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Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a better self-test.

Visualize a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?

Now, answer these questions:

- What color was the ball?

- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?

- What did they look like?

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

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

And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?

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This is an interesting one and I just tried it. I could answer all the questions about the ball, but none about the person or the table other than them existing in a hand-wavy sense. But rather than informing any level of aphantasia, it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.

> it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.

Right. Details come in, for me, based on:

- Familiarity with the subject. "Imagine your sibling playing ping pong". I can get a vivid image of my sister, the table, the movement of the ball during a game.

- Letting my mind wander, daydreaming style. More details will fill in as I imagine the scene for a longer period of time.

- Prompting. Once prompted to think about the person, details were added but the previous image (just a generic person and generic table) did not lead me to imagine anyone in particular or any details that could suggest a gender or other specifics.

And I don't know why anyone would expect differently. Not all imagined things are vividly imagined even if you possess the ability to do so, that shouldn't be a surprise.

I could answer "the ball probably rolls off the table" and to everything else; I had no answer and would have to choose after the fact if pushed for an answer.

But say you're overexcited and drunk, maybe then you think about all these extraneous matters, for fun and because you're not focused on the main question, and then you do have answers.

Yeah so you probably have between what TFA describes as hypophantasia and phantasia.

You might need to take a person's background into account as well.

I, for instance, am an avid billiards player. A "ball on a table" naturally makes me think of a billiard ball on a billiards table. A whole host of detail was filled in for me, but all specifically in that context. I could answer some of the answers as if I could visualize, but most of them as someone who could not.

n = 1, I know, but sometimes it takes only one example.

Same here. I immediately visualized one of my juggling balls (the hard kind, pastel blue) on my kitchen table, so the scene was clear. But I was focused on the ball, so I only felt someone approaching and saw their hand pushing the ball, which rolled and fell.

I tried to visualise a scene with more unfamiliar objects (a box in the street then a flood wave arrives) and I also built the scene from my own memories. But I'm obviously biased after the first test.

With objects that I've never seen myself (e.g. a handgun), I have a hard time imagining them and placing them in my imaginary scenes.

That's a test of how interested you are in random people, or indeed in visualizing things at all when not actually necessary.

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