Happy Monday! Thank you to everyone who chipped in during my October fundraiser — I reached my goal! If you still want to support Now I Know, you still can (it’s great to exceed a goal!); you can learn more here. — Dan

If you’re on vacation, at a concert, or really, anywhere else, you may be inclined to break out your phone and take a picture. With a simple text or upload, it’s a great way to share your experience with friends and family near and far — and, in theory, keep a memory for yourself, as well. But it turns out, that latter part may not be as true as one would think. Taking pictures of things we want to remember may make it harder for us to recall those events later.

As previously discussed in these pages, we tend to overestimate the reliability of our memories, even moments that we believe are seared into our brains. And to make those memories, two things need to be true. First, we need to actually experience that event we are remembering — the more details we take in, the more details we can later hope to retain. That factor should be obvious — if you’re only half paying attention and, therefore, never notice the color of something, you certainly won’t later be able to recall that item’s color. And when you’re focused on taking a picture of where you are, you may not be as focused on those details, as a 2018 paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology demonstrated. The paper’s authors tracked people who visited the Stanford Memorial Church at Stanford University. Here’s what it found, as summarized by Vox:

And — it gets worse. (But don’t worry, it’ll get better toward the end of today’s newsletter!)

In 2021, NPR summarized three studies that followed the same investigative path as the one above. The same issue popped up again and again. But this time, researchers came up with a new theory: we aren’t just ignoring the details in an effort to get a better photo. Rather, we’re subconsciously entrusting our memories to our phones. Linda Henkel, a psychology professor at Fairfield University, explained the situation to the radio network: “When people rely on technology to remember something for them, they're essentially outsourcing their memory. They know their camera is capturing that moment for them, so they don't pay full attention to it in a way that might help them remember.” Our brains know that we’ll be able to recall that moment in time by simply scrolling through our photos, so our brains don’t bother creating as robust a memory in the moment.

And that’s not all that bad. First, our memories don’t last forever — as one wise man once suggested, if you really want to remember something, you should take a picture — it’ll last longer. And second, if you want to use your camera to enhance your ability to remember things without relying on the pictures, you can do that pretty easily. As NPR further notes, one study, from 2017, found that “while the act of taking a photo may be distracting, the act of preparing to take a photo by focusing on visual details around us has some upsides. [ . . . ] When people take the time to study what they want to take pictures of and zoom in on specific elements they're hoping to remember, memories become more deeply embedded in the subconscious.”

So next time you break out the camera, pay attention to the details of what’s being captured. Not only may it make your photo better, but it may help you remember the experience more vividly.

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Today’s Bonus fact: An even worse way to not remember a key life event is to drink too much — if you become blackout drunk, there’s a very good chance that you’ll not be able to remember what happened. But it’s not because you forgot — it’s because you never made the memories in the first place. Alcohol-induced blackouts, per the National Institutes of Health, “temporarily block the transfer of memories from short-term to long-term storage — known as memory consolidation — in a brain area called the hippocampus.” Blackouts are a temporary form of anterograde amnesia that ends after our bodies process the alcohol, and as a result, you’ll never remember what happened, no matter how hard you try.

From the Archives: When You Don’t Believe Your Past Self: As noted above, if you think you remember the details of where you were in a major historical moment, you’re probably wrong.