Remembrance of Fictional Spaces
I’ve recently started rereading something and I made an interesting observation.
When reading descriptions of places in fiction, I usually end up having some sort of mental representation of the place in my brain. They are usually not accurate to every detail, but my brain usually latches on to the first one that it makes and very rarely changes it.
So, coming back to this story after three years and reading these descriptions again, I found that the mental representations that my brain had made of some of these places were (as far as I remember) exactly the same as they had been three years ago.
Even after making this observation, I was unable to consciously recall most spaces, but it proceeded to happen again unconsciously while reading.
It’s like how supposedly smelling something may evoke memories seemingly long forgotten by yourself (it’s never really happened to me).
I only have my memory to go off of, so there’s no way to know definitively if I remembered these spaces after so long, but I don’t think that I would have such a strong sense of familiarity otherwise.