John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

Did you, per chance, forget something significant. My wife routinely 'reminds' me of things.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

It’s crap like that that caused me to abandon Bottom Line Reports after ten years. Pseudoscience is rampant!

My photos jog my memory. They don’t cause me to lose it. They give me a chance to take a new perspective on my own history.

I would not have survived high school in South Carolina without becoming a writer and a photographer.

Stephan G

I forgot my wife one time. Does that count?

cr1218

I think the item I posted is too anti-tourist. All those tourists probably go home and look at their photos, and keep learning and experiencing.

mesubdoc

I really don't know about the neurophysiology of it all, but I can tell an illustrative story. When I was 19 (that's exactly 60 years ago) a college buddy and I drove a deux chavauz 2CV Citroen 10,000 kilometers around Europe on a camping/hostel/pension tour from Paris to Copenhagen to Munich to Vienna to Rome to Geneva to Paris over the space of about twelve weeks. In Rome my camera was stolen from the car, and for the rest of the trip (just about half) we were without any camera at all. I had taken about 100 Ektachrome transparencies during the first half of the trip, and I have them still. For the rest of the trip we both had to stop and stare and try to remember everything...
The point is this: my recollections of the first half of our tour are clearly based on the slides, which are of course priceless records of all the visual details they record. My recollections of the second half of the trip (up the west coast of Italy, across the Riviera, up the Rhone, through Switzerland including the Jungfraujoch, and across agrarian France to Paris again) are less visually detailed, but rich in remembered places, people, atmospheres, even cuisine. I admit I would have preferred to have a camera for the entire trip (even though we had to take but one or two shots of any scene for economic reasons), but I have long since realized that the deeper, more culturally and aesthetically profound recollections of the trip - the memories that make such a Grand Tour worthwhile in the first place - are rooted in the later experiences that we had no other way to record but by intense scrutiny and mindful appreciation and commitment to memory. I don't know which is really better; I have a plethora of digital images (thousands upon thousands) in my computer from all sorts of other, similar trips - but I remember the smells and sounds and friendships struck up on that train ride to the Jungfraujoch when I was 19 more vividly than the three other times I've made the trip. And still I can hear the organ at St. Jean de Lyon and see it in the gloom of the south transept as if it were yesterday, even though there is no photographic trace of that moment, except in my mind.
Good, better, best - no sense trying to ascribe relative values to photos versus mindfulness, but clearly there is a difference between leaping out the car to snatch a shot of a distant peak, and stopping at the roadside with the map in hand and studying the entire landscape, integrating the moment into one's experience. Probably we should aim to do both, but keep in mind that photos are not memories; they are only suggestions - data points - that help us recall what it was like to live in that moment. Don't forget to live in that moment...

dumbo

You're a very lucky person. Your trip sounds absolutely wonderful. Your statement "Don't forget to live in the moment" expresses what I said earlier.
I'm happy to report that I'm a few years older then you. My negatives and my file of Ektachromes and Kodachromes go way back. The negatives from a much earlier stage in my teens are lost forever. I don't miss them. It's very hard to convince members of UHH that they really need to live in the moment as well carefully compose a great photograph when the situation deserves it. Thank you. Welcome to this incredible resource.

DWHart24 Loc: Central Florida

polonois Loc: Lancaster County,PA.

The study comes from CA. nuff said.

Stephan G

And photographs help us relive those moments.

My earliest memories go back over six decades ago. I still can smell that aroma of the "chocolat" factory. And that squishy feel of the shoe when I stepped in a rill, chasing a tadpole. I recall watching a steam engined train moving on the horizon. Our memories are imprinted in our brains. My children hated it when the family vacationed. I would not stay in one place for long. Yet, they had more exposure to the environs, more to remember. I would strike up conversations with anyone and everyone. I, and the kids, have many stories to tell. We have also images with which to tell stories. So it is to mix both. Jump out of the car, take shots, smell the air, see what and who is around, and so on. Someone said to treat life like poetry. Make each word encompass the world around you. Photography can be visual poetry.

juanbalv Loc: Los Angeles / Hawthorne

One Rude Dawg Loc: Athol, ID

And that would be a giant load of Bull Shit.

Patw28 Loc: PORT JERVIS, NY

Nonsense! The first requisite to remember an item is to ATTEND TO the subject. That’s why you “can’t remember names”. You never got the name in the first place. You were too busy attending to distractions. - being clever, doing an assortment of mental distractions, none of which was registering the name.
Taking a picture - not a snapshot - forces you to attend to details of the incident, hence enhances the probability that you will remember the incident and those details. You’ve already got the first requisite (necessary but not sufficient) to remember the subject.
You may, indeed, be taking too many pictures but that’s more likely because you’re exasperating your wife than inhibiting your memory.

cambriaman Loc: Central CA Coast

Consider the source: University of California Santa Cruz! Come On! That's the campus that declaRED "clothing optional" for class attendance. I took a figure photography class there many years ago and no one even noticed the unclothed models posing among the redwoods!

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Santa Cruz was full of stoners in the ‘70s. No wonder they can’t remember!

Rongnongno Loc: FL

Consider your own post. Something rubs you the wrong way so everything is wrong.

Sorry but I learned more from folks I disagree with than from those I agree with. One makes me think with their challenge, the other puts me to sleep.