Cryptomnesia: When Forgotten Memories Feel Like New Ideas

The former Beatles singer, George Harrison, was convicted of “subconscious plagiarism” in 1976. In 1971, Harrison released a song named My Sweet Lord, which he claimed was never intentionally based on The Chiffons’ 1963 hit He’s So Fine, but the judge in the case ruled otherwise. Harrison was sure to have heard the original song years earlier and knew that he almost certainly had forgotten it. Well-documented memory error known as cryptomnesia occurs when memory loss of the origin or source of information, an idea or creative work, results in the person feeling it as their own original thought (Brown & Murphy, 1989).

Cryptomnesia is a strange combination of memory, creativity and identity. It poses questions that are both interesting and useful from a scientific and practical point of view: How reliable is the human mind in remembering the origin of its thoughts? This article examines the nature of cryptomnesia, the difference between cryptomnesia and plagiarism, the mechanism of the unconscious memory involved in cryptomnesia, and why the impression of originality can be extremely deceptive.

What is Cryptomnesia

Cryptomnesia, meaning “hidden memory” from the Greek roots kryptos (hidden) and mneme (memory), was first coined by psychologist Theodore Flournoy in 1900, when it was used to denote instances where the recollection of something was revived, but not recognised as a memory. This idea was later adopted by Carl Jung, who found that he had been plagiarising his own work, as a near-verbatim copy of material which he had read as a teenager and forgotten about (Jung, 1963). The fact that this sort of error can be so hard to see, even for the person committing it, is evident in the case of Jung- who could copy someone else’s text and believe the text to be his very own.

Cryptomnesia, Plagiarism, and Other Memory Errors

The most important difference between cryptomnesia and plagiarism is the intention. Plagiarism is the intentional submission of another person’s work or ideas as an individual’s own without an awareness that they were not created by the individual and a conscious decision not to cite the source. In cryptomnesia, there is no such awareness. It’s not that the person doesn’t recall the source; it’s that it wasn’t in their memory. The idea is original because, from within, it presents itself with all the characteristics of an original idea: it comes up spontaneously, it feels new, and there is no sense of having seen it before (Bink et al., 1999). This doesn’t make the result any less dire; it can still lead to academic misconduct charges, copyright violations, or damage to one’s reputation. But it’s certainly a different psychological process from outright lying.

Two other similar (but different) phenomena are also important to differentiate from cryptomnesia: a) forgetting to remember and b) forgetting to perform. The opposite problem is when a person mistakenly recognises something as familiar when it is actually novel- called déjà vu– which is why it is an unsettling feeling. In cryptomnesia, the opposite situation is true- something that is actually new is experienced as familiar. It is also different from confabulation, which is the creation of invented memories, commonly observed in brain diseases like Korsakoff syndrome, but in which the person does not realise that they are making up a memory (Schacter, 2001).

Read More: Understanding Short-Term and Long-Term Memory: How We Retain What Matters

Origins of cryptomnesia

The explanation for the phenomenon of “cryptomnesia” can be better understood if one first understands how information in the human memory is stored and retrieved. Memory is not a monolithic process. Psychologists differentiate, among others, episodic memory (memory for a certain personal experience, such as the location and time when it was acquired) and semantic memory (memory for facts, concepts and knowledge that have been separated from the context in which they were learned). Learning a new thing usually involves learning the experience as well as the thing itself, that is, where, when, and from whom the learning took place. The content is also likely to be remembered over time, while the contextual information may become more difficult to remember (Johnson et al., 1993).

Source monitoring is the process of remembering the origin of a memory (whether it was seen or heard, imagined or experienced, self-generated or externally provided). In the early 1990s, Marcia Johnson and her colleagues (1993) proposed that source attribution is not automatic; that is, the source must be derived from the memory by active inferential reasoning, relying on contextual information, perceptual clarity and cognitive effort. If these contextual factors are not known, are missing, or are forgotten, the source of the memory is not monitored, and the content of the memory is separated from the source.

Read More: How Memory Can Be Rewritten: Episodic and Semantic Memory Retrieval

Cryptomnesia and Source Monitoring

Cryptomnesia is a type of source-monitoring failure; the individual is able to recall the content of an external source, but not the source per se in general. This misattribution becomes more likely as the interval between the initial experience and subsequent recall increases because contextual information decays more rapidly than the content itself. It is also more likely to occur when people encounter the original information incidentally or without paying attention, encounter it indirectly (for example, by overhearing or briefly skimming it), or retrieve content similar to ideas they have previously considered, making self-attribution seem plausible (Brown & Murphy, 1989).

Read More: Beyond Memory: How Culture and Patriarchy Persist Despite Cognitive Decline

The Role of Implicit Memory

Cryptomnesia is primarily an unconscious memory phenomenon, known as implicit memory. Memory that people do not intentionally retrieve or consciously access but that nonetheless influences their behaviour and cognition. It is the memory system that allows a person to ride a bicycle without consciously remembering how to do it. It can also make a person feel uneasy in a social situation that is only remotely similar to a previous bad experience that they cannot consciously remember. Roediger (1990) has suggested that implicit memory can transfer a memory of an idea, such as a melody, phrase, or argument, into the conscious mind. However, it may do so without leaving an episodic memory of the idea’s source behind.

Experimental studies have consistently demonstrated the presence of cryptomnesia and the conditions under which it occurs. A basic study by Brown and Murphy (1989) examined participants’ ability to produce category exemplars (e.g., identifying category types of birds). Participants often generated examples suggested by other group members when asked to think of new ones. However, they believed that these examples were their own original ideas. This effect was more pronounced when more time passed between the group generation phase and the individual recall phase. It was also stronger when the items provided by others were plausible and contextually appropriate. Plausible items were easier to misattribute as self-generated.

Read More: Forgetting in the Digital Age: Are Smartphones Weakening Our Memory? 

Why familiar ideas feel novel and why it matters

A question that arises in the mind is: why is it so convincing to experience an original idea? To the subject, there is no difference between a truly original idea, which the person has never encountered before, and a cryptomnesic idea. A cryptomnesic idea is a previously encountered idea that is retrieved from forgotten memory but misattributed. Both seem like finds. Both are intuitively “creative owners.” This occurs because people do not determine originality by comparing an idea with an extensive internal database of previous experiences. Instead, they perceive an idea as original when they lack a competing memory of a previous encounter (Macrae et al., 1999).

Read More: Freud’s theory of the Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious

How Cognitive Load Influences Cryptomnesia

Macrae and co-workers (1999) discovered that cognitive load, which refers to the amount of mental effort required at the moment. It has a profound effect on cryptomnesia errors. Different conditions of cognitive load can therefore influence the occurrence of cryptomnesia errors. Participants who experienced distraction or had to perform a second task were much more likely to reproduce other people’s ideas as their own. This is because the process of source monitoring is cognitively demanding; it needs active attention and inferential effort. 

This discovery is immediately relevant to creative and intellectual endeavours. Creators such as writers, musicians, academics, designers, and other creative professionals often experience high cognitive load. The more a person reads, hears, sees, and absorbs, the more likely they are to retrieve information cryptomnestically. This is also more likely when more time passes between absorbing information and creating something new (Schacter, 2001).

Read More: False Memory Syndrome: Between Truth and Belief 

Who May Be More Vulnerable to Cryptomnesia?

The effects of cryptomnesia affect multiple areas. In a legal sense, the lack of intent is not a defence to legal liability, as shown in the case of George Harrison. Copyright law in most countries does not require proof of deliberate copying. It only requires proof of copying. Cryptomnesia is a real and unrecognised cause of unintentional plagiarism in an academic environment. Unintentional plagiarism is now a common concern in research and academic institutions. The amount of material a student or researcher has to read makes it hard to remember where it came from (Bink et al., 1999).

Some research has indicated that the phenomenon of cryptomnesia is not universal among people or situations. Cryptomnesia is more common among creative and generative people, who generate more ideas. This is because they have more material circulating in their brains at any one time. Therefore, they have more chances of misattribution. In general, older adults are more likely to experience source-monitoring failures, including cryptomnesia. This is because the episodic memory system, which keeps track of contextual information, is less precise with age (Mitchell et al., 1995). People with strong self-referential tendencies may be more likely to misattribute external material as their own.

Read More: Cognitive Biases That Secretly Control Your Decisions – And How to Outsmart Them 

Conclusion

It’s a sobering lesson in the fact that the human mind is not a reliable source of intellectual origin. Memory retains what it has learned but often loses the source, allowing a borrowed idea to feel like an original creation to its new owner. It isn’t a moral deficit. Memory has a structural property. What people remember often outlasts its original context. People develop a sense of originality not through verification but through contradiction.

The concept of cryptomnesia is important to society’s responses to creative and intellectual ownership. It requires distinguishing between conscious plagiarism and inadvertent copying. The former should not be condoned, while appropriate action should be taken against the latter, and steps should be taken to prevent it. The strategies of maintaining source notes and checking sources before finalising ideas help with source monitoring. They also minimise the likelihood of confusing the remembered information with the source. The mind takes in much more than it remembers taking in. Absorbing what it forgets, it may offer back one day, certain and quite sincerely, that it has created something new.

References +

• Bink, M. L., Marsh, R. L., Hicks, J. L., & Howard, J. D. (1999). The credibility of a witness affects the likelihood of cryptomnesia. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 13(1), 17–26. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0720(199902)13:1<17::AID-ACP551>3.0.CO;2-8
• Brown, A. S., & Murphy, D. R. (1989). Cryptomnesia: Delineating inadvertent plagiarism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15(3), 432–442. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.15.3.432
• Flournoy, T. (1900). From India to the planet Mars: A case of multiple personality with imaginary languages (D. B. Vermilye, Trans.). Harper & Brothers.
• Johnson, M. K., Hashtroudi, S., & Lindsay, D. S. (1993). Source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 114(1), 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.114.1.3
• Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections (R. Winston & C. Winston, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
• Macrae, C. N., Bodenhausen, G. V., & Calvini, G. (1999). Contexts of cryptomnesia: May the source be with you. Social Cognition, 17(3), 273–297. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.1999.17.3.273
• Marsh, R. L., & Bower, G. H. (1993). Eliciting cryptomnesia: Unconscious plagiarism in a puzzle task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19(3), 673–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.19.3.673
• Mitchell, K. J., Johnson, M. K., & Mather, M. (1995). Source monitoring and suggestibility to misinformation: Adult age-related differences. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17(1), 107–119. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.837
• Roediger, H. L. (1990). Implicit memory: Retention without remembering. American Psychologist, 45(9), 1043–1056. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.45.9.1043
• Schacter, D. L. (2001). The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers. Houghton Mifflin.