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

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.

boooooo

Love it

A vague thought of a ball and knowledge of what would happen. Nothing else.

Exactly. There's no need to add more details unless that's part of the requirements. Otherwise it makes it harder to keep track of things. Keep it simple first, then add complexity as needed.
Exactly. It rolls for a while unless it reaches an edge.

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!

That's how I did it too. There is a sphere on a plane. A force is applied to the sphere, parallel to the plane. Neither the sphere nor the plane have a defined color, size, material, etc. Nothing specific pushed the sphere.

My job is often to mathematically model the things people say to me, and in those circumstances thinking like this is correct.

I don't think this way when I daydream, although the visual components of my daydreams are more like the feelings I get when I look at something than like concrete mental pictures.
- Hello, fellow odd brain!

spoiler

Interesting, on the first sentence I actually thought of many different sizes and shapes for the ball, then realized I'd have to pick one before moving on to the next part, so it was kind of a conscious decision. I ended up with a simple grey anti-stress ball. But the table was always the same, light brown wood. All focus is on the ball so the person is just a silhouette partly out of camera but the hand is white and wearing a black sleeve. I only chose what the person looked like after the questions based on what felt right for the initial visualization, like panning out the camera.

There's another question though. Would your mind get into all this trouble if you didn't know there would be questions coming?

Interesting. I also had only the vaguest impression of the person pushing the ball, but I definitely caught a glimpse before the ball rolled off the table. Slacks and a blue shirt, that was about it.
It's interesting how many people picked a brown wood table. I'd guess that's probably the most common material and colour for tables. But I'm typing this on a black table, and yet I still pictured a brown wood one.
My ball was gray, too. With no details whatsoever, just shading. In the edge of the table, a hand came from the left of the camera view with its index finger stretched out and poked the ball, which rolled a few inches and stopped (while in other faded versions of it the ball fell off the table or rolled further over the table surface)

I can visualize things in my mind, but it's not... Clear? Like it's not as vivid as seeing with my actual eyes. It's like seeing images as reflections on tinted glass. Dark, murky. Muted colors. There is also an emphasis with text. I think of a ball. I imagine a red ball with the text "Ball" above or below it.

In the scenario given, I see a dark image of a red ball on a wooden table. A hand not attached to a person pushes the ball. The ball rolls across the table and falls off. There is text below describing the situation.

It's important to know if the text was displayed in comic sans or not.
- Times New Roman.
- Papyrus you heathen
For me it's kinda unfocused, like I can imagine a ball on a table and someone giving it a push.

Only after I force myself to think a bit harder about it, I get a regular square wooden table in a kitchen-esque room, with a silver pinball on it, while a guy approaches it and gives it a small push, at the same time, the post didn't ask me to imagine the ball falling off the table, so the ball barely rolls at all.
Dang, interesting! I have no text in mine.

It’s a clear vision of a red ball you’d play dodgeball with, on a stark, small, circular table with a wide white top and a single metal leg with a ring bottom.

The person is a fully black, like, men’s room door sign person fur me, and the ball falls off and bounces with realistic dodgeball physics and I can hear the THONK… THONK… THONK. THONK THONK THONKTHONKTHONK rollllllllll sounds as it falls. When I imagine this scenario I can also smell the ball and feel the texture of the ball and the table. The person is the only thing that isn’t realistic.

I had a wildly vivid imagination as a kid… and I’ve always had synesthesia.

I love how by default most tables were wooden and the balls were mostly about baseball size

Apparently I'm in spooky brain mode cause mine was a crystal ball
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

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

Were your front forks resting on the ground, or up in the air?
Was there any other damage done to your bike or to the lock?
Are there any other bikes nearby? People nearby? Security cameras that might have caught the crime?

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.
- 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.
This was fun to read. Everytime I read a new detail the scene in my head changed :)
I have aphantasia, and people really struggle to comprehend what it means or what it's like. Now to be fair, I don't really comprehend how people without aphantasia think or process things either.

Were your front forks resting on the ground, or up in the air?

No idea, all I could think was that the front tire was missing, it didn't occur to me to think how that affected the bikes position.

Was there any other damage done to your bike or to the lock?

I didn't think about there being any damage.

Are there any other bikes nearby? People nearby? Security cameras that might have caught the crime?

I had just thought of a bike rack with only my bike, no people or other bikes nearby. Looking for security cameras seems obvious now that you mention it, but I didn't think of that. If you had said "what advice would you give if your friend walked out and found their bike had been stolen/vandalized" I probably would have thought of that, but trying to think of an abstract situation is much more difficult for me.
Interesting point and I'm glad you made it, with a thought (?) experiment to check.

I think I am somewhat aphantastic, but not officially diagnosed.

Tap for spoiler

Front forks down.

No other damage.

No other bikes, bike racks, or even street furniture. But as I read this question I retroactively added in the bike rack and street furniture outside my hometown's library.
- Interesting, I was also thinking of a nearby library when I came up with the scenario. It sounds to me like you don't have much aphantasia if you thought to have the forks down, most people I think just deleted the wheel and didn't think of how that might affect the bike. Either that, or you have a lot of experience seeing bikes with stolen wheels and you naturally picture it the way you normally see it.
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.
- I'm sure it depends on the extent of the unnecessary details Thinking the ball is red is surely not hyperphantasia.

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?

Yep pretty much what I got
- Since we all went with colorless, I imagine that means we weren't doing visual stuff at all. It's all bones.
THAT IS THE SAME DUDE WHO PUSHED MY REALISTIC BALL OFF OF MY REALISTIC TABLE

I imagined it in a cartoon-ish fashion, so I think I can actually draw it out.

drawing

Red ball
Male
Like Google's default profile picture, without facial features, except he's in gray and has a neck
My single hand can surround more than half of it in a cross section view, so about 12cm in diameter
Rectangular table, about 5:2, I didn't imagine the material, but it's plain brown, so I guess wood?

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 mean, people will imagine a similar thing when asked to imagine something specific. At the end of the day there's just so many ways to imagine someone pushing a ball off a table.
More or less but person didn't have gender because that wasn't relevant to the subject which was the rolling ball. Ball also bounced a few times when hitting the floor.

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.

Hmm have you been on LSD? I’m curious if your experience with it is different from someone who doesn’t have aphantasia?
- Nope, haven't done anything harder than ibuprofen tbh, never had a desire to try. I do dream visually though

The ball rolls for a bit then stops

Colorless ball
Didn't image a gender, just the concept of a person
They didn't look like anything
I guess a perfect colorless sphere roughly the size of a tennis ball
Pretty much just a rectangular flat surface. There's no color or material

I didn't know much about it except the size of the ball being roughly proportional to the size of a human hand

Huh. The person was off-frame. And I'm pretty sure i retroactively chose a color for the ball.

I think I might have a black-and-white imagination.

I can imagine it in the sense that I can understand what happens. There is nothing visual at all for me. My assumption was that it was roughly-tennis-ball-sized absent any other info, but it wasn't even a person, just a hand pushing a ball (and again, just the idea and nothing visual) as no other info is relevant.

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.

Wait a second.

The ball had no color at all
The person who pushed the ball didn't even exist. It just got pushed by some invisible force. Naturally, they didn't have an appearance.
The ball was like... Small I guess?
The table had no properties at all.

Do people really usually have a more vivid picture in their heads? It's always just concepts with me. I'm confused.

I also had the "I spent 23 minutes designing this scene in blender" impression of the ball, table, and disembodied hand. The table was made of light grey, the ball was made of light grey, and the hand was made of light grey
Yeah, same with me. But I knew the ball was pushed and rolled to the edge of the table and then fell, so I feel like I got the most relevant bit.

Tbh I've never been good at visualising faces, recognising people I know, retracing a route I've taken etc. This just feels like one of those things I've never really been great at.
What happens to the ball?

It slowly rolled toward the edge but stopped before falling to the ground. The path was somewhat eccentric because of the texture of the ball.

What color was the ball?

Yellow

What gender was the person that pushed the ball?

Male

What did they look like?

Green and white track suit (why? IDK), mid 60's Italian, chubby

What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?

It was one of those foam Nerf bullets, so about the size of a shooter marble

What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?

It was that black IKEA table where the four metal legs screw into the corners. About 6ft by 3ft.

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?

The entire scene sprung into my head at once after reading that someone interacted with the ball
Do people really usually have a more vivid picture in their heads?

I can't speak for others, but I do if they're concepts I've encountered before. I have "default" visualizations of things that are changed if the description warrants it.

I find it very interesting that the vast majority of people saw a red ball. I did too.

red
Indeterminate, mostly just an arm
shoulder-length brown hair, androgenous body, hidden face
Like a rubber bouncy ball you'd get in a party bag
wooden, square

Mostly I already knew, but it felt like things were "filling in" as I tried to "remember" the image to answer the questions, especially around the person.

I imagine it's because it's the simplest, most common type of ball that you commonly see described as such. Like, baseballs and basketballs and soccer balls and beach balls exist, but out of context they're typically called that rather than just "a ball". So, a simple round ball. Giving it a pattern requires some extra thought, and of the solid colors red seems like the most common (think dodgeballs).
Same

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.

The ball was red.
I have no idea.
I have no idea.
Like, maybe softball sized? A little bigger? I'm not sure.
Square. It was made of brown.

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.
- Same. Is there anyone that likes looking at people's faces?
My adhd ass missed the “someone” so it was a first person perspective. Lmao

What happens to the ball? It rolls of the side of the table.
Color: I didn't imagine a specific color
Gender: I didn't imagine a specific gender. Most of the person was "out of the frame"
What did they look like: Again, most of the person was out of the frame, they were just kind of a gray silhouette
What size was the ball? Like a dodgeball I guess?
What about the table? Very minimalist square table made up of five rectangular prisms (the surface and four legs). No specific material, uniform texture. I imagined everything in isometric perspective.

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.
- I think my brain might just be lazy... I skipped over the entire walk to the table part. And just imagined a detached arm pushing the ball on a surface, until it rolled off the surface and that was all.
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
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

Labels should always be used with caution, but for me, learning about aphantasia led to me reconsidering the ways in which I imagine things, and this had a beneficial impact on how I communicated with people close to me. For example, I seem to be an odd mixture of relying on visual stimuli for thinking (so I have visual reminders all over, and reading complex info is way easier for me than hearing it), but also seem to lack the ability to visualise. This means that if my partner asks "hey, do you remember which drawer the mini screwdrivers are in?", I would usually be unable to answer, despite being able to walk in, take a glance at the drawers and go "that one, there". We didn't realise how frustrating this was for both of us until we reflected on the possibility of me having aphantasia. Whether I do or not doesn't matter. More relevant is the fact that now, when he asks me questions of where things are, it'll often be accompanied by a photograph of the location, which drastically improves my ability to recall and point to where the item is.

To some degree, I agree that it's nonsense to assign labels when in nature and in humans, variation is the norm. Certainly it can lead to reductionism and ignoring wide swathes of that variety if one is on a quest to sort people into boxes. However, there is still a lot that we don't know about how the brain works to process things and labels can be instructive either in researching aspects that we don't yet understand, or for regular people like me who find benefit in a word that helps me to understand and articulate that there are ways that my partner thinks and processes information that seem to be impossible for me to emulate. "Aphantasia" helped both of us to be more accepting of these differences.

Framing a phenomenon as either real or not isn't especially useful though, largely because of the ambiguity in the phrasing. An example in a different domain is that I've seen a wide variety of people claim that they don't think autism is a real thing. This tends to be received as offensive to many people, not least of all autistic people who feel like their lived experience is being directly attacked and questioned. Sometimes it is, and their anger is justified. However, I've also seen the "autism isn't a real thing" sentiment come from (often autistic) people critiquing the label and how it's used, especially in a clinical context. They argue that it perpetuates a binary framing of autistic and not autistic, which further marginalises people who do have a diagnosis, and isolates some people who have autistic traits but are overall sub-clinical in presentation (who may have benefitted from understanding these traits from an autistic perspective). Regardless of one's view of the arguments, it's pretty clear that these are two very different stances that might be described by "autism isn't a real thing".

I make this example because debating of the utility of labels can be a great and fruitful discussion that helps to improve our understanding of the underlying phenomena and people's experiences of them. Framing that debate as what's real or not can lead to less productive arguments that are liable to cause offence (especially on the internet, where we're primed to see things in a more adversarial manner)

As an aphantasia person myself, it is honestly mind boggling that people can visualise things that aren't there. Like that must be so much effort on things that aren't needed.

Suppose it means you can just have a wank and not need porn though.

Oh my! I didn't know what to expect, and I have to say... I was quite surprised by some of your answers. Also confirmed to me that I am definitely not normal

Not many replies that are indicative of Aphantasia so... here goes nothing. I tried really hard at this okay

spoiler

I don't "see" see anything when I close my eyes. I can create a very vague concept of a ball, a table, and... kind of a person in my head, but I don't actually see the scene, I used to think when people say imagining things they were just making a metaphor. Things get really funk from here... But the overall schema feels more like one of those badly drawn scenes from the hit visual novel Slay the Princess. And yes I imagined it in 2D for some reason

Color: the ball doesn't have a color
Gender: it wasn't even a real person; it seems like a silhouette of the hand and back of a person
Looks: As I said, the person isn't even facing me
Size: No idea; in retrospect it's fairly large compared to the table (diameter probably 1/2-1/3 of table?), but the table is also an abstract concept so...
Table: no clue, it is a square table but that's it. If anything it looks like the things served on Pizza Hut pizzas
Well I spoiled the question for myself so... but I didn't have to choose, heck I couldn't choose even if I know what the questions are

Just as an exploration with you on this. Use your same instructions for the placing and actions with one difference.

The room is pitch black, and you can't see a thing.

What do you hear?

Click for review questions:

what did the steps of the person sound like? Can you tell what kind of shoes they have with "heal/toe" impact sounds? single thumps indicating flat footfalls? nothing?

how long were they walking before they got to the table?

Did the ball make any sound as it rolled on the table? What kind of sounds? What kind of table would make that sound?

When the ball hit the floor did it bounce or fall flat? Was there an echo? Did the sound of the fall indicate you're in a tiny room or a giant room?

How close was the person to your point of observation?

Could you hear the person breathing?

What else did you hear that I didn't include here?
- I am not joking; the only thing I can imagine is for some bizarre reason a bowling ball noise followed by a comical noise of striking pins. I know there is a person but I couldn't imagine that person
- The person didn't walk, that wasn't the focus of what I was imagining
  
  The ball didn't make a sound when it rolled, but I was imagining a soft futsal ball that would make almost no noise rolling on a table. If I'd been imagining a marble or something that would have been different
  
  The ball bounced once a bit, then fell flat, it's how a futsal ball bounces, it's a kind of "splat" sound with no echoes. I didn't imagine walls, so the room is effectively infinite sized
  
  The person wasn't really part of what I was imagining. They were there to give the ball a push, but otherwise were irrelevant, so I didn't focus on them in any way
  
  If I'd let my fantasy get "polluted" by the other questions and stories, I'd have answered differently. With all the questions about the person, I'd have invented a person and effectively "panned out" so that the person was part of what I was thinking about. Instead I went with my original visualization which just involved an effectively disembodied hand giving a ball a push. If this were a TV show or something, the only part of the person that I ever saw was the hand that gave the ball a push, everything else was "out of frame". But, I wasn't imagining a "frame", just whatever my mind's eye was focused on, which was almost entirely the ball, and not anything else.
You imagined a lot more details than I did. For me it was just the concept of a ball. And then the idea of it moving. The person and the table were left our as irrelevant.

The thought experiment I use when explaining to people about aphantasia is a much simplified version of yours: "imagine a circle", "ok", "what color is it?"

That's it. People give an answer, sometimes including more details, like texture. Then I tell them that for me the question doesn't make sense, I just imagined the idea of a circle and didn't actually "see" anything, so there's no additional detail to it.
This sounds similar to how it works for me too. I closed my eyes to try this.

I saw a very rough version of the table that's in the room with me. The table is a low rectangular coffee table with a coarsely threaded grey throw over it going lengthways, but I saw it as a rectangular shape with a vague grey top. The ball was featureless with no colour, and was about the size of my fist, so an adult man's fist.

I saw a low quality arm push the ball, but I really struggled to picture it, and while I knew what would happen in real life, I couldn't picture it happening in my head.

It's strange, as sometimes I can picture things fairly well, but other times I can't do it at all. I have very vivid dreams on the occasions that I remember dreaming, but I can't close my eyes and picture my family. I know what they should look like, in the same way that I know what a rotating cow should look like, but I very rarely get any sort of mental image of them.

Ironically, I was in a coma a bit over a decade ago, and while I was in it, the dreams that I had were so realistic that it took me months to get things straight in my head.

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.

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

Yeah I had a similar struggle. I don't think I've been so caught off guard by a visualization.

Permanently Deleted

The ball was red, like a red rubber ball. The person was sort of indistinct from the neck up, it was more like my view was focused on the ball itself and didn't see a face, but it was a man, wearing a white shirt and dark tie, and dark pants. The ball was about the size of a baseball, wasn't completely smooth and shiny, sort of a matte with a slight grippy texture. Table was square, wood, like a medium brown color. The ball rolled off the table and bounced a few times.

All these decisions were automatic when reading the prompt, it's what I saw.

I've just become aware of aphantasia myself, I have a few family members who have it apparently. I was talking to my BIL about it the other day, I was saying how I'm a big fan of reading, but I mostly read nonfiction. He said he doesn't read much, mostly biographies, but fiction doesn't do much for him because he can't picture anything in his head. I can picture everything in great detail when I read fiction. Its interesting because our minds work very differently

I imagined the same red, baseball-ish sized rubber ball. Not sure why that's my default for "ball."
- +1 for a red rubberlike ball ... looks like a pattern emerges

I've put some effort into improving my visualization since learning about aphantasia. Upon reading the prompt, I was able to imagine a colorless ball, but with shading to indicate a 3D shape, like a preview render in a CAD program. That's progress! It didn't have a size inherently. For the table, I could picture a white, rectangular plane hovering in a black void. If it was a normal dinner table size, then the ball was something like a softball or basketball.

And that's it. That exhausted my ability to visualize. No person, no push, no motion. Best I can do is to see the white rectangle after the ball has rolled off of the edge.

Both my partner and I answered the same.

The ball was the size of a tennis ball, no colour.

The person had no gender or any distinguishing features.

The table was a standard kitchen table.

Neither of us knew what the test was about.

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?

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.

Neat!

spoiler

Red. It was rubber.
Male.
Tall, thin. I don't remember a face, but he was wearing an old-fashioned formal shirt and sport jacket. The cuff of the shirt was unbuttoned and folded back. He also wore a wide-brimmed black hat. (I'm currently watching an episode of Hell on Wheels which probably influenced that.)
Large for an apple, small for a canteloupe.
Square, dinner-table-hieight. Dark-stained wood. I'm no woodworker, so I wouldn't know what kind of wood it was, but I've got a couple of bookcases of the same wood and staining.

Aside from that, I can say it took place in an old cabin and in the background, I saw an open doorway to a... foyer? The door to the outside was open. It was very sunny. And I saw green grass outside.

And, I knew all those things before I got to the questions. I just had to consult/replay the scene in my head to get all the answers.

Seems fair to say I don't have aphantasia.

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
- 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.
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)
Permanently Deleted

I’ve never head of this test before now. Spoiler tags to help others avoid the answers before they take the test.

Tap for spoiler

The ball was somehow chrome but not reflective, and bigger than a large marble. The table was a flat plane with no features. The person pushing the table had no features. There were no other features within this thought space

rolled to the left and up a bit, fell off
Red
male
only saw the arm
tennis ball sized
folding card table

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

It was a billiards/pool ball, but no idea which one as I just associate balls on tables with playing pool.

No idea on gender, formless concept.

No idea on looks, just a concept.

Whatever size a pool ball is, 2-3 inches? Just a concept though.

It is a pool table with green felt and a raised edge and six pockets because that is what a pool table is. Can't really see it. Just aware of it's general properties and how the felt and wood feels.

Eveey detail is based ona pool tabke and ball because my first thought about balls on tables is playing pool. Without the table detail I wouldn't have anything at all to work with.

Honestly, it's patchy.

'ball on a table' is very generic, so my brain keeps suggesting different versions. A beach ball on my grandparents' living room table when I was a child. A fairly featureless basketball-sized sphere on a beech-like table in some kind of gallery-like environment. A tennis ball, but on little more than the concept of a table. The person, not being specified... could be anyone. In some versions it's my own arm, POV, in others it's like something seen out of the corner of your eye. Yeah someone came in and did a thing, I wasn't really looking.

The motion is more like a series of vignettes, unless I concentrate more - in which case the surrounding detail gets more abstract.

Now, if you give me details, that's another story.

A fuzzy yellow tennis ball on that cheap folding card table from my childhood with the padding cut off, leaving the textured fibreboard surface. My older sister strides up and shoves the ball across the table, making the flimsy legs wobble as she does so.

Do that, I can see the texture of the carpet and the bare walls from our shitty childhood apartment, I can downright smell the table and have the heft of the thing kinaesthetically along with the shape and visual textures. I can see the skitter and wobble of the ball across the table; my sister more an abstract bundle of mannerisms and gait, and the actual path of the ball is still more implied than observed, though.

For the most part, my visualisation is handwave, like looking through your blind spot or your peripheral vision: the part your brain makes up to fill in the missing details. When I read a book, it's like half-remembered cover-illustrations of the general scene: more vibe (sometimes richly textured, vivid vibe) than a literal image.

I have hyperphantasia according to these kinds of tests (although I am not sure how accurate they are). In any case, the ball was white with a green glow it was smooth and looked like plastic but no seams where the halves were joined, male, like a large blue bird I saw in a cartoon, a bit larger than a baseball, the table was a very long rectangle shape. It was also white. The ball was pushed very hard from one end of the table to the other and then it bounced on the wall, the floor and the ceiling. The room was a bit small, with only a very small window rectangular window. It was black behind the window. The room was also rectangle shaped, with concrete grey walls. It was a bit dark, but there was some artificial light from a lamp. The bird acted very cartoonish when pushing the ball. I think that is all.

Very interesting!

My results

The ball was about the size of a baseball, and the table was square, but I couldn't answer any of the other questions without just making something up when they were asked.

Exact same.

OK today I learned I may have aphantasia.

It suffices to say, the follow up questions were bizarre to me.

Maybe I am broken by all the physics thought experiments, but my image was very bare-bones

spoiler

I imagined a small ball (roughly of size of my fist) but only an outline, no features, I did not imagine practically anything about person - just a force (imagined impulse was parallel to table plane) - I did imagine ball rolling (considered forward rolling, as opposed to impulse on center of mass (which in a frictionless situation would make it just linearly translate, or backspin) and falling from the table after a few seconds

Sure, OK.

Welcome to my brain

Red
Don't know, the "camera" wasn't panned up that high
All I really "saw" was jeans
Looked like one of those rubber balls that people like to bounce against walls, like in handball or squash. About as big across as the palm of your hand. Hollow, you could squish it without much effort.
one of those simple black square tables from Ikea

That's kind of what just popped into my head before I knew there were questions.

I fantasized all the details as they were asked in the prompt, but didn’t give an identity to the ball-pusher until the quiz asked for it.

Weird. I’ve been thinking a lot about my aphantasia recently.

The closest I can describe what I imagined, was the feeling that those things happened.

For example. That vibe you get when you feel someone is just behind you. You can’t see them, but you know it. If I imagine someone behind me, I get the same uncomfortable feeling and an urge to look behind me.

Spoiler

Colorless. Genderless. The forbidden lovechild of Bongo Bongo and Turnip Head. Ping Pong sized. Rounded wooden table.

Visualizing takes work so generally only what's needed is there. But sometimes the darker thoughts escape out from the dungeon.

Ball rolls a bit but stops before going off the edge of the table
Red
Male
Avg Height/Build, Brown hair, shaved face
Like twice the size of a marble, like a bouncy ball
Square, wooden table, lightly stained.

Knew the answers before being asked.

Before reading the questions I visualized an all white room, with an average square wooden table with a red ball about the size of the baseball on it and the person was a white man with black hair in a grey suit.

Amateurs, all respondents imagined something new.

My mind is so efficient, it just plays something back.

This is what I saw

Except he pushed it towards her instead of picking it up.

Striped white and blue
Male
Casual clothing, nondescript
About the size of a softball
Round wooden table

All of this came before I was asked about it.

rolls off the table, bounces a bit and rolls toward a glass door, where it also bounces gently after hitting the glass door. You could see outside into a yard that had a green garden in it. And trash bins outside.
blue
female, I think. But I didn’t pay much attention to the person at all.
long light brown hair, wearing a winter jacket, facing away from me. So I couldn’t see their face.
it was a dodgeball. Blue dodgeball. Not brand new. A few scuff marks on it. I could see like, the raised bumps on it.
it was a dark brown thin wooden table. It had a tray with a vase in the middle of it with a green plant with long grass-like leaves. There was a black, modern looking chandelier hanging from the ceiling above it. The table kind of looked like it came from IKEA lol.

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.

Permanently Deleted

spoiler-title

Am I the only one who imagined things that they interact with frecuently?

The ball is green and its the one I got for my cat.
Female, she gently pushed it with one finger
It was my mom (idk why)
About the size of a lemon.
I just Imagined my table. Medium sized, thick with fake wood vinyl or something. I even imagined the mess that is on it.

I alredy knew, as I said, I imagined things I already know. And the ball bounced like 4 times before rolling out of the door.

What does it mean? lol

Edit: Added the spoiler thing. Quite interesting to read others replies.

Color - none (I hate not being able to visualise color as I hate doing 3d texturing work in blender and I would like to be able to enjoy it)
Gender - ambigious
Look - lack of info
Ball - unpleasant to touch, got pushed from the top, palm sized, it made a sound, the scene looped before the ball fell off the table, in the next iterations the ball was made of foam, and lacked sound, the camera spunn around the table.
Table - four legs, square, standard height.

A colorless ball is pushed by a non existent person and rolls slightly at a linear speed and then ceases to exist. The ball had no size and I don't remember the table existing.

In my head, a red rubber ball the size of a baseball rolls off a square wooden table and falls on the floor. A guy pushed it.

Edit: I knew ahead of time. I added more detail once I saw the quiz but I can imagine pretty vivid images.

That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I'd been asked in a way that didn't feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.

What does it mean if I already knew the answer to every question except what the person looked like?

Same here. I knew it was a man but nothing else. But I had a clear view of a small red rubber ball on a card table.

I didn't know most answers, my mind kinda works with the concepts. The ball was there, but there was no color, not even a grayscale, but the absence of color ( I have difficulty imagining colors in general), the pweson was there, and was a woman, but with no face of features. I don't even know if i really pictured a woman, or if my mind worked on that after seeing the questions. The table was there, but was simply a plane for the ball to be on, without features.

Now that I write this, it seems weird. Do people picture scenarios like this as if seeing a real scene? Can this be related to aphantasia? Should I be worried?

What color was the ball?

I didn't see a color in my visualization, but I know it was red.

What gender was the person that pushed the ball?

They were genderless; more of a concept of a person than an image of one.

What did they look like?

Like...an area of visual space that my mind attached the identifier "Person" to.

What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?

A little smaller than a tennis ball, but bigger than a ping pong ball.

What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?

I didn't see either property in my visualization, but it's wooden and round.

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?

Lol. Well, I guess I botched that one. Obviously I did not know before being asked these questions, for most of the answers.

small dull red rubber ball
no obvious gender
they looked simple, like a Simpsons character. Impression of having a body, but only actually saw their hand
table was standard rectangular, wooden affair

My visualisation is quite chaotic, so I mostly see a jumble of overlapping objects then have to choose which one to focus on.

Surprisingly, I had a real hard time visualising the ball rolling on its own. The hand was either pushing it or it was bouncing off of the floor.

Interesting exercise!

Red No gender No appearance No size The table was the same color as our dining table, but that was the only property it had.

I don't literally SEE it like I would with my eyes but:

Red ball

Clown, no idea of gender

Again, clown

Ball smaller than tennis ball, bigger than golf ball

The table I am sitting at and looking at right now.

And no, I can and do imagine how things look. It's a different sort of knowing/imagining than actual physical vision or dreaming though. Which led me to be confused about what exactly aphantasia is.

Permanently Deleted

I visualized a blue ball the size of a tennis ball being pushed forward on a flat white surface by a shadowy figure with only the hand being visually clear. Upon the follow-up question, I believe that it solidified the gender in my mind to be male and also prompted me to think about the surface of the table edges in relation to where the figure stood. However, my main focus was on the blue ball and the hand pushing it forward over a white surface.

Everything was shadows with rainbow outlines, basically.

I think this is a fun exercise, but Idk I'm oblivious to a lot of things excepts shapes and interactions. More telling is my dreams tend to fall into two categories:

Objects without details but with crisp, colorful outlines and dark scenes with illuminated spacces where the more fleshed out areas that are illuminated.

And my ability to imagine is similar- if no lighting condition is given my mental image is shadows with rainbow outlines. If the instructions include lighting the details are more robust: A cat will have a color, a ball will be plain and white and softball sized.

Purple-ish

Male? Maybe?

Too abstract I more imagined an arm more than a whole person

Baseballish

Square, I dunno it was also purple. I get very like, early computer animation type vibes from the whole scene. "Ball" and "table" without any context just leaves everything kinda blank.

I think I already knew. Maybe the gender one was a stretch.

Red

Didn’t think about gender

Didn’t think about what they looked like

Ball was baseball sized

It was a square wooden table

Bonus, I imagined the ball rolling across the table and then falling off the table and bouncing a few times on the floor.

I didn’t choose any answers after reading the questions, but didn’t have an answers for the person.

What color was the ball? - Red rubber, like an old school dodgeball.
What gender was the person that pushed the ball? - Unknown, all I saw was a hand and the sleeve of a white dress shirt with the cuff rolled up.
What did they look like? As above.
What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? About the size of a softball. Bigger than a baseball, smaller than a basketball.
What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Square natural wooden table.

Already knew.

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.

spoiler

I feel like I started to picture something more specific, but as soon as it asked what happens next I deliberately cleared the details from my mind and re-imagined it as generically as possible so my prediction wouldn’t be biased by anything not explicitly stated.

The ball was red
The person was of indeterminate gender, I only really saw their arm
They were wearing a blue button up over a white shirt
The ball is about the size of an orange, and it rolled forwards
The table was made of wood

I had to picture it again to get the shirt color but not the rest. I can say that the background was dark, almost like a dimly lit billiards hall, and there was a light shining on the ball

Blue. Didn't really envision a person, just the hand, didn't notice the potential sex. It was a billiard ball on a pool table. The ball kinda rolled gently across the table at an angle, hit the side, and slowly rolled back before stopping.

The ball was blue and kind of glossy, clearly made of plastic.

The person was a scruffy looking femme character in black and white. I just subbed in a character from a comic post above this one.

The ball was about 50% bigger than a baseball.

The table was a round coffee table with that fake wood texture paneling you see on cheap furniture, you know the type? It was a muted brown color.

I did know that I was probably expected to visualize details on the described object, but not the person or table!

I've always found this subject fascinating. Why are we all so different in this regards? What's going or not going on up there? Anyway, this is my result…

Tap for spoiler

I imagined a bright red ball, like a shiny red plasticy looking ball

The "person" pushing the ball was just a disembodied arm, the ball rolled and bounced around the pool table much as a pool ball would

The arm was pretty much my arm. I didn't bother to visualise the person, instead concentrating on the interaction with the ball.

The ball was larger than a pool ball, maybe softball sized or even slightly bigger

The table was basically a pool table, green felt, but smaller or maybe the ball was just much bigger

All this I knew from my visualisation but when answering the questions I probably solidified my thoughts a bit. When viewing things they are constantly changing or shifting to match new information/ideas/concepts of what's there. I don't really see the whole scene at once easily, instead focusing in on different aspects of it. For example if I'm concentrating on the red, shiny ball then the table is just a green plane/background.

My answers:

What color was the ball? Metallic silver
What gender was the person that pushed the ball? A woman
What did they look like? Short straight black hair, pale skin tone, fit build, black blouse, plaid skirt, black leggings, wearing black pumps
What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? Slightly larger than a baseball, slightly smaller than a softball
What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Wood, square, about 1 meter/yard square, thick square legs one at each corner.

Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions? All of this was a picture before seeing the questions. Other things about the image that weren't asked were also there like:

the room was lit from a single light bulb above the table with a wide shade. Light was cast straight down on the table/ball and extended slightly beyond the table, but I couldn't see how big the room was...until the ball rolled off the table and hit the floor. I could tell the floor was smooth wood and the walls in the room must also be of a hard material because the sound of the solid ball hitting the floor reverberated. The light showed one wall was red brick. It was indoors.

Just from scrolling through, you may have been one of the only ones to report seeing the ball-pusher as female instead of male or indeterminate/ no gender

At first I saw something silhouetted on a card table. Then Action entered the story and I had to choose an adventure after being asked what happened.

I figured how it rolls might depend on who pushed it, and I already knew that. Kevin. Why he did it was less clear. Muscle memory placed us at a table in the canteen. Sitting across from him on any ordinary day, some rolled up piece of napkin or a wad of garbage paper might present itself as a projectile to reach him across the plates and glass between us.

Tonight we were in my kitchen, together there for the first time. I'd moved the table into the corner with both leaves open to make extra space for snacks for the party. We pushed the pretzels and empties aside and sat facing each other off the edge of the table, knees nearly interlocked.

My chin was on my hand and my heart was on the ceiling. We were laughing about something when I noticed the toy baseball on the table. The stairs creaked and the sound of background chatter crept in like a breeze that chilled my spine. He flicked the ball, and it rolled fast off the edge then fell to the floor with a flat thud.

The phone on the wall behind him rang, and I clicked to review the test questions.

The ball was white/light gray. It has the surface texture of plaster of Paris, but it is somewhat lighter than would be appropriate for its canteloupe-like size.

I don't think I actually pictured a whole person as pushing the ball, more likely it was a disembodied hand or the general sensation of pushing it myself.

I remember being specifically intrigued that I pictured the ball rolling back towards the center of the table and pondering why I had chosen the table to be slightly concave. I don't remember more attributes of the table, but I have the feeling that has more to do with inattention to its details rather than not picturing them at the time.

I imagine that, based on the framing of the story, my interpretation was to picture the sphere as a literal entity, but the person as the "concept of a push"... The table probably lied somewhere in the middle.

The ball was pale, not any color specific, something life a cream color. The person was nongendered, just a hand extending from a black suit with no determining orientation. They were a suit below the shoulder to above the knee, no other visible details past the table. The ball is maybe baseball sized, just big enough to comfortably fit the hand. The table is my current dining room table, an antique drop leaf table. This detail was the oddest to reconsider because until now I've been imagining either my previous table or the coffee table from my childhood, I don't normally decorate the thought space.

Small push, ball rolls a very short distance and stops
No color
Male, maybe an extension of myself doing the push
I did not visualize a complete person, only a suggestion of a body, and a arm/hand to push the ball
Size of two fists together
I did not visualize a full table, more like a camera view of a tabletop. Nondescript wood finish.

Did I already know? Sort of... My brain rotated through multiple possible imaginings. It worked forward, then reversed the logic to complete the scene. Nothing was set in stone: My brain decided that the ball would not roll off the table. Why? The ball has an uneven surface, it wobbled when stopping. Why? Because it has a surface like a soccer ball. Why? Because that was the first "look" my brain landed on that answered the question. I recall rotating through different colors and finishes, but after my brain imagined the ball stopping I had to come up with a why.

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.

I already had my answers before looking through the questions. Red, no gender, mostly a lab coat, tennis ball sized, waist-high wooden rectangular table.

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

Permanently Deleted

The interesting part is that some people are able to see.

What color was the ball?
Grey, I suppose? It wasn't important until this question so it was kind of colorless, even though I could picture it.
What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
Androgynous.
What did they look like?
Nondescript.
What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
A bit larger than a softball.
What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?
It was a rectangular table. It shifted from being smooth and grey to a lightly finished maple, then back again.
Important question:
I didn't really think about these details until asked.

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.

Don't know, they were an amorphous humanoid so I uh don't know for these two, baseball ish sized could fit in a palm, the platonic ideal of a wooden table. The first questions did not make me change the thing in my head. I don't think I see color in my mind eye, but I can uhhh label things with a color. Like. This ball is red, I think to myself, as the ball... continues to ball. Maybe if I imagined a specific red ball it world be redder.

It's a gentle push so the ball rolls for a second before falling off the edge of the table and bouncing away on the floor.

Ball Color: Bright red

Pusher Gender: Masculine

Pusher appearance: Caucasian, Tan suit, head was out of frame

Ball size: Tennis ball sized, but smooth with a seam around the middle

Table appearance: A square, short end table on a white studio backdrop. Dark wood with a glossy coating.

The important question: I can confidently say every question I already knew and was just describing what I was seeing, with the exception of maybe the pushers clothing. After reading the question my focus shifted to it and it visually resolved and I described it. Looked and felt almost the exact same way that you might not notice the details of an object in your peripheral because the focus of the scene was the ball, and then at a prompt, shifting your gaze and taking note of that object at the edge. It was framed like some kind of ball demonstration physics video.

The ball was red
It was a man
They wore a t-shirt and jeans
A small sized ball, like a stress ball
It was a plain wooden table made out of cheap particle board or laminated wood.

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.

The ball was a colorless wireframe. Color wasn't necessary for the scenario.

The person was genderless. Gender wasn't necessary for the scenario. They looked like a wire frame skeleton of a person.

The ball was roughly the size and density of the smallest size bowling ball.

Table surface was circular wireframe with four legs. Material wasn't filled in as I wasn't trying to model for friction.

My imagination doesn't tend to fill in unnecessary details. Too much wasted processing power. I also don't really envision things. Like, I don't "see" them in my head. I feel out the shapes and weights and other physical properties relevant to the scenario and let my intuitive understanding of physics roll the scenario forward.

Like, I know the ball rolled until it fell off the table, it fell some distance, then bounced off the floor three or four times with a sharp crack, as I filled in that the floor was concrete as soon as I needed to know how it would bounce, and the sound it would make filled in naturally from there.

I genuinely don't know whether how I think qualifies as aphantasia. I don't really imagine visual stimuli, but my imagination is very thorough for sound and feel.

spoiler

The ball, a red ping pong ball of maybe 1.5-2 inches diameter, is on a square, concave white, glazed ceramic plate that is on a rectangular matte white table that is plastic. I have no idea why the ball is on a plate but that's how it is when I imagine it for some reason. The entire room is white with a door on the wall that I am looking towards. The door slowly opens, and it is me (I'm a girl)! I look exactly like I do when I look at myself in photos. When I push the ball with my hand, it gets pushed off of the plate and lands on the table. It rolls toward the end of the table and bounces on the floor twice, making a noise you'd expect a ping pong ball to make when it collides with hard flooring. The whole scene looks like how a YouTube video of it being physically acted out would look like.

I already knew after I read the prompt. It was like a little YouTube video playing in my head! 😃

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

The ball was orange
I don't remember
I don't remember
As big as an orange
The ball was on a white surface

I don't have aphantasia, but a rather vivid imagination sometimes. Also, a lot of my answers were indirectly influenced by my immediate surroundings:

What color was the ball? - Red
What gender was the person that pushed the ball? - Male
What did they look like? - I only imagined seeing the person up to the waist, approaching the table and giving a push to the ball. I pictured him with social attire.
What size is the ball? - Tennis ball, but very smooth. It was smack dab in the middle of the table, too.
What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? - Round glass.

A question for those of you who have, or suspect you have aphantasia, how are your dreams like? Can you imagine and "hear" sounds?

how are your dreams like

Pretty sure I dream normally. Can't discern faces but I know I can see things.

Can you imagine and "hear" sounds?

Basically how I function. If I'm thinking of a song I know decently well or heard recently it's like a live show I can control. Just with the lights off.
I recall dreams the same way as I recall real events. There are no actual images or sounds that I can "see" or "hear" in my mind as I think back on the events, but I know I've seen and heard those things. So it's difficult to answer the question. Did I "see" things in my sleep, but remember them only as ideas, or were they just ideas in the dream too? I tend to think it was the former.

Well maybe I'm not all that aphantasiac, I immediately came up with a woman pushing a 9-ball on a green billiards table

The ball was red and smooth and uniform and shaded like it had been painted there or drawn with colored pencil.
the gender of the person was indeterminate, perhaps leaning female
they did not have a definite look to describe, it was more a concept of a person. They were a featureless, fuzzy, void-white silhouette adorned only by a similarly featureless light blue t-shirt, black pants and black hair, all so ill-defined it was as if they they had been hastily cut from craft paper and slapped over top the glowing form. Like the color scheme of the fitness boxing mascot, but the more simplified form of South Park Canadians, and more amorphous.
the ball was slightly larger than a baseball but smaller than a softball
the table was rectangular, of beige ‘wood’ with a light grain, and very sharp edges. It looked distinctly like it was out of a low poly video game.

Important question: The ball and table were distinct and known but oddly not “real-life”. The person was very indistinct and the gender is merely speculation. The edges defining their arms and hands became more defined as they approached and interacted with the ball. The color and form of the clothing and hair manifested then too.

Interestingly, I “know” the visualization took place in my kitchen, in an orientation different than my actual kitchen table. I saw the light from the windows Illuminate the table and the ball, and I could tell where I was in the space watching it happen, but the kitchen wasn’t there and neither was I. The table, ball and person appeared alone in a murky dark void.

The ball was red. The gender of the person was unspecified, they were just a hand coming into the scene coming out of a long sleeve green shirt. And the ball was like the size of a softball. What I pictured was a zoomed in part of a table, Brown, but with two zoomed in of perspective for me to know the shape of the whole table.

spoiler

The ball started out crystal, then changed to a colourful pool ball, off-white & yellow / red,
The person doing the pushing had no distinct features / might have been me in the first person / was otherwise unremarkable, most of the visualization starts after the point of pushing the ball
ditto.
ditto
The ball was roughly pool ball sized.
the table was a relatively non descript wooden (pine coloured) dining table, in a kitchen / dining room ish area with the vague sense of cabinets and a counter behind it, but these were all very blurry and non descript

What color was the ball? Blue
What gender was the person that pushed the ball? Male
What did they look like? Skinny, pants, dress shirt
What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? Blue, smooth, baseball sized
What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Around 2ft square, wooden, light color, four square legs

All of this was built in my head with each part of the prompt. Pretty sure I don't have aphantasia.

Orange

Male

He was a server in a black waistcoat, white shirt. He was brushing the ball off the table before setting plates down.

It was a ball from a kid's ball pit, so a little bigger than a baseball, smaller than a softball.

The table was round, with a red gingham table cloth.

The orange ball on the red gingham table cloth were there immediately, once instructed to visualize a person pushing it, it only made sense that it was a server, since the table seemed restauranty.

I'm way ahead of you at knowing I have aphantasia, no test needed.

Oh shit.

The ball is black, the table is black, the human is black. They're all just blobs I tell myself exist so I feel normal.

Tap for spoiler

Red
None
Nothing
Indeterminate
Brown, indeterminate
It's like looking at a watercolor through a frosted window.

It puts the push in the little backpack it's wearing and thanks the person.

Fun experiment! It's amusing reading the comments.

spoiler

Red ball pushed by an older gentleman, only imagined the hand and arm (wearing green long-sleeve but I'm not sure if I added the long sleeve after tbh, Im pretty sure I only imavined the hand). It was a red rubber ball, the kind you throw to a dog and it was on my kitchen counter (it has a distinct pattern).

Except for the log sleeve, I knew the rest without a doubt. Also, I didn't really see it fall, my angle was from across, I couldn't see the other side per say and I stopped imagining the moment it slipped off. I don't really remember a floor either.

Yellow ball on a dark mahogany table with a blue felt background is what I see.

If that doesn't match the prompt in my bad, this is just me being prompted with an aphantasia prompt mentioning a ball on a table

The ball I imagined was made of polished metal and reflected its environment.
A man.
I did not imagine a face. But he was wearing a dark blue business suit with a red striped tie. A watch was on the wrist of the hand that pushed the ball.
About the size of a large orange.
It was a smaller rectangular table made of a dark, varnished wood.

I'm an artist. I often tend to visualise what I want to draw quite well.

spoiler

red
no gender
just an outline, maybe a bit tall?
it was around the size of a softball
the table was circular and small for a table, like maybe two could sit at it. I didn't imagine a material.
I imagined more about the ball than anything else, it was made of a spongy material like in those sponge brushes for painting, and it was red. The person was a complete blank slate. The table was only circular, nothing else.

My answers

It was sandy brown.
I didn't picture a person, but a real cat that I'm worried about. She's a female.
Like that specific furball looks like. She resembles savannah cats from a distance but she's a pure-bred mutt.
Around the size of my palm. Massive, springy.
I pictured the ball over the desk table that I'm using now.

I picked a lot of RL stuff (like the cat, or the table) to "build" the image with; I often do this. I picked all those things before seeing the questions.

Ball color and size, and table shape and color were the only things I distinctly pictured, and the ball being deformed when pushed. Everything else was still sort of abstracted and not specifically visualized, and the table color changed to improve the contrast as I imagined the scene. If I stop and really focus on the scene I think I would fill in more specific details but at my pace of reading that's as far as it went. I think unless I have a reason to do otherwise I tend to visualize the minimum necessary.

Maybe the ball was light blue, I smaller than a baseball maybe standard stressball sized?

I didn't exact gender the person but did kinda imagine dude-hands because I was looking at my phone with my hands holding it. And I just imagined maybe a wood table, like a dinner table.

All these details were present from only reading the title:

A very large and heavy marble that you'd need to pick up with both hands to hold. A man was already there keeping a hand on the marble, to prevent it from rolling on the wooden table. The table is simple, square and has 4 legs. I know what the marble would sound like if it were to roll, bumping over the little imperfections. This is happening indoors, but there's some natural light coming through. The table is relatively close to the edge of a room but you can still approach the table from all sides. The room is mostly undefined besides that. The man is not too detailed, I have a vague awareness of what he is like, but more like a gestalt of him.

After reading the prompt: The man rolled the ball with a soft push. It produced the expected sound and then he stopped it again before it fell. I felt anxiety when the ball rolled, and was relieved when it was stopped. I want to put it on soft cloth so that we can stop worrying about it rolling off the table. There's soft cloth nearby, and it's purple felt.

I have hyperfantasia.

The ball was red and smooth and uniform and shaded like it had been drawn with colored pencil.
the gender of the person was indeterminate, perhaps leaning female
they did not have a definite look to describe, it was more a concept of a person. They were a featureless void-white silhouette adorned only by a similarly featureless light blue t-shirt, black pants and black hair all so generic and featureless as if they they had been hastily cut from craft paper and slapped together, but more… amorphous? Fuzzy? than cut paper. Like a weird cross between
the ball was slightly larger than a baseball but smaller than a softball
the table was rectangular, of beige ‘wood’ with a light grain, and very sharp edges, like out of a low poly video game. The grain even looked like a low-res texture

My answers:

What color was the ball? Red
What gender was the person that pushed the ball?: seen from the bust, but a masculine physique
What did they look like?: Grey shirt, light skinned, clean nails, hands looks slightly worn.
What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?: Tennis ball size. Smooth and has a good bounce, but sounds solid.
What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of? Rectangle. Wooden. Smooth, but had a knot in it.

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?

I already knew? . I had to visualize it first to answer any questions.

Really interesting reading your follow up post in here. It's so incredible to hear about how differently people can think.

I imagined the scene in detail, but to pay attention to all the details I had to think back to it and examine each part of what I imagined, if that makes any sense.

I pictured a side camera angle with a white metal table and a light blue wall behind. The ball was a soccer ball, and it was pushed by a woman's hand wearing a gray knit sweater. Only the hand and forearm are "in frame". Her arm comes in from the right side and pushes the ball to the left, rolling it across the table.

So my ball was the ball from toy story on a round wooden kitchen table. Probably the table from my childhood home. So the ball is yellow with a blue stripe and a big red star. It has shading and a shadow. I switched it out for a golf ball, but that didn't seem right, so back to the bouncy ball from toy story, bigger than a baseball, smaller than a kickball. Because it's the ball from toy story, the young man pushing it is toy story animation style. I tried switching him out for a regular human, but it just seemed wrong so I couldn't. He goes with the ball.

Table is wooden with a reddish brown stain and a glossy finish. The ball I picture is red rubber about the size of a grapefruit. "someone walks up to the table" I see a caucasian woman in her 30s with blonde hair in slacks, a long sleeve shirt and a sweater vest, she has slightly long nails. She pushes the ball with a flick of her fingers, it bounces/skips a couple times and then rolls off the end of the table. Sounds kind of like a tennis ball hitting the carpet, it bounces across the room, hits the baseboard on an adjacent wall and comes to a stop.

Everything above I wrote before even opening the follow-up questions. About the only thing I didn't think to mention is the table is a solid top rectangular dining table about 6 by 3 feet.

The "camera angles" might be slightly weird, at first I see the ball from a point of view about an inch off the table, then as it rolls off the table I "see" from my normal standing height but I only hear the ball bounce because the table is in the way, and I see it hit the wall and come to a stop from about kneeling height.

I see things photorealistically but I don't have peripheral vision. The way my mind parsed the sentence "someone walks up to the table and gives the ball a push" I processed "pushes the ball" first and I saw a woman's hand reach into my field of view to push the ball, then I processed "walks up to the table" and my field of view turned to look at her.

I pictured a smooth red rubber ball about the size of a baseball on my kitchen table. The "person" was more of an invisible force, not explicitly male but definitely not female. That might be male bias, or subtly thinking of myself doing it (combined with playing too many physics engine video games where your disembodied self pushes things around).

All of this was pretty vague though, like I didn't really imagine the details of the room or the exact path of the ball other than knowing it would roll off and bounce on the floor.

Orange *No gender. *Bald mannequin, like the outlines of people in bathroom stalls. *Baseball *Square wooden table.

It was a grey ball

It was a man's legs

I only saw their legs but I think it was shorts and shoes

A bit smaller than a basketball

It was a completely white table in the shape of a square made out of marble probably

Color: greenish-blue

Person: male (I identify as male, the person kind of represents me, I guess)

Looks: Cannot see entirely, because "the camera" is very near. Blue pants.

Size of ball: Fits in one hand. The ball is made of a light material and will probably bounce on the floor.

Table: Very generic table. Beige, light brown.

I think, all of that I knew before reading the questions, I was able to answer the questions without really thinking about it.

White
Not in shot, just a hand
The arm was the same complexion as my own
Tennis ball sized but made of that stuff billard balls are made of, smooth and shiny
Classic oblong wooden table, looks like that cheap ikea pine with a clear grain
The ball rolls along the table with again, the same sound you get with a billard or similar rigid ball rolling along a solid surface, upon falling off the table it hits the floor (pale orange ceramic tiles) and bounces a few times in that satisfying way that produces an ever increasing frequency until it stops.
I already knew and did not have to chose after being asked the questions.

yellow
male
round face, beard, brown hair, mid 20s (I think probably some internet-famous person whose name I don't remember)
small plastic ball filled with air
a simple square table with a natural wood top and legs

That was my first thought. But then (before reading the questions) I also imagined other similar scenarios like with a soccer ball and my desk at work, lol.

My experience with this experiment was kind of like when they play memory flashbacks in movies, I could see the ball being pushed and falling, but with jump cuts and the timing was off. Detail-wise I'd say it was kinda like what you got from AI image generation when Dall-E first came out two-ish years ago.

I don't think I have the most visual imagination out there but if aphantasia is one end of the scale I'm pretty far to the other side.

White/colourless ball. And honestly, more of a circle viewed from a perfect side on angle.
I didn't visualise a person only the effect of their push on the ball. And like another poster corrected the slide to a roll.
See above.
Ball was of uncertain size. It was viewed side on, and no other objects to give a sense of scale. Maybe tennis ball sized, but I think that's retroactive.
Table was rectangular and wooden. But no legs. Unsure of the thickness.

Included the timely-ness of the details in my answers above.

The ball was a futsal ball, so white with green markings
I didn't see the person who pushed the ball, just their hand, I was concentrating on the ball
The table was at about the height of a typical dining room table, it was plain wood about 1cm thick with a dark top and had fairly thin black metal legs

I already knew the answers, for the most part. The questions didn't cause me to add more detail, but they did cause me to reflect on the details I had chosen. So, for example, I never looked at the person who pushed the ball. Because of that, I couldn't fill in any details about their looks or gender. But I did clearly see the hand giving the ball a push, and I think the hand belonged to someone white. Having said that, I did have to stop and think about the answer for the table. The table was part of what I imagined seeing, but it wasn't the focus of my attention. I realized I could think about what I had imagined and the details came to me. But, it's possible that I didn't actually dream them up until I was asked the question.

Also, nobody asked, but the ball fell down and hit a white surface (something like white tiles) and bounced the way a futsal ball bounces, which is to say mostly a soft "thud".

The scene was like an example reel from a video game, greenscale-ish translucent humanoid mannequin standing in a pseudo void, with a nondescript rectangular table of a similar greenscale-ish semi translucent material, and only the ball is "finished" as it is the camera focus. It is approximately between baseball and softball size, smooth, but I did not pay attention to the color. There is an "interaction/activation" sound effect as the mannequin kinda leans over and lightly pushed the ball to cause it to roll. It rolls to a stop on the table top, and this action loops.

The center of focus pulled back as I read the questions, more becoming aware of them than choosing them, and the scene changed with a camera pull out as part of the "ball is pushed" tutorial clip.

I have realized how much growing up as a gamer as influenced my perspective.

Ball rolls about two feet and stops just before it rolls off the table.
White ball, polished surface, shiny
Male
Tall person, slender build, light brown hair, clean shaven, white button-up collared shirt, blue jeans.
Ball was a bit bigger than a billiard ball, but smaller than a baseball. Smooth, and heavy. Like a white cricket ball but with no seams.
It was one of those large common fold-up trestle tables but with a white table cloth on it.
I knew all those without having to think about it, or choose afterwards.

To me the imagery seemed like a cheesy "how to push a ball" educational video with a paid actor to demonstrate how to push the ball in the correct manner.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

This feels AI trainerish so I refuse to give specifics just in case, but I imagined all of that in great detail instantly and vividly. I've been told I may have the opposite problem of yours. Hyperphantasia. It's a more common issue than aphantasia and means that if I'm not careful, I can lose myself in my imagination until I snap out of it. My imagination is vivid enough that I've embarrassed myself in public by reacting to something I dreamt up out of boredom.

I haven't done that since my 20s, but I'm still very able to kind of vanish into my own head to the point someone has to be loud, or touch me to get me out of it. I'm told I take on a blithe face when it happens. Explaining that to my Dr got them to teach me about hyperphantasia. It's not a common issue, but it's not exactly rare either. You see it much more than aphantasia.

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.

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.

Orange.

Dude.

Very stock photo, long dark green shirt untucked, but i had no details.

Like a big pomergranate, smaller than a football but bigger than an orange.

The table was made exclusively out of square shapes of the same dark brown, so for example no cylindrical feet. Kind of like a 3D model or the not-cheapest table at Ikea.

I had all of this before, but i didn't "see" it in the sense that people ususally mean because i have the most complete aphantasia that you can have. If you were to ask me how i saw it in my mind without litterally seeing it in my eyes, i'd have no answer. It's kinda like concepts.

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.

How is this a question?

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

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

red/blue stripes

none

they didn't

small pool ball

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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)

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.

Visualise (picture, imagine, whatever you want to call it)

I ignored this portion of the instruction because it was unnecessary to answer the question of what might happen to the ball if it were pushed by someone. I didn't visualize anything until moving on to the spoiler questions. Even then, my brain mostly went "nah, we'd just be making up something to fill in details irrelevant to the question, don't waste the energy".

Permanently Deleted

Unnecessarily aggressive lol
- I think you are correct, thanks for pointing it out to me. I don’t recognize that myself as well as I should.
Everybody can do think in concepts, you're not special in this regard
- Sorry, I tried to say from my perspective the people who can literally see things are acting weird, but seems like I gave you some other impression somehow.

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

Thought experiment begins below.