What If the Secret to Remembering Is Learning to See?

My mentor wouldn’t allow a single photograph at Salem. Forty years later, the memory research caught up with him...

In 1978, I was half-owner of a small advertising agency and had been hired by the founder of a German charity to promote a US tour of his orchestra made up of orphaned and abused children. (I tell the story in detail in my autobiography The Prophet’s Way.) The first thing I needed to do was produce a brochure and some posters and ads, but that founder, Gottfried Müller, told me he didn’t want any pictures of any living thing in it.

“It’ll be more interesting to people if it is just words,” he said.

I pushed back, because conventional wisdom in the advertising industry is that you should always include images in ads and other ligerature.

“Pictures always draw the eye faster than words,” I said. “They’re powerful tools to get people to look at something.”

He nodded. “Too powerful.”

I asked what he meant, and that’s when I realized something I’d walked past on every previous visit to the Salem Children’s Village in Stadtsteinach without noticing.

“There are no pictures of living things at Salem,” he said. “None in our newsletters, none in our literature, none in our homes. None.”

I thought about his residence, his office, the children’s houses, the guest house where I’d stayed, and the clinic. He was right; everything was either abstract art, maps, or paintings and drawings of buildings and streets. But there were no images of people, plants, or animals — living things — anywhere.

Then he ran an experiment on me. He said:

“Think of somebody you know very well but who you have not seen in several years.”

My maternal grandmother came to mind.

“Did you ever see a picture of that person?”

The one that immediately came to mind was a framed photo that sat on my mother’s bureau for years after her mother died, and a few seconds of a home movie of my grandmother that my father had shot when I was about three, which we watched most Christmases.

He leaned closer. “Can you remember her face, or just the picture of her face?”

This is what I wrote in my diary that afternoon after I’d left his office to consider how to produce the ad materials for the upcoming orchestra visit:

“I felt disoriented, as if the world had just turned sideways, as my mind raced through the dim recesses of memory looking for memories of my grandmother’s face. I remembered her house, the black-and-white kitchen tile, the hardwood floors, the mahogany dining-room table, a green-felt desk blotter. I remembered the house in Charlevoix right down to its smell, the brick building where she worked and the sound of the noon siren, the swing-sets in the playground where we played. But I couldn’t remember her face, except from those photos.”

He told me to try someone more recent, so I tried my father. I’d spent two weeks with him visiting Michigan, just a few months earlier. But the image that surfaced was a portrait my brothers and I had commissioned ten years before.

His explanation has stayed with me for nearly fifty years:

“Pictures are frozen in time, while reality flows in time. When you look at something living for a few minutes, it makes millions of little time-moment pictures. But when you see a frozen picture, all those time-moments become filled with the same image. And so it will destroy the other, more fragile, but real images you have in your memory.”

I took this, at the time, as an eccentricity of Herr Müller’s Christian mysticism. He’d read the first of the Ten Commandment, the one against graven images, and either taken it too literally or as an echo back to the oral traditions of what I called Older Cultures.

His comment about memory, though, knocked me for a loop; could it be that he (and, maybe, Moses) was onto some deep psychological reality that we’d all been missing throughout the years since that day 3000 years ago on Mt. Sinai?

And, sure enough, now — decades after he told me that story and had me reality-check it against my own memory — psychologists have gone and measured it.

In 2014, scientist Linda Henkel ran an experiment with undergraduates by walking them through an art museum and having them photograph some of the displays while merely looking carefully at others. The result of her study, published in Psychological Science, was straightforward: people remembered the things they’d only looked at better than the ones they photographed, even though they’d spent the same amount of time looking at both.

Dr. Henkel called it the “photo-taking impairment effect,” and at first she concluded it was just because the process of whipping out the camera and framing the show pulled people out of the here-and-now experience of looking at and interpreting the meaning of the artwork, saying:

“When people rely on technology to remember for them — counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves — it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences.”

But a follow-up study she did was even more interesting, as reported in that journal:

“A second study replicated these findings, but it also presented an interesting twist: Taking a photograph of a specific detail on the object by zooming in on it with the camera seemed to preserve memory for the object, not just for the part that was zoomed in on but also for the part that was out of frame.

“‘These results show how the ‘mind’s eye’ and the camera’s eye are not the same,’ says Henkel.”

And just this month, researchers at Binghamton ran seven experiments with 892 participants and found the same thing is happening when we take screenshots. People remembered fewer details about what they’d captured that way than about about the things on the screen that they’d merely looked at or read.

The researchers went looking for some compensating benefit, some freed-up attention of ours that simply showed up elsewhere, and couldn’t locate a single one. It was the same result that Herr Müller had introduced me to in 1978 and Dr. Henkel discovered twelve years ago.

In a fascinating twist, Henkel’s second experiment discovered that when her students in the art museum zoomed in and photographed only one specific part of an art object rather than the entire thing, the “impairment” effect vanished.

They remembered both the detail they’d framed and shot, but also the details outside the frame of the photo as well. Apparently, the extra attention required to view the entire object and then decide what to focus on made all the difference, presumably because it required more detailed attention.

So, it turns out that the camera isn’t stealing your memory; it’s the consequence of essentially deferring your memory-making processes to the camera in your hand instead of the one in your brain. Herr Müller was emphatic about this, too, telling me that most people spend most of their lives essentially sleepwalking.

“The average person cannot walk even ten steps without falling out of this awakeness,” he told me once. “It is so easy to forget G-d and to forget to be awake and alive here and now.”

He taught me a practice to overcome this tendency to fail to notice all the life around us. We took a long winter walk through the steep hillside behind Salem in Stadtsteinach; standing on a trail we could see over the tree tops that fell away below us to a distant hillside where there was a crumbling castle built around the year 900, now abandoned in the forest.

The trees were bare browns, the ground red and orange with fallen leaves, the pines around the castle a deep green, the sky sparkled bright blue with thin crystalline clouds up high. The air smelled of pine resin and a coming snow.

“Thomas, have you ever thought that G-d needs you?” he asked.

I offered something about the coming millennium.

“More than that. He needs every person. Everybody. Always, for all time.”

Why?

“To be His eyes and ears, His senses. He created the world, but He is not here in a physical body to experience His own creation. Therefore He created man, to walk on the Earth and see, hear, smell, taste, and feel His creation. And so our lives can be a gift to our Creator.”

Then the exercise.

“Look in front of you. Do not look at only one thing, and do not look at everything. But notice it all. All the detail. All the color. All the texture and sounds and smells. And then close your eyes.”

I did. It was gone.

“Then open your eyes, look at it again, and close your eyes again. Keep doing that until you can see the same scene with your eyes closed as with your eyes open. And be as present in the here and now as you possibly can be: don’t think about what you are looking at, just take it all in.”

After a few tries, the valley began to hold in my inner vision.

“That is the beginning of seeing,” he said. “You must learn to see with power. To hear with power. To sense with power. And then keep those images in your mind as a gift to G-d.” Then he slapped me on the back hard enough to move me and laughed. “It makes Him very happy when you take pictures here on the Earth for Him!”

When I look back over my past, I see little jewels of vivid and bright memories, surrounded by a long fog of blurred time. Those bright memories, when I examine them, are invariably from the times when I was momentarily but fully awake and living in the here-and-now.

So, the challenge for us is to decide how much of our lives we want to actually experience, deeply experience, and remember (or “take pictures for G-d”). Try this:

Pick any one thing you’d normally photograph; a grandchild’s face, the light shading a particular tree, whatever stops you. Take it all in, close your eyes, check whether it survived, and open them again. Do that three or four times until it holds.

Then, if you still want the photograph, zoom your camera in on one detail and take it. You’ll end up with both the picture and the memory..

Tell me in the comments what you looked at, and whether it stayed when you closed your eyes. I’ve been practicing this for almost fifty years and I still fail at it most days, so don’t worry if it takes a few tries.