The Benefits of More Drawing (and Photographing Less)
And how many are still sitting un-looked at on your hard drive?
Chances are you’ll have thousands of digital photos on your phone’s memory or stored in the cloud that you will never look at again. You have great intentions of making albums from your digital memories but it turns out, taking photos can actually impair your memory of an event.
If you want to remember a special moment, don’t take a photo. Try drawing it instead.
The Photo Taking Impairment Effect
Research by Linda Henkel, a psychology professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut, studied how taking photos impacts our experience of a moment and our memory of it. Participants in the study were led on a guided tour of Bellarmine Museum of Art and told to just observe some objects and to photograph others.
Results showed what is now known as the photo-taking-impairment effect: when participants took photos of objects on their visit, they remembered fewer objects and fewer details. They also did not remember the location of the objects in the museum as accurately. By comparison, participants who did not take photos remembered more objects in more detail.
“When you take a photo of something, you’re counting on the camera to remember for you. You’re basically saying, ‘Okay, I don’t need to think about this any further. The camera’s captured the experience.”
Interestingly, however, when participants zoomed in to photograph a specific part of an object, their memory was not impaired. In fact, their memory for the features they did not zoom in on was just as strong as the memory for features that they did zoom in on.
“This suggests that the additional attention and cognitive processes engaged by this focused activity can eliminate the photo-taking-impairment effect.” Henkel writes in the study.
Put the camera away the next time you want to live and experience a moment.
Being in the Photo
And there’s more. The researchers also asked participants to both take a photo of an object and also to have a photo taken of themselves next to the object.
In interviews afterwards, Henkel and her team found that when participants stood next to the objects, they became more removed from the original moment — as if they were an observer watching themselves doing something outside themselves. In contrast, when they were not in the image, participants returned to relive the experience in the first-person, through their own eyes and remembered more.
“Cameras, as amazing as they are, can’t compare to what the brain is capable of with input from the eyes and the ears. Cameras are a lesser version of the human information-processing system.”
So the next time you really want to live and experience a moment, put the camera away. Even better, take a moment to stop and draw what you see. I promise you, you’ll not only remember more, but you’ll also enjoy a beautiful moment of pause and reflection. Importantly, you will recall this moment from memory a lot more easily and quickly than trying to access it on your phone or hard drive!
Inspiration
Here’s a great video Why We Should Draw More (and Photograph Less) from the folks at The School of Life explaining why we pay more attention and notice so much more when we draw what we see.
Indulge in your artist, swap the scroll and try the creative mindfulness exercise ‘Draw The View’.
Eyes of the Sketcher
I had to leave you with this quote by John Ruskin as it so beautifully sums up the ‘eyes of the sketcher’:
“Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect; and that’s all!
But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the cause of beauty, and penetrate the minutest parts of loveliness. He looks up, and observes how the showery and subdivided sunshine comes sprinkled down among the gleaming leaves overhead, till the air is filled with the emerald light. He will see here and there a bough emerging from the veil of leaves, he will see the jewel brightness of the emerald moss and the variegated and fantastic lichens, white and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a single garment of beauty. Then come the cavernous trunks and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the steep bank, whose turfy slope is inlaid with flowers of a thousand dyes.
Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane.”