Taking Photos Makes Your Memory Worse

If you want to make a memory, start by forgetting your camera. Two new studies published in Psychological Science found that people who took pictures of objects had more trouble remembering specific details about them, where they were situated, and even if they had seen them at all.

Fairfield University psychologist Linda Henkel had people take tours through the university’s Bellarmine Museum of Art. On the tour, the subjects were asked to take note of certain objects, either by photographing them, or simply by observing them.

The next day participants had less accurate memories of the objects they photographed compared to the ones they had only observed. Henkel attributed this to something she called the "photo-taking impairment effect," which is sort of like in The Phaedrus, where Plato warns that the written word kills our ability to memorize things, but with cameras instead of writing.

"When people rely on technology to remember for them—counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves—it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences," Henkel said.

For camera haters, this news is the best since it emerged that Instagramming food makes meals taste worse. I was personally pretty excited, since nothing brings out my inner crotchety old curmudgeon more than the ubiquity of people taking pictures, especially in museums. There’s almost always a better digital version of every piece of artwork already online, so why does everyone need to have their own much crappier rendering of it?

In my more charitable moments, though, it kind of makes sense: it’s not a photograph of a painting of a pipe; it’s a photograph to remember the time they saw the painting of the pipe. It’s not a print so much as a souvenir.

And it’s hard to blame someone for wanting something to remember the moment by. Our memories suck, on a fundamental level. A study that appeared in PNAS last month found that even people with “highly superior autobiographical memory,” who can remember details about specific days even years later, can be induced to have false memories just as easily as any of us.

Henkel’s research compares someone’s memory of the previous day with someone who was told to take a picture of an object while walking through a museum. There’s a lot of differences between the study and how people take pictures in everyday life—by selecting specific objects ourselves, for instance.

"This study was carefully controlled, so participants were directed to take pictures of particular objects and not others," said Henkel, "but in everyday life people take photos of things that are important to them, that are meaningful, that they want to remember."

People were also only asked to remember the previous day. Having a picture might not be an improvement on one’s memory of yesterday, but it might be an improvement on your memory of last year, assuming you take the time to look at the picture. "I only used a one day delay in both of the studies," Henkel told me via email. "It seems likely that with a longer delay, people would remember even less overall, especially about details of the objects.  If they were able to look at the photos and review them—as we do when reminiscing—that would help preserve the memories."

But the problem for some people is even remembering to review what they've shot. "Research has suggested that the sheer volume and lack of organization of digital photos for personal memories discourages many people from accessing and reminiscing about them," Henkel said. "In order to remember, we have to access and interact with the photos, rather than just amass them,”

In addition to actually looking at their pictures, the other way that people were able to better remember was to zoom in and photograph a detail in the object, rather than the whole object itself. When participants used their cameras to zoom in on a specific part, they were able to recall more about the whole object, even the parts beyond the frame. It still wasn't as much, however, as people who simply observed were able to remember.

While it isn’t the “cameras are ruining your brain” hit piece of research I was sort of hoping for, the study at the very least implies that indiscriminately photographing everything at the Met isn’t going to make the day any more memorable.

@a_ben_richmond