Nathan Blumenfeld

I think it's generally accepted that memory is unreliable and fluid in just about everyone -- one of the reasons why eyewitness testimony holds way too much power in law. Our imaginations are great at filling in details after the fact, at distorting events based on the hormone cocktails our cells dump infuse us with in stressful or emotional situations, at rewriting our memories of events to justify the decisions we have made and help us keep a positive idea of ourselves. We are always reinterpreting our pasts to fit with our current idea of ourselves. It's very frequent to be unsure whether something is a true memory or a created memory. Not sure how anyone would quantify whether it's moreso in some people than in others.

I love both. Thinking back, I used to fixate on visual descriptions of characters -- I would take notes whenever height, eye or hair color, features, etc for a character were noted in the text, to help me construct a full idea of the character, because I couldn't picture them. This led to some interesting situations where I realized that often what other readers pictured looked nothing like how the character was actually described, and some others where I'd note contradictory information in the text, or note trends such as when an author kept describing heights relative to other characters, to the extent that every main character must have been pretty much towering over the average person. But at the same time, I tend to skim over lengthy descriptions of locations. Instead, my pleasures are not in "seeing" the narrative but in the texture of the prose, the architecture of the story, etc.