According To Science, Taking Photos Affects Your Memory Of That Moment Later

Just yesterday, I was taking a back-up of all my 5,000 precious photos and transferring them from my phone onto my laptop. And as I was scrolling through all those old photos, I found myself talking aloud to myself and saying, "oh even this happened", "we went here too", somehow I just couldn't remember so many of these moments that I was seeing pictures of.?

And naturally, my curiosity as always, had me typing on google about how I can't remember moments I took pictures of and to my surprise, I found out how this is an ACTUAL thing.

A recent research suggests how clicking photos can affect your memory of the moment, find details below.?

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A study published in the critically acclaimed scientific journal, Psychological Science, detailed how researchers of a study, asked 294 participants to take a tour of a museum, while listening to an audio guide, and were asked to click a minimum of ten photos. At the end of the tour, all participants were made to answer multiple-choice questions. Questions focused on what all the participants had seen.

The results? Those who took photos, the researchers found, were unable to recall more objects than those participants who hadn't taken pictures.??

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But I went a step ahead and actually understood why we can't remember those moments.?

Now we have always been told via movies, TV shows or just pop-culture in general that when you take a picture, it's saved forever. This fact has been ingrained in our head to such an extent that when we click a picture of a particular moment, we believe that it's saved elsewhere. And that's how we trigger our brain into forgetting that moment.?

Psychologists refer to this process?as 'cognitive offloading', in which it is thought that our brains look for other ways of lessening the amount they needs to remember or process, often in the form of technology and apps.

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So go ahead do take those pictures.?

But moments that are the most precious to you? Allow them to remain vivid and alive in your memory. Let those conversations repeat on loop in your head because a photograph can never take you back to a moment as well and as magically as your own memory can.?