Cryptomnesia

For the album by El Grupo Nuevo de Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, see Cryptomnesia (album).

Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a tune, a name, or a joke;^[1] they are not deliberately engaging in plagiarism, but are experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.

Early use

Cryptomnesia was first documented in 1874, involving the medium Stainton Moses, who during a séance believed himself to be in spiritual contact with two brothers from India who had recently been killed. Despite the apparent communication, he was unable to ascertain any details which had not already been given in newspaper coverage of the story the week before. Researchers concluded that Moses had read the story but forgotten that he had read it, instead mistaking the partial memory for a message from the spirit world.^[2][3]

The word was first used by the psychiatrist Théodore Flournoy,^[4] in reference to the case of medium Hélène Smith (Catherine-Élise Müller) to suggest the high incidence in psychism of "latent memories on the part of the medium that come out, sometimes greatly disfigured by a subliminal work of imagination or reasoning, as so often happens in our ordinary dreams."

Carl Gustav Jung treated the subject in his thesis "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena" (1902)^[5] and in an article, "Cryptomnesia" (1905),^[6] suggested the phenomenon in Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The idea was studied or mentioned by Géza Dukes, Sándor Ferenczi and Wilhelm Stekel as well as by Sigmund Freud in speaking of the originality of his inventions.^[7][8] Jacques Lacan illustrated the adaptability of the concept in his formulation of the ego ideal (the "ego" as Other^[9]) in refashioning the "case" of Margarite Pantaine (Case of Aimée). Her experiences of self-"misrecognition" provided a structure for Lacan's key subsequent theories of The Symbolic and the mirror stage.^[10]

The word cryptomnesia is a compound of Greek cryptos (hidden, concealed, secret) and mnesia (memory).

Experimental research

In the first empirical study of cryptomnesia, people in a group took turns generating category examples (e.g., kinds of birds: parrot, canary, etc.). They were later asked to create new exemplars in the same categories that were not previously produced, and also to recall which words they had personally generated. People inadvertently plagiarized about 3–9% of the time either by regenerating another person's thought or falsely recalling someone's thought as their own.^[11] Similar effects have been replicated using other tasks such as word search puzzles^[12][13] and in brainstorming sessions.^[14]

Causes

Cryptomnesia is more likely to occur when the ability to properly monitor sources is impaired. For example, people are more likely to falsely claim ideas as their own when they were under high cognitive load at the time they first considered the idea.^[15] Cryptomnesia increases when people are away from the original source of the idea, and decreases when participants are specifically instructed to pay attention to the origin of their ideas. False claims are also more prevalent for ideas originally suggested by persons of the same sex, presumably because the perceptual similarity of the self to a same-sex person exacerbates source confusion. In other studies it has been found that the timing of the idea is also important: if another person produces an idea immediately before the self produces an idea, the other's idea is more likely to be claimed as one's own, ostensibly because the person is too busy preparing for their own turn to properly monitor source information. ^{[citation needed]}

Value

As explained by Carl Jung,^[16] in Man and His Symbols, "An author may be writing steadily to a preconceived plan, working out an argument or developing the line of a story, when he suddenly runs off at a tangent. Perhaps a fresh idea has occurred to him, or a different image, or a whole new sub-plot. If you ask him what prompted the digression, he will not be able to tell you. He may not even have noticed the change, though he has now produced material that is entirely fresh and apparently unknown to him before. Yet it can sometimes be shown convincingly that what he has written bears a striking similarity to the work of another author — a work that he believes he has never seen."

Jorge Luis Borges's story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," is a meta-fictive enactment of cryptomnesia. This work is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about (the nonexistent) Pierre Menard. It begins with a brief introduction and a listing of all of Menard's work.

Borges's "review" describes this 20th-century French writer who has made an effort to go further than mere "translation" of Don Quixote, but to immerse himself so thoroughly as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th century Spanish. Thus, "Pierre Menard" is always used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of accurate translation or, in this case, the hermeneutics of cryptomnesia.

Cases

Nietzsche

Jung gives the following example in Man and His Symbols.^[17] Friedrich Nietzsche's book Thus Spoke Zarathustra includes an almost word for word account of an incident also included in a book published about 1835, half a century before Nietzsche wrote. This is considered to be neither purposeful plagiarism nor pure coincidence: Nietzsche's sister confirmed that he had indeed read the original account when he was younger, likely sometime between ages 12 and 15; Nietzsche's youthful intellectual capabilities, his later cognitive degeneration, and his accompanying psychological deterioration (specifically, his increasing grandiosity as manifested in his later behavior and writings) together strengthen the likelihood that he happened to commit the passage to memory upon initially reading it and later, after having lost his memory of encountering it, assumed that his own mind had created it.^[18]

Byron

In some cases, the line between cryptomnesia and zeitgeist (compare the concept of multiple discovery in science) may be somewhat hazy. Readers of Lord Byron's closet drama Manfred noted a strong resemblance to Goethe's Faust. In a review published in 1820, Goethe wrote, "Byron's tragedy Manfred was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius."^[19] Byron was apparently thankful for the compliment; however, he claimed that he had never read Faustus.

J.M. Barrie

J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, was aware of the occurrence of cryptomnesia. In Peter and Wendy^[20] Wendy sews Peter's shadow back on and this makes him very happy but he immediately thinks he has attached the shadow himself:

"How clever I am," he crowed rapturously, "oh, the cleverness of me!"

Peter exhibits a number of other clinically accurate peculiarities of memory suggesting that Barrie regarded Peter's behavior as a memory disorder rather than self-centredness.^[21]

Helen Keller

Helen Keller compromised her own and her teacher's credibility with an incident of cryptomnesia which was misinterpreted as plagiarism.^[22] The Frost King, which Keller wrote out of buried memories of the fairy tale The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby, read to her four years previously, left Keller a nervous wreck,^{[citation needed]} and unable to write fiction for the rest of her life.^[23]

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson refers to an incident of cryptomnesia that took place during the writing of Treasure Island, and that he discovered to his embarrassment several years afterward:

... I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is from Masterman Ready. It may be, I care not a jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying: departing, they had left behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints which perhaps another—and I was the other! It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the Tales of a Traveller some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters—all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye ...^[24]

Jerusalem of Gold

Jerusalem of Gold (ירושלים של זהב) is a 1967 song by Naomi Shemer. Some of the song's melody is based on a Basque lullaby, Pello Joxepe,^[25] composed by Juan Francisco Petriarena 'Xenpelar' (1835–1869). Shemer heard a rendition by Spanish singer/songwriter Paco Ibáñez, who visited Israel in 1962 and performed the song to a group that included her and Nehama Hendel. She later acknowledged hearing Hendel perform Pello Joxepe in the mid-1960s, and that she had unconsciously based some of the melody on the lullaby. Shemer felt very bad when she found that it was similar to Pello Joxepe, but when Ibáñez was asked how he felt about the issue, he replied he was "glad it helped in some way", and that he was not angry, nor did he perceive it as plagiarism.^[26]

Steven Tyler

In 1984, when Aerosmith were recording Done With Mirrors, lead singer Steven Tyler heard the group's "You See Me Crying" on the radio and, not remembering that it was their own song, suggested that the group record a cover version, to which guitarist Joe Perry replied, "That's us, fuckhead!".^[27]

George Harrison

The precedent in United States copyright law, since 1976, has been to treat alleged cryptomnesia no differently from deliberate plagiarism. The seminal case is Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music,^[28] where the publisher of "He's So Fine," written and composed by Ronald Mack, demonstrated to the court that George Harrison borrowed substantial portions of his song "My Sweet Lord" from "He's So Fine." The Court imposed damages despite a claim that the copying was subconscious. The ruling was upheld by the Second Circuit in ABKCO Music v. Harrisongs Music,^[29] and the case Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton,^[30] upheld by the Ninth Circuit, affirmed the principle.

Colleen McCullough

In 1987, Australian author Colleen McCullough published a novella, The Ladies of Missalonghi. Critics alleged that she had plagiarised The Blue Castle, a 1926 novel by L. M. Montgomery. McCullough acknowledged having read Montgomery's works in her youth, but attributed the similarities to subconscious recollection.^[31]

Umberto Eco

In Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Umberto Eco describes the rediscovery of an antique book among his large collection, which was eerily similar to the pivotal object in his novel The Name of the Rose.

I had bought that book in my youth, skimmed through it, realized that it was exceptionally soiled, and put it somewhere and forgot it. But by a sort of internal camera I had photographed those pages, and for decades the image of those poisonous leaves lay in the most remote part of my soul, as in a grave, until the moment it emerged again (I do not know for what reason) and I believed I had invented it.^[32]

See also

• Anybody Seen My Baby?
• Automatic writing
• Bridey Murphy
• Confabulation
• Déjà vu
• False memory
• Hindsight bias
• Jamais vu
• Joke theft
• Melancholy Elephants
• Minority influence
• Misattribution of memory
• Revelation
• Source amnesia

References

1. Taylor, F..K. (1965).Cryptomnesia and plagiarism. British Journal of Psychiatry, 111, 1111–1118.
2. Brian Righi (2008). "Chapter 4: Talking Boards and Ghostly Goo". Ghosts, Apparitions and Poltergeists. Llewellyn Publications. ISBN 978-0738713632. An early example of this occurred in 1874 with he medium William Stanton Moses, who communicated with the spirits of two brothers who had recently died in India. Upon investigation, it was discovered that one week prior to the séance, their obituary had appeared in the newspaper. This was of some importance because Moses's communications with the two spirits contained nothing that wasn't already printed in the newspaper. When the spirits were pressed for further information, they were unable to provide any. Researchers concluded that Moses had seen the obituary, forgotten it, and then resurfaced the memory during the séance.
3. Robert Todd Carroll (2014). "Cryptomnesia". The Skeptic's Dictionary.
4. Théodore Flournoy (1901). From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages – via answers.com/topic/cryptomnesia-psychoanalysis.
5. Jung, Carl Gustav (1902). "On the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena". Coll. works. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
6. Jung, Carl Gustav (1902). "Cryptomnesia". Coll. works. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul – via United States Bollingen Foundation.
7. Freud, Sigmund (1920). A note on the prehistory of the technique of analysis. Vol. SE 18. pp. 263–265.
8. Freud, Sigmund (1923). Josef Popper-Lynkeus and the theory of dreams. Vol. SE 19. pp. 259–263.
9. Lacan, Jacques (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. p. 7. ISBN 0-393-30709-3.
10. "[Pantaine] remembered with horror the time she had spent in hospital and blamed Lacan for never having done anything to get her out of the asylum, for never having helped her or listened to her properly. In her opinion, he had stolen her life story and turned it into a thesis. When he became famous she resented it, and feelings of persecution again rose up strongly ίη her. She never forgave Lacan for not having given her back her manuscripts. After Lacan's death Ι asked Jacques-Alain Miller [Lacan's protégé and son-in-law] to look for them. Ι knew how much Marguerite's son wanted to have them back, though he didn't want to ask for them himself. But Ι never received any answer." Roudinesco, Elizabeth (1997). Jacques Lacan. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ISBN 0-231-10146-5. (Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original - see "Lamella". No Subject. 26 May 2019.)
11. Brown, A. S., & Murphy, D. R. (1989). Cryptomnesia: Delineating inadvertent plagiarism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 432–442.
12. Marsh, R. L., & Bower, G. H. (1993). Eliciting cryptomnesia: Unconscious plagiarism in a puzzle task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 673–688.
13. Marsh, R. L. & Landau, J. D. (1995). Item availability in cryptomnesia: Assessing its role in two paradigms of unconscious plagiarism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 1568–1582.
14. Marsh, R. L. Landau, J. D. Hicks, J. L. (1997). Contributions of inadequate source monitoring to unconscious plagiarism during idea generation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 886–897.
15. Macrae, C.N., Bodenhasen, G. V. & Calvini, G. (1999). Contexts of cryptomnesia: May the source be with you. Social Cognition, 17, 273–297.
16. "Cryptomnesia and Plagiarism — TAYLOR 111 (480): 1111 – The British Journal of Psychiatry". bjp.rcpsych.org. Retrieved 2008-03-11.
17. "Cryptomnesia". Shell of Man. Archived from the original on 3 December 2013. Retrieved 15 November 2013.
18. Oppel, Frances (2005). Nietzsche On Gender. University of Virginia Press. p. 204. ISBN 0-8139-2320-4. The book of adventure stories as "source" was discovered by Carl Jung, who describes his find, and his subsequent belief that Nietzsche had "crpytomnesia," the concealed recollection of a textual memory, to his seminar of fellow depth psychologists who gathered once a week between 1934 and 1939 to analyze Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The piece of text "secretly crept up and reproduced itself" in "Of Great Events" (Z 2). Jung recognized the story about seamen stopping on an island to hunt rabbits, having read it in his grandfather's library. He wrote Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who confirmed that she and Nietzsche had read the same book in their grandfather's library, when Nietzsche was eleven. This, Jung informed his Zarathustra seminar, "shows how the unconscious layers of the mind work." He added, "the absolute parallel is of course formed by the rabbits" (1218).
19. Reprinted in Lord Byron: The Critical Heritage by Andrew Rutherford
20. Barrie, J. M. (1911). Peter and Wendy. Hodder and Stoughton.
21. Ridley, Rosalind (2016). Peter Pan and the Mind of J. M. Barrie. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4438-9107-3.
22. Jonathan Bailey. "5 Great People Who Plagiarized". Plagiarism Today, February 10, 2015.
23. Foer, Joshua (27 April 2006). "No one has a photographic memory". Slate. Retrieved 11 March 2014.
24. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1919). "My First Book: "Treasure Island"". Essays In The Art Of Writing. London: Chatto & Windus. pp. 120, 121.
25. Paco Ibáñez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttuRcl1dK1M
26. Idit Avrahami; Nurit Wurgaft (6 May 2005). "Naomi Shemer had no reason to feel bad, says Basque singer". Haaretz. Retrieved 11 April 2014.
27. Bienstock, Richard (2011). Aerosmith: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Boston Bad Boys. Voyageur Press. p. 119. ISBN 978-0-7603-4106-3.
28. 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976), available at "Referenced Case". Archived from the original on 2009-03-26. Retrieved 2009-03-22.
29. 722 F.2d 988, 221 U.S.P.Q. 490, available at http://digital-law-online.info/cases/221PQ490.htm
30. "Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton 212 F.3d 477 (9th Cir.2000)". Music Copyright Infringement Source. USC Gould School of Law. Archived from the original on 24 November 2018. Retrieved 17 May 2017.
31. Maunder, Patricia (30 January 2015). "Outspoken writer Colleen McCullough praised by all except literary establishment". Sydney Morning Herald. Archived from the original on 19 August 2016. Retrieved 12 September 2016.
32. Umberto Eco; Stefan Collini; Richard Rorty; Jonathan Culler; Christine Brooke-Rose (1992). Interpretation and overinterpretation. Cambridge University Press. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-521-42554-4. Retrieved 24 August 2011.

External links

• Cryptomnesia - The Skeptic's Dictionary