Answer:

It was a simplistic grescale scenario devoid of unnecessary features. Think a simple and fast 3D render from the 90s or something. So everything was grescale, the person had no gender (or even features), and pushed a baseball sized sphere on a simple rectangular table made of indeterminate materials. Now I can picture something more detailed if required or desired but my mind focused on the mechanics of it all and kept details to a minimum. Asking for these details afterwards doesn’t generate them retroactively.

I have complete aphantasia, I can’t even visualize a ball or table, or anything else - never have been able to, I see absolutely nothing when I close my eyes and can’t visualize or see things in my head at all except when dresming. Same for my Dad. He can apparently visualize an extremely tiny amount (like the night sky but just black + stars, etc) when he’s high on thc gummies. I’ve never been high so idk if it works for me.

It took me 24 years to realize that people actually can actually see images in their head when they think about something or intentionally imagine it. I always thought that phrases like “picture it in your head” or “see in your head what it will look like” were just phrases, not that people actually can see things when they think about it.

I basically fill in the details as the questions were asked. It could have been anything from a billiard ball on a pool table to a rubber ball on a dining room table. Anything unimportant is basically left “unfilled” or generic until it needs detail.

The person who pushed it was vaguely male, again no details unless the question is asked. They may as well have been a featureless mannequin.

I do not have Aphantasia, but I’ve always been fascinated by other people’s “normal”. I always loved the “is my red the same as your red” thought experiment ever since I was a kid. I have spoken to people that claim to have Aphantasia, and they describe their experience as pretty normal. Instead of seeing an image in their head, they just… know the thing. Where most people can visualize a scene in their head, Aphantasiacs apparently just feel and understand. It doesn’t seem to impair them whatsoever and they seem to be perfectly normal people otherwise. My layman’s explanation is maybe it’s a vestigial function of the human brain back when we needed more empathetic or intuitive responses to stimuli, similar to the theory that ADHD would have been a benefit during hunter/gather societies.

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 I don’t like about this experiment is that being hyperphantic doesn’t necessarily mean “you need photographic visualizations of every scenario at all times”. My mind conjures scenarios differently depending on context.

I can imagine myself barely being able to see a ball on a table, let alone a person moving into view.

I can see the ball having a glossy, low-res texture alla 1980s CGI, with the ball being pushed by a polygon figure, moving without any real animation and limply falling off the table with no gravitational speed.

I can picture a worn, shiny leather baseball sitting on an old coffee table, stained walnut. The person is Mark Wahlberg and he has a smirk on his face as he lazily finger-flicks the ball, which only barely makes it to the edge of the table before just being able to tip off the edge, bouncing twice with a heavy bomp-bomp and rolling unevenly for a couple seconds. Mark winces because his finger hurts now. I could also imagine the flavor of the baseball and what it would smell like.

The point is that an aphantic might only be able to visualize this scenario at best as well as the first description, or perhaps not even at all and they can only ‘know’ of the movements in the scene with zero visual or otherwise relation to it.

Hyperphantics generally can conjure near limitless detail and they can retain that information visually for long periods of time without much effort.

Blue

Gender-nondescript, like a drawing in a school book

See above

Tennis ball size

Square, particle board like Ikea furniture

Some of them I extrapolated upon after seeing the questions because having unknowns in your mind’s eye is not uncomfortable to people with intellectual integrity

I was really surprised when I learned that the inner eye wasn’t just some figure of speech, so I don’t see anything, certainly no extra visual details.

Something is still happening though, I can sort of “feel out” shapes/volumes and motion, like depth perception with no visuals attached.

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

Background: I did this experiment with the pre-existing belief that I likely have aphantasia.

Starting with the important question, no, I didn’t know the answer to these things before being asked

The ball was red, but I don’t think my initial “rendering” involved a colour of a ball at all, because the colour isn’t relevant to how it rolls. The ball felt cold, because that’s one of the ways I understood its weightiness, and thus how it rolls. The ball was small enough to hold in one hand, but in “visualising” its size, I imagined how it would feel in my hand. The ball I imagined was a bit larger than a tennis ball and much heavier. I can imagine the force my fingers would need to exert to grasp it.

The person who pushed the ball had no gender because it wasn’t relevant. When I considered the person’s gender, they were a woman, but that information seems to have gotten lost when I “looked away” by considering other questions; when I reread the questions, I “forgot” what gender the ball pusher was, and this time they were man. I suspect that because the information wasn’t relevant to the manner the ball was being pushed, the person pushing the ball was in a sort of superposition of gender, where they are both and/or neither man and/or woman, because it was liable to change whenever I “looked away”.

The ball pusher(s) didn’t look like anything unless I really pushed myself on this question and then I’m like “erm, I guess they were brunette?”, but I think a similar thing happens as with the gender question — unless I have a way to remember what traits I assigned to the ball pusher, I’m just going to forget and have to regenerate the traits. I suspect that if I were actively visualising something, these details would stick together better, like paint to a canvas.

The table has a similar effect of nebulousness. My only assumption before you asked further about the table was that it was level (because the ball started at rest) and rectangular/square. When I tried to consider the table in more detail, I asked myself “what can a table be made out of”. Wood comes to mind most obviously, because I have a wood table near me. Laminated particle-board is another thing. I also remember some weird, brightly coloured , super lightweight plastic tables from school. It could also be metal. It could have four legs, or it might have a central base like the dining table at my last house. It might be circular, or oval, or rhomboid. I think I just modelled it as squarish because I’ve learned enough mathsy-physics that I’m inclined to think of spherical cows, and having a straight edge is easier to model for mathematically, and to draw.

Brains sure are wacky, huh?

Red. Before

Dude. After

Me. After

Baseball. Before

White card table with grey liner. Before.

Ball rolled slightly forward after being judged by the person. Stayed in the table. Before