#A remember to moment free
Henkel doesn’t disagree that the purpose of outsourcing our memory to devices can free up our brains to do other cognitive processing. Who hasn’t dumped photos from a trip into Dropbox and promised to make an album - only to never look at them again? But isn’t that what photos are for? To refresh our fallible memories? Of course you’d remember things better if you were completely in the present, hyperaware of every detail, like some supreme Zen master. Henkel came up with a frightening term for this phenomenon: the “photo-taking-impairment effect.” Okay, okay. In other words, if your camera captures the moment, then your brain doesn’t. The camera’s captured the experience.’ You don’t engage in any of the elaborative or emotional kinds of processing that really would help you remember those experiences, because you’ve outsourced it to your camera.” “You’re basically saying, ‘Okay, I don’t need to think about this any further. “When you take a photo of something, you’re counting on the camera to remember for you,” Henkel said. They also couldn’t recall as many specific visual details of the photographed art, compared to the art they had merely observed.
The results were clear: Overall, people remembered fewer of the objects they had photographed. Whenever they remembered a piece of work, she asked follow-up questions about specific visual details. The next day, she brought the students into her research lab to test their memory of all the objects they had seen on the tour. The students were asked to take photos of objects that they looked at on the tour and to simply observe others. She crafted an experiment using a group of undergraduates on a guided tour of the university’s Bellarmine Museum of Art. Linda Henkel, a professor of psychology at Fairfield University in Connecticut, studied how taking photos impacts experience and memory. In one study, students were told to take photos of objects at a museum - and they remembered fewer of the overall objects they had photographed. However, every time we snap a quick pic of something, we could in fact be harming our memory of it. When I surveyed participants, many said they used photos as a “memory aid.” They took pictures of things like parking spots or the label of the hot sauce at a restaurant to buy later. In 2015, I conducted a Bored and Brilliant Project - in which I challenged people to detach from their devices in order to jump-start their creativity - with more than 20,000 listeners of Note to Self (the podcast about technology that I host). One of the major reasons we take photos in the first place is to remember a moment long after it has passed: the birth of a baby, a reunion, a pristine lake. But how does that persistent need to capture the moment - which so many of us feel - change how we actually experience the moment, both in the present and when we try to recall it down the line? The answer is quite illuminating. If you’re not gazing into someone’s eyes, at least you’re pointing an iPhone at them. When it comes to obsessional tech habits, photo-taking probably isn’t the worst for relationships. But it turns out: all our photography may be obstructing our recall, says tech podcaster Manoush Zomorodi. Istock People worldwide upload more than one billion images a day, preserving their memories to enjoy them in the future.
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