this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024

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This is a thought experiment "Ball on a Table" for detecting whether someone has Aphantasia. What do you see when you perform this experiment? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 month ago by zlatiah to c/asklemmy

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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?

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[–] shalafi 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] zlatiah 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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

[–] evilcultist 1 points 1 month ago

This test was unexpected for me. I love fiction, especially fantasy. I love playing tabletop RPGs. I play solo RPGs and try to imagine the events in my head. I daydream a lot.

But I didn’t have an answer for any of the questions. I believe it’s because I took a utilitarian view to the exercise. I assumed it was about the ball being pushed and the motion of the ball and all of the information the questions asked about was irrelevant. But, I don’t know. I’m also autistic.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

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)