Imagine and Image

Imagine and image.
It sounds simple but may not be as simple as you think unless you are a well practised artist or have a particularly good memory for detail, depending how far you are going to go with it.
Bear with me and see what I mean.

Start with an easy one.

Imagine someone you admire a great deal such as an actor, actress, pop star, politician (yes, surprisingly to some, there are those who do admire these), sports personality etc. but do not include a close relative or friend.

Without any preparation or having any direct reference to them with you, just imagine their face for a moment - a front view and not a mirror image of it.
This is easy, after all they are someone you really like and have seen them perhaps hundreds of times at the cinema in films or on television, in action or in still images, on the Internet, in magazines and newspapers etc., you may even have their picture as a poster on your wall at home or in a club.

Now, think of their temples; the soft indent on the side of their head level with their eyes.
Now picture only the left temple.

If they have a particularly noticeable blemish or feature such as a beauty spot, mole, pigment patch or something of that nature on their temple - discard it, forget about it.

Now imagine the next most noticeable feature of that left temple on the side of the head of your choice of actor, actress, pop star, politician, sports personality etc.

What is it and where is it?

At this point most people will draw a blank, they may even not have 'noticed' any particularly noticeable feature on the temple anyway because that is not how our mind works.  We have a tendency to form a general impression with the salient features noted mentally but when it comes to finer detail we have no need to know, so mentally flush it.

This can also be demonstrated by yourselves by thinking of a visit to a hotel on a short visit such as a weekend break. Obviously this will work better if you didn't visit very recently but even recent events can apply.
You probably remember the room and its layout and style - but can you remember the pattern and colors of the carpet outside the room, or if there was no carpet what was there instead?
With this question it may be a lot easier if there was some specific reason why you might remember that flooring such as dropping something onto it that broke or some feature that embedded it in your memory but you probably get the gist of where I'm coming from.

For most of us, the memory can only cope with so much.  To some extent this can be improved with memory training, of which there is plenty available either freely or at cost from a variety of sources but there are is a minuscule number of people indeed who genuinely have a seemingly limitless capacity to remember 'everything' - and I am not writing about those with a photographic memory.  There are those who do remember virtually everything from a very early age, some even well before their teens, who can recall, without great effort, everything from the day to the place and the event with all the details.

What is your capacity to remember?