Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

The fun thing is that for those of us who cannot it’s as hard to believe others can conjure images. Yes the idea of mental imagery is deeply ingrained in our language but I’d always assumed it was allusion till I learned of aphantasia when I was 30.

One of the more cliche, and not super useful tests, is “imagine a ball on a table, someone pushes the ball and it begins to roll. What color is the ball?” For me that was a revelatory statement because I’d never consider that others might give the ball a color, or size, or texture as the imagine it. I assume not everyone with the ability to visualize does but it seems like many do according to the literature. To me it’s just a statement, a ball is rolling pushed by a nondescript person.

So for me I definitely visualized a ball on a table, but the color wasn’t resolved, if that makes sense. After hearing the question asked it kind of snaps out of superposition into a red color (but there was definitely a color-choosing step that happened after hearing the question).

Same thing happens if you ask “what surface is the table on” or “what country is this image in”. It’s layers I can add to the mental state, but if they’re not important they’re just not there.

I’d say the closest thing to what I was “seeing” before the color question is something like a wireframe, or maybe the gray color of a Blender model without colors/textures applied. Grey in the sense that you don’t really notice it’s grey, you just understand the grey color means color is absent.

You accurately described my experience.

You described my experience well as well, except my abstract colorless ball was barely even visual. I was quite happy to entertain the idea of a ball on a table with very few concepts activated - roundness for the ball, flatness for the table, gravity holding the ball on the table. Rather like a physics problem.

When forced to dereference a color, it felt like an entire system was booted up. Not only did the ball have color, it also had specular reflections. There was lighting. The table gained an abstract sense of having texture.

What I find particularly fascinating is that my mind also assigned "red". I wonder if that is a coincidence, or a deep reflection of something about how brains work. Supporting evidence: in languages with only three words for color, the three colors are "light", "dark", and "red": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Stage_II_(red)

My ball was kind of an indeterminate grey, too, but it was on a granite countertop of a kitchen island in an open concept kitchen/living room. Like one from a Bounty commercial or something.

That’s a really cool description. Makes me think about people complaining of having unwelcome images brought to mind. Which I can relate to through songs. If someone says Baby Shark it’s going to start playing whether I want it to or not.

For me when someone asks “What color is it?” I think to myself “I don’t know you’re the one telling the story you tell me.”

I'll also chime in and say I was able to visualize the generic ball-ness and as soon as the question of color arose, I also immediately picked red despite not being my favorite color or anything. I blame childhood depictions of balls lol

I imagined a small, red, dense foam ball actively being placed by a feminine hand with matching red nails and a fancy bracelet onto a white marble slab with olive green marbling. The slab is a couple inches thick and overhangs the cabinets below it. The point of view, like watching from my own eyes, is looking down at the counter with the ball being placed by the ephemeral hand as if they stood opposite me.

What color was the ball? I didn't have to think; I knew it was red. However, I can't tell you much about the cabinets or the arm or body attached to the hand. Totally unrendered and void.

I’m curious, what kind of work do you do? Do your dreams have that kind of detail?

Software engineer, but I've also been a graphic designer, a photo editor, a fire and casualty insurance agent, a financial services advisor, a construction worker (very basic carpentry, electrical, plumbing, roofing, etc), and high school math teacher, all before being a software developer turned manager turned developer again. And, yeah, dreams have that much detail, but also the extra depth that comes in dreams like knowing intent, emotions, relative history, etc