Photographs are memories but clicking too many can impair the very experience they are trying to preserve. In this episode, Anuradha Vellat, Assistant Editor with TOI, speaks to two experts — cognitive scientist and IIT professor Jaison Manjaly, and clinical psychologist Nupur Dhakephalkar — about what scientists call the 'photo-taking impairment effect', a phenomenon where we are distracted from the experience of that perfect sunset because we are trying to capture its essence on our cameras and phones.

Manjaly explains how memory is inseparable from attention. Zooming in, staying curious about a subject, and revisiting images later all strengthen recall, while mindless, rapid-fire clicking, now enabled by smartphones, floods our galleries with photos we never really encoded in the first place. Dhakephalkar unpacks how social media compounds this, turning presence into performance. We start photographing not to remember an experience, but to be seen, chasing likes and 'aura' over lived, felt experience. Her fix is simple — an 80-20 ratio, eyes first, lens second, favouring fewer, more deliberate and intentional photographs of what is meaningful to us, rather than merely what looks beautiful.

Before you put your phone down, tune in to hear why the most photographed moments are often the ones we remember the least.

And before you tune out, do check out the nutrition power tip by nutritionist Sangeetha Aiyer (https://www.rewriteyourstory.in/) in the end.

Chapters

00:00 - Photos That Steal The Sunset

01:37 - How The Brain Decides What's Worth Remembering

03:11 - Photo-Taking Impairment Effect, Explained

04:14 - Sight Over Sound: Why Visual Memory Gets Priority

06:22 - Smartphones Didn't Invent This, They Amplified It

09:52 - Is Outsourcing Memory Actually Irrational?

11:12 - Clicking to Remember Recipes — So Why Do We Still Forget?

13:45 - Volume Vs Retrieval: Why Bigger Camera Rolls Mean Fewer Memories

16:08 - When Forgetting Signals Something More Than Photos

17:15 - Videos And The Concert You Never Quite Experienced

20:06 - Zoom-In Effect: Attention As The Key to Memory

28:17 - FOMO, Aura Farming & Turning Experience Into Performance

29:47 - Eyes First, Lens Second: 80:20 Rule For Mindful Memory

31:52 - Photos As Storytelling: Final Takeaways