(Photo courtesy of http://www.youtube.com/user/SoldierKnowsBest.)
The sleek, hand-held device that you knew would revolutionize not only what you bring to the table when you hang out with friends, but also how you store all the photos of beautiful scenery, blurry scenery, and, well, just blurs.
If the findings of a recent study published by Fairfield University's Linda Henkel holds true, then you should really, really appreciate that magic moment because it might just mark the beginning of your slowly decaying memory.
Let me start out by making a psychic prediction... you take photos. I bet that in some way, shape, or form you are contributing to the 300 million photos that are uploaded to Facebook each day. I probably shouldn't have told you that. Now my prediction seems less mystical.
Anyway, previous research has shown that there are some tangible benefits to snapping these shots. For one, when you see these pictures even 30 years later, you activate memories and trigger a whole range of emotions. In fact, research done by Koustaal et al in 1998 suggests that overtime you retain these memories better as you keep looking back at the same pictures.
But, what exactly are you remembering? The moment artistically captured in the photo? Whatever you were thinking or feeling at the time? The events associated with that photo?
One thing seems for sure: you are not actually remembering what happened at the time you took the photo. For that particular moment, the camera became your eye and the photograph downloaded to your camera rather than your brain.
In the present study, researchers performed two separate experiments where they guided individual undergraduate students through the Bellarmine Museum of Art. During the tour, they gave participants a list of words, which were the titles of various art pieces found around the museum. As the undergrad read the title out loud, the experimenter would guide him or her to the art piece.
In the first experiment, participants stood in front of each object for 30 seconds and either took a photo after 20 seconds or simply looked for the entire time. In the second experiment, participants would either observe, photograph the whole object, or zoom in on a specific part of the exhibit.
The results of the first experiment indicated that taking a photograph hurt a person's ability to recall information about what they took a photo of in basically every way. They were worse at remembering visual details, the names, and where the art pieces were located in the museum.
This finding aligns with a type of “dismiss and forget” paradigm set up by researchers Golding & MacLeod in 1998. Tell people to forget something and they will. In the same way, tell people to take photographs and their brain will rely on the picture for future recall rather than remembering by itself.
(Photo courtesy of http://www.youtube.com/user/StrikerWolf3.)
To test this idea further, the second experiment followed basically the same guidelines except that now the participants were asked to zoom for half of the pictures they took. Again, casually taking a photograph of the whole piece of art hurt every part of a person's memory.
Surprisingly, zooming in on one part of the object actually resulted in comparable memory of the object's details as just looking. Somehow, taking the time to pinch the screen improves your brain functioning.
So, what does this all mean for you and your life? Should you just remove the camera function from your phone? Or maybe take a picture and then just continue to stare for an extra 20 seconds just in case?
Well, yes and no. The key is to be smart about how you use your camera. If you find yourself taking countless photographs everyday and spending more countless hours deciding which hashtags to use for your Instagram and Facebook posts, you have definitely crossed a line.
The reason you wanted that new-age digital memory-maker in the first place was to be cool and collect priceless moments, remember? So stay cool, hang out with friends, and bust out the camera at the beginning, middle, and end of your night. Capture the progression from sober to tipsy to drunk to toilet. You know you're doing it wrong when you can't remember anything even though you didn't drink any alcohol.
Most importantly, stop taking selfies. Especially at funerals.
