Photographic memories

It’s a snap-happy world, let’s face it. In a year when “selfie” was voted the word of the year it seems that not only language but life itself is squeezing itself into a digitally generated box. With camera technology so prolific, idiot-proof, and omnipresent via smartphones people take photos of anything and everything; themselves, their breakfast, the amazingly funny thing their cat did (surely a crime punishable by the maximum penalty), and so the list of inanity goes. It is enough to make photographers like Ansel Adams and Brian Duffy chew their own lenses to dust. Just like everyone is a novelist, so has the ubiquitous digital camera made everyone a photographer, or at least it has made them think they are a photographer. The question is though, what impact is all of this happy snapping having on us? New research has found one answer: it might be dimming our collective memory.

The research involved subjects taking a tour of a museum and being asked to take not of certain objects either by examining them closely or by photographing them. The next the subjects were asked to return to the museum and pick out the objects and give details about them.

The people who had photographed the objects recognised less of the objects correctly and were less able to answer questions accurately about the objects. The researchers call this the “photo-taking impairment effect”. What it amounts to is that relying on the camera to record an event means that people do not attend to it fully themselves and that impairs their memory of the object or event.

You might think that having a permanent record of something as a picture will provide a stimulus for you to look at and promote recall. In fact however, other research has shown that the volume and lack of organisation of digital photos discourages people from accessing them.

So the easy availability of digital photography is paradoxically disconnecting us from events around us. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth your memories?