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...

What you folks in all your wisdom forget to realize is that when folks are living their 'experience' through their cameras they do not enjoy the fullness of the experience they are living or eventually die from not paying attention to what surrounds them - the ultimate loss of memories -. That is 99.99% of this over documented digital imagery world.

Debate all you want, if one is only concerned with taking 'good memory pictures' one is missing life. Unless I go somewhere on a job (not anymore) or trying to challenge myself to learn something new a camera is not my 'go to' to 'create memories'.

So....

robertjerl, you are absolutely right as far as memory need goes when there is no method to record. Now if you read many threads here (and other places) a constant issue is 'WHERE IS MY (photo) STUFF???'...