People say to live in the moment, you only live once etc. Why not live and remember many of your favorite moments in life? Pictures help capture events in lives that mean something to us.

“A picture can trigger a buried memory and recall a precise moment in time much more rapidly than words,” said Daniel Glaser, neuroscience researcher.

For over a 100 years, cameras have been capturing moments in lives. Family trips, graduations, birthdays, parties, etc. And as cameras have developed more and more, especially on cell phones, pictures are getting easier and easier to take better and quicker pictures that are easier to reach, now more than ever. These pictures taken are cherished by people and are looked back on many times. As years go on, memories start to fade, but pictures never do.

“If people review the pictures, this seems to help memory,” said Ira Hyman Ph. D college professor at Western Washington University.

This is why pictures are so important in today’s world. Our brain is mainly an image processor and captures moments in time without us even realizing it and makes them memories.

“…our brains are so efficient at storing ‘essence’ of a picture, capturing not just the subject but specific visual qualities,” Glaser said.

Glancing at pictures help our brains to find that lost memory and bring it to the surface. When it does, we are able to relive that experience over and over again.

Research has also found that people with dementia can recognize photographs they have looked at previously.

“A picture glanced at six months ago will still chime and feel familiar, even though you couldn’t call it to mind a minute ago,” Glaser said.

Pictures help people with dementia to recognize something they previously couldn’t remember, and they help people without dementia to remember an event that happened many years before. And with how easy it is to take multiple pictures at once, shows how taking pictures and having them at our fingertips is becoming more and more important in today’s world. All these prove how important pictures are in the world.