Psychology says photographing something instead of looking at it makes you remember it worse — museum visitors who took pictures of objects recalled fewer of them than visitors who just looked, and the camera quietly takes over the job of paying attention

Psychology says photographing something instead of looking at it makes you remember it worse — museum visitors who took pictures of objects recalled fewer of them than visitors who just looked, and the camera quietly takes over the job of paying attention

The first thing most of us do when we see something worth remembering is pull out a phone. A concert, a sunset, a birthday cake, the absurd thing a toddler just did with a piece of spaghetti. We take the picture because we want to keep the moment. That’s the whole logic: the camera preserves it so we don’t lose it. But research on how memory and photography interact has found something that complicates that logic. Under certain conditions, takin…