Professor Schacter, from Harvard University, studied the effect of continuous exposure to photos of the past through social networks on memory
At one time to imprint in memory the good times we wrote diaries or created photo albums. Nowadays this is no longer necessary thanks to social networks like Facebook or Instagram that allow us to immortalize certain moments forever. But what does this do to our memory?
Photographs have negative effects on our memories. This is the conclusion that Professor Daniel Schacter, professor of psychology at Harvard University, came to. Schacter began his investigation in the early 1990s and his research took an unexpected turn with the boom of the Internet and social networks in the 2000s. According to Professor Schacter, the means we use today to remind ourselves of a past event mystify the truth, forever altering our memory. Photos basically mislead the memories of our brain. In particular, the events associated with certain photos.
Facebook memories and memory
Nowadays it is common to share memories, especially on Facebook, through functions that allow us to post shots and videos even five years ago. For Schacter, this trend is changing our memory forever. The photo, in fact, allows us to fix in our memory the precise instant of the shot, but it changes our perception of the events that happened near the photo. Moreover, a picture where we are all happy and smiling can change our memory of a day that was not exactly radiant. In his experiment, the Harvard University professor also found that by releasing "erroneous" photographs of an event that did not happen, the people interviewed did not recognize the mistake and were convinced that they had done something or had participated in that event.
The "recovery-induced loss"
Schacter also derived from exaggerated exposure to photos a phenomenon, which he identifies as "recovery-induced loss". Basically, continuous exposure to photos from the past allows us to not exclusively forget events we've shared on social media. And our brains accustomed to this new practice will tend to forget earlier events not posted on the Net and not recalled continuously on various social.
The "source information"
According to Schacter, the Internet also plays another nasty trick on our memory. A phenomenon he calls loss of source information. With the amount of information we learn every day online, our brains tend to forget where they learned a particular thing. In practice, a piece of information remains imprinted in our memory but we struggle to remember the source and the moment in which we learned it. This gives the green light to fake-news. In this way our brain loses some natural antibodies that can help us to recognize the reliability or not of a news. Since we don't quickly understand whether the events reported in the article refer to something reliable that we have already read or not.