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?
Once you're done with the above, click to review the test 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?
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.
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.
I didn’t think about there being any damage.
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.