Hyderabad: Taking video or pic can reduce human memory

Hyderabad: Memorialising an experience by taking a video or photograph can drastically reduce the human memory of the event itself. While at a wedding or a birthday party if often we find ourselves, reaching out for our phones to photograph the event, studies claim that when we choose to record these memories, our brains are unable to cognitively store a rich experience.  Often while the memory of the event is clear, it lacks detail.

Prof. Diana Tamir of Princeton University, conducted a research on different sets of participants who recorded events by visually looking, recording and note taking of  a church on Stanford University’s campus. It was concluded that people who recorded details of the church by note-taking or recording on cameras were not able to give a detailed feedback of their experience as compared to those who visually looked at the church. In addition, to this church tour, the researcher also gave the participants memory tests to check their retention of a TED talk speech they attended as a part of the study. The results were a 10 per cent drop in memory retention of those participants who took notes.

Meanwhile, Mrs Sheetal Jose, a psychologist, Christ University said, “When visual processing of memory is taking place, any interruptions of that experience can lead to the memory faltering. Memory as per psychology is a formation of all factors as consumed by the human eye and retained as visualised. When we hold a phone, we share the mind’s detailing with other factors like camera angles, colours, zoom features etc, by doing so we miss the raw experience.”  

Even the idea of recording a memory can result in the brain retaining more memory of how to later access the recording that any parts of the memory as perceived. While the importance of memorising information to share or later return to, the first rich experience of the memory itself is lost in this process. Neha Gandhi, a photographer said, “I often feel that when I first see something extraordinary and decide to capture it, I am later unable to describe it very well. However, I am able to remember details of events in life more clearly when I did not record it.”