Ask Lemmy

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

1. The ball I imagined was made of polished metal and reflected its environment.

2. A man.

3. 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.

4. About the size of a large orange.

5. 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.

Fun experiment! It's amusing reading the comments.

::: spoiler 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.