The unavoidable consequence is that all individuals gain the impression that cryptomnesia is mainly something their colleagues suffer from. Sincerity is not the same as impartiality. Even when test participants have the chance to win considerable sums of money by attributing ideas correctly (and know this in advance), they still claim now and then to be the source of other people’s ideas. The cause is not simply confusion about ownership, since occasionally participants attribute their own ideas to others, although the number of times that happens is negligible compared to the times when ideas generated by other people are claimed by participants as their own. In the third session they often come up with ideas that they think are new but in reality have been proposed before, usually by one of the other participants. Several dozen experiments along these lines have been carried out over the past 20 years and every time it turns out that in the second session participants tend to present other people’s ideas as their own. In a third and final session they are challenged to come up with ideas that have not been proposed before. During the second session, several weeks or months later, they are required to indicate what their contribution was on the previous occasion. Typically they have to brainstorm about solutions to complex problems, such as a medical diagnosis. In the first session, test participants are asked to come up with ideas. They developed an approach that set the pattern for later researchers.

In 1989, two American psychologists, Alan Brown and Dana Murphy, attempted to gain an experimental grip on cryptomnesia. To be done with the whole business he later bought the rights to “He’s So Fine.” Anyone clicking on that song on YouTube can indeed sing along to it with the lyrics of “My Sweet Lord.” Harrison was ordered to pay more than half a million dollars in royalties. It must, he said, be a case of “inadvertent copying of what was in Mr Harrison’s subconscious memory.”5 But unintentional or not, it was still copying. The judge – perhaps he had dabbled in psychoanalysis – issued a verdict that was worded in such a way as to spare Harrison’s feelings. Harrison admitted that he knew the number by the Chiffons but denied having copied it. Bright Tunes accused Harrison of plagiarism, saying the melodies of the two songs were virtually identical. A writ was issued against him by the production company Bright Tunes, pointing out the song’s resemblance to “He’s So Fine,” a major number one hit for the Chiffons in 1963. In 1969 he wrote “My Sweet Lord,” which topped the charts worldwide. The most famous example of cryptomnesia concerns George Harrison. Bitter conflicts can arise in the workplace as a result of our tendency to come up with other people’s ideas from time to time. Rather more everyday examples might include thinking you had invented a new cocktail, an original pun or an exercise for basketball training. Cryptomnesia has been suggested as an explanation for the publication in a plastic surgery journal of a “new” surgical technique that in reality had been part of the training given to surgeons over many years. A person may be firmly convinced he or she has thought of a solution that was in fact proposed by a colleague at an earlier meeting. The trick is to mix just enough forgetting with remembering at just the right moment, such that the memory concerned does not disappear but is no longer recognized as memory.Ĭryptomnesia, which means “hidden memory,” is fairly common. It can occasionally be the cause of what has perhaps rather generously been called “unconscious plagiarism.” In the laboratory, cryptomnesia can be replicated through subtle manipulation of the processes of forgetting.

Over the past 20 years, attempts have been made to understand through experimentation a phenomenon known as “cryptomnesia,” whereby you arrive at an apparently original idea that you later turn out to have heard from someone else or to have read somewhere.

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