peering through a keyhole. Like an image with too much vignette. The objects are usually non-descript and are more like concepts than things.
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.
This is a good point... I strongly prefer nonfiction over fiction, but it could just be Autism. I really only read fiction if it is really, really good... but I read them in the same way as I would read a nonfiction book as well, I'd be more interested in the themes of the book
I have known people with aphantasia who were avid readers of fiction, and I've read accounts that more or less say "good writing allows me to somewhat vicariously enjoy a sense that I don't have, perhaps similar to how deaf people can enjoy music.". Besides that, fiction is so diverse that the necessity of visualisation ability likely varies across genres, authors, time periods etc..
My gut says that aphantasia would almost certainly affect how people would engage with fiction, but that it's not a determinant of whether they do or not. Ditto for autism (indirectly responding to OP: I have anecdotally found that autistics are rarely ambivalent on fiction — we either can't get enough of it, or can't engage with it at all. Some people I have known have directly attributed their love of fiction to their autistic modes of being)
Amateurs, all respondents imagined something new.
My mind is so efficient, it just plays something back.
Except he pushed it towards her instead of picking it up.
Very similar to mine. Although for me the ball was white and rolled right
I thought it was interesting I could only see the arm, probably because I wouldn't be able to picture the full body
All of this came before I was asked about it.
I'll participate.
The ball is silver colored/metallic, grapefruit size. A man resembling my partner pushed the ball. The table is a plain square wooden shaker-style.
I began imagining as soon as I started reading, with each additional word adding detail in my mind. By the time I got to the questions it was easy to answer them.
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)
Mine got better as I got older. Especially after some experiments with psychedelics. I didn't think I was able to imagine a 3D object in detail, and for most of my life I wasn't. But then I had a shroom trip in which I was able to freely rotate an imagined 3D object. Even render an object in my mind based solely on touch.
Afterwards I went back almost to normal, but not completely. It's like I learned to use some previously inactive part of the brain.
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.
I imagined all the details for the items, but didn't pay attention to the person. I don't like looking at people's faces.
My person was like a disembodied arm. Like if pushing the ball off the table were a game on the Wii, which I guess would mean it was in first person.
My adhd ass missed the “someone” so it was a first person perspective. Lmao
The reason this is so detailed is that I just so happened to imagine the kitchen from a friend’s house. I already know everything that’s in there. It was easy to picture. And no, I didn’t come up with any of this as a result of answering the questions. I just saw it in my head.
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.
I love how by default most tables were wooden and the balls were mostly about baseball size
For me it was a round coffee table and it was a lanky butler wearing white gloves who gently reaches out with index and thumb and pushes the baseball sized ball forward
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).
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.
Questions
I’m aphantasic. You can say “picture this” followed by whatever you like. It’s not possible for me in any way. Growing up I honestly thought “picture this” or “close your eyes and see” was just metaphor. I legitimately didn’t understand other people can see things.
My mind has a verbal descriptive stream, and I’m good with muscle-based or proprioceptive spacial memory, and the two combine to handle most things, but nothing visual. So like I can easily describe things from memory or from an idea, and it’ll be fully consistent, but not something I see.
If you have aphantasia, and not just hypophantasia, it makes no difference how much detail is provided, there’s a total, fundamental, inability to visualize things.
So as someone who coaches sometimes I have to ask. Can you imagine and feel body movements? Sometimes I'll ask someone to visualize themselves performing an action before they do it.
I’d imagine thinking through the thought has around the same mental impact. But that would be interesting to research as that advise always helped me massively in tennis.
In my experience people have a hard time running through a checklist in their head. That's why just imagining the action is so helpful, since you don't have to think as much. Or in my experience, the less you think about it the more natural the movement becomes. Like you can practice the action a bit but you need to eventually just do the action.
This was fun to read. Everytime I read a new detail the scene in my head changed :)
My mental image of the bicycle changed as each detail was added, but sometimes the detail changed the image (the handlebars were straight until you said they were dropped) and sometimes the detail didn’t exist; the dropped handlebars were wrapped in handlebar tape, but that tape didn’t have a colour (not sure how to explain that better) until you mentioned it was black. Most of the details “added” something to the scene rather than “changing” an assumed detail.
The “front forks on the ground” question was particularly interesting to me.
The bicycle started with two wheels, and front wheel just sorta disappeared from my image when you mentioned it was stolen, but the front fork remained floating in the air as if there was a wheel still supporting it. But asking the question about the forks on the ground made gravity exist, and then there had to be a reason it was floating, which became it was being held up by the U-Lock.
I seem to imagine scenes with few superfluous details that mostly includes only what is mentioned or implied by the narrative. But it’s super interesting to me what details we’re in fact implied.
The ball on the table was similar. The table was at waist height to the person, and the ball had a specific size of roughly the size of a racket ball because it had to be something that could be easily pushed. But the person pushing it was just a silhouette of a person, it had no gender, the only thing I pictured clearly was the hand that pushed the ball. It was pushed in an intentional way that made the ball roll across the table away from the “person” (as opposed to bouncing, or pushed sideways)
The table was just an elevated plane it had no texture, or even legs supporting it, (probably because there was no ground for those legs to be on,) it didn’t go on forever, you could see the end of the table, but it also didn’t have a size.
Also conjuring up unnecessary details is a hyperphantasia thing, not doing it doesn't mean you have aphantasia.
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.
Blue rubbery ball with small dents in it like for a dog toy.
Pushed by a man in a suit with brown hair but face of Olaf Scholz because I did read a news about him prior.
Ball had a diameter somewhat smaller than a tennis ball but bigger than a golf ball.
White table with very flat plastic top, like in a students learning room. Because I automatically associated this as some kind of experiment which I often did at school.
I could feel the table I rested on while watching the man push the ball to fall of the table.
I have a high level of imagination and work creatively all day in my free time, be it doing art or playing creative games. But this never increased in a way, I remember being able to create these same quality images in my head since I was able to read as small child.
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
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.
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 have aphantasia. The reason this experiment works is because someone with aphantasia will logically think about what they're being asked, but since they're not really "picturing" it, they won't have any answers about details. Color, type, and size of the ball? I have no idea, that information wasn't relevant to my mental checklist. For me, it really does work like a checklist. My brain supplies exactly zero imagery. For some people it's more like a spectrum, where they might be able to have a hazy picture with minimal details.
But aphantasia is 100% real. It's just hard for people to believe it because it's so foreign to the way they're used to thinking, in the same way it sounds unbelievably exhausting to me that regular people are constantly creating movies in their heads.
With all due respect, I don't believe aphantasia is a real thing.
It does, it's a studied and proven condition. No idea why you wouldn't believe it lol
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.
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?
A vague thought of a ball and knowledge of what would happen. Nothing else.
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 imagined it in a cartoon-ish fashion, so I think I can actually draw it out.
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.
My brother in Christ you have described almost the exact same specs I visualized. The only difference is in the level of resolution of my "scene." And by that, I mean essentially I did a few more render passes in my head to anchor everything you've written within a sort of Impressionistic, highly softened, out-of-focus backdrop. I saw hints of shadowy cabinets, the concept of a darkened kitchen out of sight. The shape and finger placement of my slightly more textured, clothed yet featureless male. The gray-brown feeling of a floor below, a dark white ceiling above, and the faded glow of sunlight through an unseen dining room window grazing one end of that oaken table.
But the basics ... They're the same, and before being asked to recall them. Damn.
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!
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
