Coming quite soon: Pixellated memories

Now, a piece of sage advice to those who live by their smartphones — apps, calendars, diaries included: they may be injurious to your memory. There was a time when having a “photographic memory” was deemed to be a compliment.

If recent research is to be believed, though, that phrase could become an oxymoron, as taking copious photographs of events could actually prevent the brain from registering it fully and, therefore, committing it properly to memory. The study by a Connecticut university has even got a name for this new form of memory loss: the photo-taking impairment effect.

Birthdays and anniversaries or celebrity sightings and sting operations, obsessive recording of momentous occasions thanks to those ubiquitous megapixel cameras could be the undoing of those “leetle grey cells” that have served the likes of Hercule Poirot so well.

Since the experiments leading to this conclusion also showed that certain types of photographs — detailed closeups — did actually lead the photographer to remember more than just the part captured in the frame, it shows that the mind’s eye has a broader sweep than the camera’s.

But the deleterious effect of relying on what is recorded on the phone or camera’s memory rather than the human brain is obvious: soon, we shall remember only what we see again!