"Olivia, our granddaughter, said, " If there isn't a photo, it didn't happen." This may be a bit extreme, but to some, photography freezes time with an immediacy no other medium can match. A photo is an imprint of something that truly exists: a person, a place, or a gesture. To accumulate such images is to collect moments that survive."
"The neuropsychology of collecting helps explain why photographs, in particular, exert such pull. When individuals engage with pictures that evoke emotion, whether joy, nostalgia, melancholy, or fascination, the amygdala and hippocampus often activate simultaneously. The hippocampus retrieves or simulates memories; the amygdala reacts to their emotional importance. Together, they produce a sensation of reliving."
"This idea aligns strongly with research by Kislinger and Kotrschal (2021), who argue that the human attraction to photography stems from hunter-gatherer tendencies. Instead of assimilating berries or tracking prey, modern humans gather images that serve as visual tokens. They represent the social, emotional, or ecological information that would once have been essential for survival. Kislinger and Kotrschal (2021) propose that collecting pictures, digital or physical, emerges naturally from cognitive systems that reward attention to faces, social cues, landscapes, and potential threats. Their work helps explain why people feel compelled"
Photograph collecting emerges from biological predispositions and cultural practices that make images potent anchors for memory and feeling. Emotional engagement with pictures activates hippocampal memory processes and the amygdala’s emotional tagging, producing a sense of reliving. Ownership of images enables voluntary replay of internal states and stabilizes emotional experience, offering a form of temporal control, especially for those sensing time’s acceleration. The tendency to gather images parallels hunter-gatherer behaviors: people accumulate visual tokens—faces, social cues, landscapes, threat-relevant scenes—that convey social, emotional, and ecological information and are reinforced by cognitive reward systems.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]