Cryptomnesia

Cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, is a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else. In these cases, the person is not deliberately engaging in plagiarism, but is rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.

Research has distinguished between two kinds of cryptomnesia, though they are often studied together. The distinction between these two types of plagiarism is in the underlying memory bias responsible — specifically, is it the thought that is forgotten, or the thinker? The first type of bias is one of familiarity. The plagiarizer regenerates an idea that was presented earlier, but believes the idea to be an original creation. The idea that is reproduced could be another’s idea, or one’s own from a previous time. B. F. Skinner describes his own experience of self-plagiarism;

“One of the most disheartening experiences of old age is discovering that a point you just made — so significant, so beautifully expressed — was made by you in something you published long ago.”

Self-plagiarism is not as costly as plagiarizing the work of others. In a famous case, George Harrison was sued over royalties for his first solo song My Sweet Lord, a song that sounded just a little too much like the Chiffons’ He’s so Fine. Harrison lost the case when a judge said he “subconsciously plagiarized,” and was ordered to pay $587,000 to Bright Tunes Music, who owned the copyright. Plagiarism of this sort is a kind of sleeper effect whereby old ideas come to feel new.

The second type of cryptamnesia results from an error of authorship whereby the ideas of others are remembered as one’s own. In this case, the plagiarizer correctly recognizes that the idea is from an earlier time, but falsely remembers having been the origin for the idea. Various terms have been coined to distinguish these two forms of plagiarism — occurrence forgetting vs. source forgetting and generation errors vs. recognition errors. The two types of cryptamnesia appear to be independent: no relationship has been found between error rates and the two types are precipitated by different causes .