There are many shared experiences as a parent, but none are as universal as being told by an older parent with a hint of wistfulness to ‘enjoy every moment; they grow up too fast.’
While I understand and genuinely appreciate the intention with which this advice is delivered, I promise you that as a new parent, you’re inundated with this message. It’s everywhere. You should enjoy and cherish every moment. That babies grow up too fast. That time flies. That they won’t be little forever. That the days are long, but the years are short. Or that infuriating Jordan Peterson audio telling you, ‘You have little kids for four years,’ and then it’s over.
And I get it – it’s easy to lose yourself in the weeds of parenting, and it’s nice to be reminded to occasionally stop and smell the roses. But as the mother of a 10-month-old daughter, I find myself in a constant tug-of-war with time, grappling with an incessant need to capture, to cherish, to permanently etch these fleeting moments into my memory.
I’ve been making desperate attempts to hoard these memories, hoping to stall the relentless march of time that seems so intent on stealing precious moments from me. But how do I hold onto these moments? How do I cherish this enough? How do I enjoy this EVEN HARDER?? How do I??????
Simple – I take pictures and videos. LOTS of them. I’ve been filling up my gallery at a maniacal rate since I found out I was pregnant last year. I’ve captured plenty of bump shots, newborn videos, sleeping pictures, feeding pictures, me carrying my baby pictures, others carrying my baby pictures. So. Many. Pictures.
And in the process, I’ve been thinking about how this relentless archiving has shaped my memory. I look at her pictures often and sometimes find it odd that my memory of October 2022 is quite different from my gallery version of October 2022. I think back to the hazy first week with a newborn, and I can’t find any hazy pictures.
So today, I’m here to scrutinize our relationship with taking pictures for the purpose of remembering the moment. This doesn’t apply solely to parenthood because I think a similar kind of relentless archival exists when we travel or experience anything that we want to remember.
The themes we’ll be discussing are: Does taking photos or having photos help us remember things better? Has our phone gallery become our go-to memory bank? And more importantly, does it work?
I’m exploring these themes in four parts and wrapping up with an evidence-based handy little guide to taking pictures and forming a better memory-retaining relationship with our photographs.
Let’s go, puppies.
Part I: Can I outsource or offload my memories by taking photos to look at later?
People take pictures for different reasons. Photographers do it for work, to create art, and tell a story. Bloggers and influencers do it for similar creative reasons, along with some form of promotion. I’m neither a photographer nor a blogger (in that sense).
My compulsion to capture every moment is driven by my fear of forgetting and feeling like I have no control of time as it slips through my fingers. Not everyone has the same problem, but I know everyone has felt the need to preserve a memory by taking a picture of it.
I felt helpless every time people told me that the baby phase would go by too quick, so my only antidote was to immortalize it in some way. I felt the need to hoard these memories, and the camera was my chosen tool.
But every time I encountered a moment that I wanted to remember, I was often torn between taking a picture of it or simply living it fully. It’s the same conundrum when you attend a concert – do you record your favorite song? Do you just belt it out loud and lose yourself in the moment? You can only do one because belting the song out loud AND recording would ruin your video footage.
So the question arises: should you rely on the camera to remember moments for you? Can we outsource or offload our memories this way?
To answer that, I need to briefly explain two concepts:
- Cognitive Offloading: It’s fairly self-explanatory; it basically means using a tool or device to reduce the brain power needed to perform a task. E.g., you no longer need to remember your friend’s phone number; you can offload that cognitive work to your phone. You don’t need to remember the directions to that friend’s house either; Google Maps does it for you. Frankly, you don’t even need to talk to that friend to find out how their weekend was; their Instagram stories do the job. It might be time to evaluate this entire friendship. Why did I get carried away in the middle of this definition? Okay, a typical example of cognitive offloading in the context of photography is when we take a photo of something to remember it instead of relying on our big beautiful brains.
- Photo-taking Impairment Effect: This is a big phrase for a simple idea. Taking photos of something negatively impacts your memory of it. The concept was first introduced by psychologist Linda Henkel; you’ll see her name pop up a lot because I’ve read SO much of her work. She’s amazing. Linda came up with the photo-taking impairment effect.
Side note – there have been a surprisingly large number of research studies on this subject. I spent a week or two reading all the papers I could get access to. I then asked a friend that works in a healthcare company to get me access to the restricted papers, and I read those. I then read a bunch of PhD theses too. I’ve linked my favorite one here.
I think the reason why people seem to be unusually concerned with this subject (TIME friggin magazine wrote about it too!) is that memories are really valuable. And if we’re outsourcing them to our photographs or distorting them in some way, that’s a pretty scary and serious thing to reckon with.
A 2013 study by Linda Henkel (♥️) and colleagues, published in Psychological Science, asked two groups of people to walk around a museum. One group was given cameras and asked to photograph the art they viewed, while the other group was told to simply observe. They discovered that participants who photographed museum exhibits struggled more to recall those exhibits than those who merely observed.
A cognitive psychologist Dr. Emma Teasdale explains this phenomenon:
“Every time we press the shutter button, we subconsciously signal our brain that the camera is taking over the responsibility of remembering. Over time, our memory may grow lazy, relying more on the camera roll than its own capacity.”
This makes sense at a superficial level. I’ve heard people over the age of sixty or seventy talk about how they used to be able to memorize a ton of phone numbers, and now they simply can’t.
Linda Henkel says that the photo-taking impairment effect diverts the attention of the photographer in two ways: 1. The very act of taking a picture can distract you from your surroundings, and 2. It acts as a sort of memory crutch, training you NOT to remember things on your own because you have the camera to remember them for you.
But when you go a little deeper, it brings us to the subject of cognitive offloading, the process by which we shift the responsibility of remembering onto an external device. While cognitive offloading doesn’t matter when we’re offloading mundane stuff like phone numbers or directions, it can be more complicated when it comes to something as nuanced as life experiences.
Terry Nguyen shares in her essay called Posting for posterity,
“I was disturbed to realize how confidently I had relegated the burden of memory entirely to the internet, scattering digital keepsakes across a handful of apps without any thought to their vulnerabilities. A lifetime of posting could disappear into the void one day. And I would have nothing to show for it.
Whatever anonymous digital footprint I had as a teenager that wasn’t uploaded to Google or Facebook, or iCloud has largely faded into obscurity. I’ve already lost access to shared Google Drive folders with hundreds of photos. A photo backup app I used throughout middle school suddenly shut down a few years ago. I forgot the login for a Tumblr that had hundreds of private journal entries. The feeling, at first, is like discovering a hole at the bottom of your backpack. Shock and regret. Then, the dawning realization that what was missing was quite unimportant.”
This is why when it comes to taking photos, the question of offloading becomes more complicated: How much of my life do I want to be remembered purely by my brain?
Part II: Can my photos end up distorting my memories?
As I’ve been writing this essay, I have also deliberately been trying to remember – as a mental exercise. And then, I look at my pictures to see how reliable they are in helping me piece things together.
I tried to remember what my first couple of weeks were like post-baby, and very specific images and emotions surfaced as I did. I remember feeling completely elated, like I had the best, most precious gift in the world. I remember feeling like I could never fully relax again. I remember feeling stronger than ever. I remember feeling deeply alone at 3 am almost every night.
Then I checked my gallery and saw very, very little in there that reflected those feelings. And it’s not because I only took pictures of the pretty, wholesome moments. No – I had decided to document the good, bad, and ugly. But still, it didn’t quite work the way I’d hoped.
I remember one of the hardest nights during that phase, being up till sunrise with a baby that just wouldn’t settle no matter what I did. The next morning, I decided to take a little video of the both of us lying on a couch, the morning light flooding the living room; we were exhausted and frazzled, but we survived another day.
I uploaded the video on my Instagram story, and comments came flooding in about how cute it was and how happy and peaceful we looked. How adorable this moment was. How tiny she was, how motherhood looked great on me. And when I came across the picture as I scrolled through my gallery, my first thought was, ‘Ah, that happy moment on the couch together!’ before I remembered the context. The memory of the sweet comments felt more vivid than the reality of that moment.
This terrified me.
Taking pictures, especially with the intention of uploading them for public consumption, has the potential to distort our memories more than we realize. This distortion not only influences the accuracy of our memories but can even lead to false recollections, making us believe we experienced events we did not actually witness.
Linda Henkel (!!!!) says, “The act of looking at photos actively shapes our memories. Photos are not reality; they are revisions of reality. And photos are only one interpretation of reality.”
While I didn’t take that video of us laying on the couch specifically to share on social media, something else happens when we set out to record something with the clear intention of posting.
When we take pictures with the intention of sharing them online, we tend to shift from a first-person perspective — being in the moment and experiencing it firsthand — to a third-person viewpoint, where we are concerned about how the moment might be perceived by an online audience.
In this process, we’re often mentally scripting the narrative of the photo before it has even been captured. This skewed approach to experiencing life can result in a disconnected and distorted understanding of our own experiences — a hyper-reality in which the line between our lived experiences and their online portrayals becomes increasingly blurred.
Part III: Why do I want to hoard my memories?
Sometimes I think of how each generation has fewer baby pictures as you go back in time. I wonder how they feel about it. My grandmother used to tell us extremely vivid stories of her childhood and teenage years. She would tell us about her visits to Calcutta, her picnics, and her friends jumping over their boarding school wall. I’m guessing she has maybe ten pictures in total to show for this whole season.
I think about this a lot.
I think about the fact that my daughter will have every month of her first year documented in great detail. Our children will grow up with a wealth of documented experiences at their fingertips. What will it do to their memories? Will it make their childhood memories exponentially richer?
The other day, a friend asked me what my first memory was, and I had no idea how to answer that question.
I was just impressed that people could organize their memories chronologically. I don’t think I can, so I told her about a photograph that my mum has of my brother and me. In this picture, we have the biggest smiles on our faces. My mum says that we were both laughing hysterically while sitting on the kitchen counter, and she took a photo of it. I’ve looked at it so many times that I’ve assigned it as my first memory.
The idea of taking photographs isn’t just about preserving memories; it’s also about creating a narrative of our lives. It’s about achieving some sense of order in the chaos. In documenting the stages of my child’s life, for instance, I’m creating a story for us to revisit in the future.
Our memories are a complex blend of lived experiences, emotions, and the narratives we create. Photos can enhance this, they can fill in the gaps and maybe spark some recollections, but they’re merely a tool in our memory-making process, not the process itself.
Part IV: Can I preserve my memories?
The last time my family and I visited Europe was before the heyday of Instagram, sometime in 2013. Nobody cared about meticulously documenting their European summers for public consumption. Photos were taken mostly for posterity and a little bit for Facebook.
I still remember that trip quite well, even though I have only a bunch of extremely over-edited, blurry pictures to show for it (taken on my iPod touch, I might add. For the kids – this was a device solely for listening to music, but the fancy ones had a blurry camera on it. They added the word ‘touch’ to this iPod because, at the time, not all devices had that functionality. The other day I saw a fridge with a touchscreen on it.)
Every time I think of that trip, I remember one specific moment. We were visiting Vatican City. The place was buzzing with tourists just like us, and after waiting in line, we walked into a crowded St. Peter’s Basilica.
I stepped into the Basilica and looked around. The building was so grand and so, so massive. The foundations are 1700 years old. The building contains the artistic genius of Michaelangelo, Bernini, and Raphael. It took a hundred and twenty years to build. The Statue of Liberty could fit inside, with an additional hundred feet to spare.
The sheer size and grandiosity of it brought me to tears. Like, I straight up cried for a bit in there. And as I walked around, taking it all in, I knew I’d remember this for the rest of my life. It was a moment that commanded my attention and stirred my emotions.
Our brains do more than just record our experiences. They selectively filter and encode information based on a bunch of factors, like the intensity of our emotions and our level of attention. These factors act like spotlights that emphasize certain experiences for later recall.
It’s an intricate process, which is why I’ll leave it to renowned neuroscientist Dr. James McGaughn to explain:
“We store in our memory what is emotionally important to us. The more we attend to something, the more likely it is that we will remember it. Therefore, the role of attention and emotional connection in forming memories is paramount.”
Emotion stimulates the parts of our brain involved in memory processing, and intense emotional experiences improve the consolidation of these memories. Memories that involve a lot of emotion become stronger and easier to recall, for better or worse.
Next, we have attention. Attention allows us to focus on specific information or experiences, guiding our cognitive resources to process things that are relevant and ignore the fluff – this is important since our brains have limited capacity for processing. In short, the more attention we give to an event or piece of information, the more likely we are to remember it.
Together, emotion and attention form a powerful duo that supercharge our ability to remember things. Emotionally engaging events that seize our attention are usually the ones we recall most vividly and for the longest time, like walking into St. Peter’s Basilica for me.
Here’s something to remember: If you want to hold on to a memory, any activity that takes you OUT of experiencing the emotions involved, or anything that hampers your ability to pay attention will one hundred percent jack up your ability to form a memory that you can remember later.
Linda Henkel provides a valuable perspective on this topic. “The things that tend to lead to detailed, long-term memories are rich in sensory-perceptual cues, contextual cues, affective responses, your thoughts, your reactions, the feelings they evoke.”
Interestingly – the study I mentioned earlier about taking pictures in the museum had a super important finding. When people zoomed in on specific aspects of the art, the photos helped strengthen their memories of the rest of the artwork (for example, if they took a photograph of the little dog in a painting instead of the entire painting), they retained better memories of the entire artwork compared to when they photographed the whole thing.
This, so far, seems to be the main way you can counter the whole photo-taking impairment effect. By paying attention. Club that with some emotions, and you’re golden! ✨
Learning to let go
In the modern world, our relationship with memories is changing. Many of us no longer jot down thoughts in a notebook or create physical photo albums – instead, we make notes on an app and pay companies like Apple to store countless digital images.
Will this change? Most certainly not.
Even though we have lame warnings about technology and autonomy or the risks of entrusting our memories to social networks and corporations. All this moral humdrum about phones affecting our attention span does nothing to us; we seem destined to remain tethered to our devices till the end. It’s a convenience, a tacit trade-off.
Decay theory tells us that memories eventually fade simply due to the passage of time. If we don’t occasionally activate or retrieve a memory, it gradually fades away and becomes harder to recall. Initially, this theory was proposed to explain forgetting from short-term memory, but it has also been extended to long-term memory. It’s basically a manifestation of “use it or lose it.”
Now, if we apply decay theory to the practice of taking photographs, we gain an interesting insight. We take photos to capture and preserve memories with the understanding that our memory of events, places, or people within the photos will fade with time. According to decay theory, our memories of these events will naturally decline unless we actively retrieve them. Hence, a photograph can serve as a tangible memory cue, stimulating retrieval and slowing the decay process. Each time we glance at a photo, we reactivate the memory traces associated with it, making our memories more resistant to decay.
I began this essay motivated by a desperate longing to cling to the precious moments that made up this new season of motherhood. I wanted to immortalize them. I wanted to be ultra-present yet also be able to revisit this season in some way, whenever I wanted. I’m aware that I’m already asking for too much.
In the spirit of acceptance, I have given up.
I acknowledge that impermanence is a fundamental law of nature. Our memories are designed to be just that – memories. They will fade with time. Some will remain with us forever. Some will slowly get bent as the years go by. And perhaps there is wisdom in this design.
It’s the reason why another mum might look at me with a newborn; the memory of their own sleepless nights, disarray, and exhaustion will have faded to oblivion. They will remember – with an intensity that could light up the darkest night – the sweet, precious moments they spent with their child.
And from a place of profound understanding, they’ll say –
Savor this moment. It goes by too fast.
How to use photographs as a memory tool
I don’t want to leave us in an awkward place, not knowing what to do with our relationship with our photos and not sure how to proceed with our snap-happy lives. After poring through all these papers and reading a bunch of commentaries, I drafted some basic guidelines that I’m fairly proud of.
The goal is to help you strengthen your memory around taking pictures and figure out how to use the amazing, wonderful fact that you have a camera at your disposal all the time to your benefit.
I. The ‘Savor or Snap’ Rule
If the moment is fleeting and the emotions are running high, you may want to simply savor it. Don’t worry about not being able to remember the moment later; your brain will do the work for you.
Stuff like your baby’s first steps, a rare glimpse of a dolphin out at sea, or a wonderful moment with someone you love – these are times of raw emotion and sheer unpredictability that you might want to imprint on your mind rather than your phone gallery.
The idea is to take a few good pictures and then put your phone away. Don’t make life about the pictures. If you can have someone else take them so that you can stay present in the moment, even better! Every time you’re tempted to stress about getting a ton of perfect shots (provided your job doesn’t depend on it), remember that your memory of the moment is the only thing you’ll actually be able to retain.
II. The ‘Reinforce, Don’t Replace’ Rule
I think we’re super fortunate to have these digital memory cues, but our massive gallery of travel photos, graduation photos, college photos, and wedding photos all serve as reinforcements to our memory, not replacements.
The next time you’re taking pictures of something, focus on details. Look for specific aspects that you want to remember. If you immerse yourself in the details of a scene as you take a photo, that process can help anchor your memories.
Decay theory says use it or lose it, so look at your photos every now and then. Photos are an effective tool for memory retention only if we take the time to look at them and reactivate those mental representations. Spend time looking at your pictures and see what memories they bring up (you can also decide if you’d rather let go of some pictures).
III. The ‘Narrative Nudge’ Rule
Every picture has a story; every story fortifies a memory. Photos can be fantastic prompts for narrative memory. If you want to remember certain times of your life more accurately, instead of merely scrolling through a bunch of pictures, narrate the story behind each picture.
Remembering the story behind a photo will reinforce that memory and add vivid details to it. I find this especially helpful for travel pictures because there’s nothing that would otherwise make your picture of a city skyline any different from something on Google Images. When you look at pictures from your trip, remember the laughter, the weather, and the sound of the surrounding crowd – it helps more than you might imagine.
IV. The ‘Real over Ideal’ Rule
In our quest to capture ‘perfect’ moments, we sometimes end up staging them. But genuine, unfiltered, and candid shots often carry more emotional weight and recall value. Real-life instances, including the crappy pictures and imperfections, contribute to the uniqueness and authenticity of our memories. Let your photos reflect reality, rather than an idealized version of it.
Hope this helps!
References
Forget in a Flash: A Further Investigation of the Photo-Taking-Impairment Effect – ScienceDirect
Does taking multiple photos lead to a photo-taking-impairment effect? | SpringerLink
How the Intention to Share Can Undermine Enjoyment: Photo-Taking Goals and Evaluation of Experiences | Journal of Consumer Research | Oxford Academic
Effects of Social Media Photography on Memory Presented by Blake Berry in partial fulfillment of the requirements for completion
SAF- True or False with Dan Schacter.avi
How Social Media Is Hurting Your Memory | Time
Point-and-Shoot Memories: The Influence of Taking Photos on Memory for a Museum Tour – Linda A. Henkel, 2014
To Remember The Moment, Try Taking Fewer Photos
Media, technology, and the sins of memory
How the Intention to Share Can Undermine Enjoyment: Photo-Taking Goals and Evaluation of Experiences | Request PDF
The Effects of Volitional Photo Taking on Memory for Visual and Auditory Aspects of an Experience
Unfinished Conversations 
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