Cryptomnesia is a phenomenon that concerns the creation of ideas. Specifically, when someone accidentally presents another’s ideas as their own. It happens when the memory of an idea from an outside source gets forgotten and lost in long-term memory. The idea is then stimulated and resurfaces, recognized as a new, original idea. I know this phenomenon almost sounds like something a plagiarism lawyer made up to win a case, but it is a studied psychological occurence. To varying degrees, we have all been guilty of cryptomnesia. And as we navigate the era of excess information, we are more at risk of forgetting where ideas came from than ever before. Psychologists believe that cryptomnesia occurs when someone obtains an idea without noting the source. As we accumulate memories, the various details of the memories are sorted by importance and the source is often not high on the list. This issue is a flaw in the brain’s “source-monitoring”: the process of determining the origin of a memory.
Research into Cryptomnesia was first published by Dr. Alan S. Brown and Dr. Dana Murphy, who performed a series of experiments where subjects were brought together initially to come up with solutions to a problem. The subjects were asked to individually bring forward solutions that were unique, not repeating ones from other participants. Months after the intial solutions and sources were noted, the participants were brough in and asked to repeat the solutions that they contributed. Researchers found that subjects would regularly attribute others’ ideas as their own. What’s more, they found that subjects would rarely attribute their ideas to other participants. Becuase this experiment has been repeated several times with similar results, we can understand that cryptomnesia is real. Unfortunately, the limitations of research on cryptomnesia means that it cannot be proven in legal cases involving plagiarism.