When it comes to obsessional tech habits, photo-taking probably isn’t the worst for relationships. If you’re not gazing into someone’s eyes, at least you’re pointing an iPhone at them. But how does that persistent need to capture the moment — which so many of us feel — change how we actually experience the moment, both in the present and when we try to recall it down the line? The answer is quite illuminating.

One of the major reasons we take photos in the first place is to remember a moment long after it has passed: the birth of a baby, a reunion, a pristine lake. In 2015, I conducted a Bored and Brilliant Project — in which I challenged people to detach from their devices in order to jump-start their creativity — with more than 20,000 listeners of Note to Self (the podcast about technology that I host).

When I surveyed participants, many said they used photos as a “memory aid.” They took pictures of things like parking spots or the label of the hot sauce at a restaurant to buy later. However, every time we snap a quick pic of something, we could in fact be harming our memory of it.The results were clear: Overall, people remembered fewer of the objects they had photographed. They also couldn’t recall as many specific visual details of the photographed art, compared to the art they had merely observed.

“When you take a photo of something, you’re counting on the camera to remember for you,” Henkel said. “You’re basically saying, ‘Okay, I don’t need to think about this any further. The camera’s captured the experience.’ You don’t engage in any of the elaborative or emotional kinds of processing that really would help you remember those experiences, because you’ve outsourced it to your camera.”