Want to forget all of your favorite memories?
Easy. Just take an endless amounts of iPhone photos.
Hi friend,
Glad to have you back for our second edition of Train of Thought!
For today’s issue, I’m riding a train of thought from a week ago when I was on vacation in Acadia National Park.
This place holds very special memories from family vacations over my life. To this day, I can describe to you the sound of a morning fog horn, the smell of countless pine trees, the sight of the sunrise on Cadillac Mountain, and the taste and texture of a buttery, rubbery lobster claw.
But I’m sorry to tell you that in today’s world, recalling these memories might be a lost art.
For this week’s issue…
Photo by Eaters Collective on Unsplash
How digital photography is changing the way we remember (or don’t remember) our lives
Have you ever wondered what all of your endless, digital picture-taking is doing to your brain?
I sure have. Especially as I started noticing over the years a new dread whenever I opened my iPhone to take a picture.
It all started after college when I worked as a freelance photographer capturing various kinds of events, editorial coverage, and food (my favorite because this often meant a free, delicious meal afterward).
Here’s what I learned very quickly which would slowly kill my love for photography: overshoot everything.
I would come home after a gig with thousands of photos. And then proceeded to spend hours and hours staring at a screen to cull these photos down to sometimes 20 of the “best” images.
It was absolutely painful.
Not only that, but I noticed a new inability to enjoy the moment, feel completely present, or recall any other use of my senses at these events other than sight.
Well, according to this article from Vox, there’s a reason for that…
…in many cases, scientists are finding that constant photo taking actually diminishes our ability to recall our experiences, diverts our attention, and takes us out of the moment. Constantly sharing photos may even be changing how we recall events in our own lives….
The first step to forming a lasting memory is to pay attention. Without attention, our brains won’t store the sensations we experience in the world around us.
The brain stores long-term memories by linking neurons. The stronger the memory, the stronger the connections. These neurological connections link all the sensations that form a memory: what a scene looked like, what it felt like, what it smelled like.
But if we’re not paying attention — if we’re not even getting information into our short-term memories — nothing will be stored long term in our brains.
The writer of this article points out that we are literally “outsourcing” our memories to computers. Meaning that we’re telling our brains “don’t worry about this one, I got a guy for that.” (The guy being a computer.)
Then, he asks a brilliant question that will now stick with me every time I pull out my phone to capture something: “When it comes to taking photos, the question of offloading becomes more complicated: How much of my life do I want remembered purely by my brain?”
For me, the answer is now as much as possible.
The Stanford Memorial Church experiment
According to Vox, Stanford Memorial Church is a building that should make you stop in your tracks and take in all of its breathtaking details.
Above the entrance is a giant, pastel-colored fresco of Jesus welcoming worthy souls into heaven. In this depiction of heaven, there are palm trees. The inside of the church features mosaics, stained glass, and more paintings of angels and saints than you can count on your hands and feet. It’s magnificent.
Yet, in a series of experiments that involved a few hundred participants taking self-guided tours through the church, they found it became easier to lose sight of all of its glory when looking at it through a camera lens.
On the tour, the participants were supposed to take note of details like “the cruciform shape of the church” and make sure they checked out the bronze angels that “greet you from the massive entry doors.”
Some of these participants had iPods equipped with cameras and were instructed to take photos (either to print out later or to post on Facebook). Other participants went in empty-handed.
A week after the tour, the participants were given a surprise quiz, with questions about details they should have learned on the tour. In one arm of the study, those without a camera got around 7 out of 10 questions right. Those who had a camera scored closer to 6. That’s like going from a C to a D, a small but significant difference.
Why did this happen? Think about it… You can’t smell, touch, taste, or listen to an image. Photos only increase our visual memories. But if we are so focused on what we’re seeing through the screen that we don’t pause to take in everything else, it gets offloaded from our memories.
So, what does this mean for your relationship with your camera?
My Thoughts
Here’s a little anecdote for you.
Some of the most challenging gigs for me were ones I was hired to both photograph and write for a story. It didn’t take long to feel the pressure of capturing every moment while also noting everything that was going on around me.
Visceral descriptions are what bring an article to life. That’s why I found it so ironic that taking a photo to enhance a reader’s experience of an article could actually take away the visceral experience for me, the writer.
I remember one art event in particular where I walked around by myself photographing whatever I found interesting. There wasn’t a specific timeframe or moment they wanted to be captured. So, the pressure was off. And I took my time going through, photographing and watching. Watching and photographing.
There was one exhibit in particular that I easily could have missed if I didn’t walk back to it a second time and observe without my camera. As a result, I went home and wrote one of my favorite descriptions possibly thus far in my writing career:
A crowd of people were standing under a square, metal awning, struggling to get a glimpse of what was at its center. Murmurs rose at the crowd grew larger. Lights were erupting all around and other-worldly sounds were emitted from the object that was at its core. Everyone was pressed tightly together and peering over shoulders as they struggled to find out what was so captivating.
Returning at a different time and the scene is completely different. Instead of a bursting crowd, only a few people surround the exhibit curiously examining what they found at its center: a small, shiny ball. It was void of the lights and sounds radiating before, except for a quick burst and blip at seemingly random intervals. But it wasn’t random at all.
One by one, the scattered onlookers grew closer as the people caught on that if they had contact with one another, the lights and sounds became brighter and louder. Pretty soon, a circle formed with known and unknown passersby holding hands as the colorful light show surrounded them.
This was the unifying power of the interactive light installation “Urban Lights Contacts” from artists Grégory Lasserre and Anaïs met den Ancxt, and beautifully represents what Baltimore’s Light City is all about: community and art.
I truly believe the only reason I even noticed this exhibit and was able to remember it in such detail is because I put down my camera, and just watched.
Then, there’s film photography.
Why film photography deserves its comeback
On our honeymoon across Europe, my husband and I took turns using his film camera. Now, there’s a lot more to consider when clicking the shutter with a film camera (price, amount of film). My husband had to finally give me the one-shot-per-scene rule to end my habit of overshooting.
And you know what? Not only did it force me to shoot less, but I discovered one of my new favorite ways of reliving memories when we picked up our developed photos a month or so later. It became an event itself to sit down together and recall all the moments each photo brought.
Also, I loved how these experiences were left shared just between us. No uploading these photos to Instagram and wait for the hearts to come in.
So, it didn’t really surprise me to read that when we share our experiences with our many followers through social media, we may actually lessen the experiences for ourselves:
In the past few years, not only have we begun taking more and more pictures with digital cameras but we’re also sharing them, nearly instantly, on social media. This may alter our memories too — in a subtle but profound way.
Barasch and her colleagues have found evidence that taking pictures to share on social media changes our perspective within our memories. That is: When we’re taking photos to share on social media, we’re more likely to remember the moment from a third-person perspective.
“If I asked you to form a picture in your mind of your Christmas experience” that you shared a photo of on social media, she explains, “then you’ll actually start visualizing your Christmas more from an outsider’s perspective.” (She and colleagues performed this experiment with 332 students over a Christmas break.) Photos we simply take for our own archives don’t produce this effect as often.
On that note. I’d love to leave you with one, last thought-provoking quote:
Powerful experiences in the real world are immersive and often engage all the senses. On your last vacation, can you remember what the wind felt like on your back? Do you remember what was going on internally: Were you thrilled, excited, or scared? When you look back on the Instagram photos from the trip, will you remember what a dinner tasted like, or just that it was pretty?
Photos and recordings are always going to be a thin slice of what you experienced. “They’re not even necessarily the true, full version of what happened,” Henkel says. When we look back on those photos, they do serve as memory cues, but they’re not necessarily reminding us of the whole story.