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?
If someone told you to study a ball for 20 seconds and then close your eyes, then asked you immediately after you closed your eyes what colour the ball was, could you answer? The second something disappears from your visual field, is it gone from your “mind’s eye”?
What’s interesting to me about this is that the way our visual field works involves a lot of fantasy. Like, our minds are convinced that we’re currently seeing everything in front of us and most of it is in focus. But, in reality our eyes can only really see a tiny amount of the world in full focus at once, but they’re constantly flickering around filling in details. This is why some optical illusions are so strange, because they show us that our visual systems are taking shortcuts and what we think we see isn’t actually reality. It makes me wonder if people with aphantasia actually “see” the world differently too.
I don’t have a minds eye for something to fade from, so that question doesn’t really make sense to me. I have my eyes and then when I close my eyes it’s either black or eyelid colored, nothing else, and I’m super unclear what seeing things in your mind is supposed to be like. Tho I do have super-vivid visual dreams these days (which did not happen until my late 20s, but aren’t at all uncommon for people with aphantasia) and because I only have open-eye sight and these dreams that seem totally real, I frequently have to ask people if things actually happened. It’s very disconcerting, but my understanding is that dreams are not really the same as waking minds eye anyway.
Rather than a visual representation, I’ll have a verbal description ready as soon as I see an item. So for the ball example, I’d know the ball is “small, about the size of a plum, solid pink somewhere between neon and intense salmon, smooth matte texture, looks like it might be foam”. It probably serves the same function as a visual representation, although perhaps with a bit more required specificity. I don’t really describe things to myself unless I need to, though, so I guess my thinking is sort of abstract. I know the traits something has, and can recall them, but typically don’t explicitly list them unless I’m describing for someone else.
One perk of this is I’m great at describing things I’ve seen or made up, a downside is I’m terrible when people describe things to me. Since I’ve never seen the thing being described, it is a super arbitrary list of usually non-specific features and I don’t care at all. I skip clothing descriptions in books, for example. Don’t care. But when I describe things, even made up things, I’ll run through a list of the features it needs as a minimum to be the object for my mind, which is usually vivid detail for others, as the ball example above.
Idk if I see things differently eyes-open, I don’t really think so, but that’s always been a curiosity of mine since there’s literally no way to know what other people see. I have mild impairments as a result of not being able to visualize, like I’m largely face blind - I have to pick out specific features and traits and use the combination as identifiers. I get a ton of false positives, and almost everyone “feels familiar”. Beyond that, I’m pretty sensitive to colors and patterns. Idk.
But the -way- you ask that first question makes me curious; If you close your eyes and intentionally picture something other than the ball, would you then be unable to tell me what color it was in your example? Do you, personally, require the visual representation to “know” the object?
Not who you asked, but yes I could answer and also yes it’s gone from my mind’s eye. I would be answering from memory.
I have no mind’s eye. Full-stop. But I have memory and can recall details without needing to see the thing.
If you can remember someone’s name after meeting them, that’s the same process it would be for me to remember their hair or shirt color.