I was at my sister’s theater performance when it happened.

Lined up along the walls and sticking out of the audience were a countless number of cellphones and cameras. One mom was slumped against a wall, staring through the small LCD screen of her camera. A dad on the opposite end of the room brought a tripod for his camcorder.

At that moment, twenty different versions of that performance existed from twenty different angles, but does it really matter? Why do people feel obligated to mindlessly record events through their phone screens, even if it means missing what is actually happening?

Linda Henkel of Fairfield University conducted a study to measure the effect this mindless form of photography has on museum goers. She asked a group of undergraduates to tour an art museum and take note of different pieces using either their phone camera or pure observation. Henkel discovered that undergraduates had more trouble remembering artwork that they photographed as opposed to observed. She calls this the “photo-taking impairment effect.”

The introduction of increasingly more sophisticated camera on phones is a great thing. It allows people to enact change, to share unique experiences instantly, and to take notes of events throughout life. But there has come to be a natural reliance on the phone camera, and not enough on memory. This leaves people reaching for their cellphones when anything of note happens.

Platforms like Snapchat have accelerated this habit, with every classroom featured in a countless number of photos. Being recorded, and recording any event of significance, has become a part of public life.

The solution is simple. If the photo is able to be found after a quick Google search, don’t take it. When traveling to other places, I try to capture what can’t be seen online. The people, or the tiny overlooked details. It’s the unique photos that help our personal memories of an experience, not the clique ones.

Henkel found a pattern with this too. When taking photos of specific details of a piece, zoomed in, the brain remembered the piece as a whole more clearly.

It’s time to stop using phones as a memory crutch and use them for what they are really for: recording an experience, not just another place.