Photographic Memory
I’ve got to that stage of my life where I start to forget things and begin to panic I have that memory-wasting disease I can never remember the name of (See what I mean?). I have also been in the predicament of trying to determine whether the image I hold in my head of a photo I’ve taken is of the actual experience or the memory of the image itself. Or whether it’s because of the image that I have taken that I remember the experience around the image. The point being that if I did not have the image to conjure up, the old grey cells would be all the poorer for it.
The reason I bring this up, is that I was interested in a new study in the journal of Psychological Science, where one of those white-coated boffins with a clipboard has recently been arguing that there is a “photo-taking impairment effect”. That means if we take a photo of something we’re less likely to remember it than if we’d looked at it with our eyes. “People just pull out their cameras,” says study author Linda Henkel, researcher in the department of psychology at Fairfield University in Connecticut. “They just don’t pay attention to what they’re even looking at, like just capturing the photo is more important than actually being there.”
The good Doctor Henkel could be on to something here – I recently developed a roll of film I’d had from last summer, and was totally flummoxed by the fact that I couldn’t remember taking this picture of the woman in Ballard, using her iPhone to take a picture of something that she’s probably forgotten about also by now.