2mo ago

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

This is more of me trying to understand how people imagine things, as I almost certainly have Aphantasia and didn't realize until recently... If this is against community rules, please do let me know.

The original thought experiment was from the Aphantasia subreddit. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/g1e6bl/ball_on_a_table_visualization_experiment_2/

Thought experiment begins below.

Try this: Visualise (picture, imagine, whatever you want to call it) a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?

235 comments

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!

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- This was fun to read. Everytime I read a new detail the scene in my head changed :)
- 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.
  
  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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
- 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
- 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.
- 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 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

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

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

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 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.

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
- 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?
  
  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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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)

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!

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)

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

Sure, OK.

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

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.

Very interesting!
- Exact same.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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