02-07-2025
From photos to fitness data, recording our lives is changing how our brains work
Do you have more photos on your phone than you know what to do with?
Apart from taking up valuable space, experts have another reason why you should think twice before whipping your phone out to capture that special moment.
Taking photos might actually make it harder to recall the very thing you want to remember.
Over the past two decades, researchers have been teasing out how a steep increase in "lifelogging" influences how we think, act and make sense of our past.
Julia Soares, who studies the impact of digital technologies on memory at Mississippi State University, has identified several areas where our digital devices affect how our brain works.
An overstuffed photo app might be just the beginning of a profound cognitive shift.
Lifelogging involves digitally recording aspects of your daily life: things like photos as well as fitness, travel and health metrics.
Dr Soares says such data collection may have benefit — a number of studies have found it can help support memory recall and quality of life — but it depends on how intentional someone is about analysing and reviewing their data.
"I have a couple of studies where we've found that taking photos can impair memory," Dr Soares says.
"So your memory specifically for objects that you photographed compared to objects that you don't photograph."
This phenomenon — called the "photo-taking-impairment effect" — has been demonstrated multiple times in a particular type of experiment.
Imagine two groups of people at the entrance to an art museum, about to wander through. One group is instructed to take photographs of the artworks they see, while the other group is told to take no photographs at all.
Once they're done walking through the museum, the two groups are quizzed about visual details of the artworks they've looked at, like whether the Moon in Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night is full or a crescent.
In multiple different versions of this experiment, scientists have observed that people who don't take photos tend to have better recall for what they've seen. They get more questions right about the visual details of the artworks compared to the photo-taking group.
It's not fully clear why those who take more photographs in these experiments tend to remember less, Dr Soares says.
Down the track, when photographs are used as a prompt to help people remember, they can be a "highly effective memory cue".
But it may be that in the moment, the act of taking the photograph distracts somebody from fully capturing the event in their internal memory.
This research has influenced how Dr Soares herself takes photographs.
"I do try to make sure that when I take a photo, I'm in the mindset of thinking, 'How is this going to cue my retrieval later on?' It should be something that I want to remember alongside the photo."
It's not just our visual memories that we're outsourcing by snapping them on our phones.
There are also fitness and biometric tracking, voice memos, emails, travel data and chat logs.
Dr Soares says if all this information isn't used deliberately, people can just end up with pointless piles of data.
"If you're not paying attention to the data, then it just collects up."
But used well, lifelogging can also be a powerful too help us make positive behaviour changes.
"You can come to some really useful insights by collecting all of this data," she says.
Kunal Kalro began recording his health data more than a decade ago after his father died from heart disease.
Kunal started out tracking his daily step count and workouts using a fitness band. Before long he was also collecting heart rate variability, temperature, sleep quality and even macronutrient intake.
"It helps you change your behaviour patterns," says the 38-year-old, who still tracks his health data today.
"If you're having a few nights of poor sleep because you're watching a TV show late at night … you see your daily scores fall.
He says tracking his data has helped him uncover patterns of behaviour he wasn't aware of, like the relationship between his coffee consumption and sleep.
"I can notice and I will see the difference in my heart rate variability overnight when I'm sleeping if I've had caffeine after midday versus before," he says.
"For me anyway, it's less about memory recall, but more about making something a little bit more consciously present. I feel way more in sync with my body."
Lifelogging on our smart devices isn't the only way our seemingly instant access to digital technology is changing our ability to think and recall.
Dr Soares has also looked at what we think we know, which is influenced by search engines such as Google and the ability to save and search up information on our devices.
She says there is evidence to show that people can overestimate what they know after using the internet, and fail to distinguish between the knowledge in their head and the knowledge that they can access with search engines.
In some experiments, researchers found search engine use during a quiz led to an increase in "cognitive self-esteem" — an increased belief in one's own ability to remember information and perform well on future quizzes.
"Even if they ask them really carefully, 'What do you know? What is in your brain?', people can sometimes overestimate what they know as a result of using internet search," Dr Soares says.
Despite the evidence that snapping photos can negatively affect our memories, and that having Google in our pocket is distorting our sense of our own knowledge, Dr Soares doesn't think you should throw your phone away.
"These digital technologies that take off clearly have some type of utility for people," she says.
"But [we need to] inform people about the ways to effectively use these technologies alongside their cognitive system."
Listen to the full episode of Brain Rot about life-logging and its effects, and follow the podcast for more.
