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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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.

1. The ball was red
2. It was a man
3. They wore a t-shirt and jeans
4. A small sized ball, like a stress ball
5. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 can only see still frames of random motions and detective gadget animated is the character who flicks the ball. The red ball which I then added a hammer and sickle moves with illustrative wooshes across the table bounces off of a wall into detective gadgets eye.

• Reflective metallic silver, like a ball bearing.
• genderless
• a mannequin silhouette
• about the size of a large grape? Like a superball.
• my wooden dining room table, background and all.

The focus seemed to be on picturing the table and ball, and the person pushing it was irrelevant other than to provide motive force, so I didn't spend any time to fill in their details.

My ball was blue. It's one of those dog toy soft bouncy ones. Table is rectangular, wood, with a light colored stain that's well polished. A man casually slaps the ball and I hear the sound that type of ball makes as it bounces without much force. It bounced once off the table, then off the wall onto the floor where it did the dribble bounce off the tile in the kitchen until coming to rest on the carpet in the living room. None of what I see is related to my house.

If I really wanted to, I can vanish into this world I've built for the ball. I can get lost, staring out a window or something while not actually seeing anything because I'm in my head. I have hyperphantasia. It's seen more often than aphantasia, but it's not exactly common. It's very useful for creative endeavors, but has a lot of pitfalls; usually involving spacing out at inopportune times.

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.

• black
• male
• nothing, it was just a hand pushing the ball
• a ping pong ball
• round, wood coloured, but thin like a metal coffee table.

I did have to think about how to put it into words, but the picture was fully formed before revealing the questions.

Before reading the questions:

• The ball was uniformly gray, with a slight shine.
• The person was genderless and featureless. I only pictured their hand and arm pushing the ball. The moment of contact was indistinct, as if the arm was hiding the ball from view.
• The ball was the size of a large watermelon.
• The table was square, about 1m² , brown-gray, with four turned legs. Same material as the ball: uniformly colored and vaguely glossy.

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.