Word of the Day: Cryptomnesia

This a followup to my earlier post about plagiarism vs. inspiration.

Fellow blogger Richard Lawrence Cohen said in a comment under that thread, PK, your point that "it's essentially statistically impossible that those similarities will be extensive in any truly original piece" is one that Jorge Luis Borges might disagree with. In his short story "Pierre Menard, Auithor of the Quixote," a modern man becomes so obsessed with DON QUIXOTE that he is ultimately able to sit down and "write" two chapters of it, not by copying or memorizing but by reproducing it from his innermost depths. The two versions of the great novel -- Cervantes' and his -- are seen to be different works with different meanings, because of their different contexts, even though they are word-for-word identical. Was Borges right? I think that he invented a brilliant illustration of the importance of context. But his fictional character could only reproduce two chapters of Quixote, not the whole thing. And after all, it's only a story. In real life it would be plagiarism.

I hadn't heard of that story, Richard--thanks for mentioning it. It is very interesting.

However, we need not turn to fiction for examples of accidental plagiarism. There are a number of historical examples of someone unintentionally plagiarizing someone else's work simply because it had become such a part of their consciousness that they didn't even realize they were copying it.

There's actually a word for this phenomenon: cryptomnesia. That was my new word for today. :)

Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary defines cryptomnesia as "the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognized as such but which appear as original creations." In other words, it's something you remember without remembering, thinking it's your own creation when really it is from some other source.

Historical examples of cryptomnesia include Mark Twain, Hellen Keller, and possibly George Harrison and even Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung.

The most famous (and most extensive) example of cryptomnesia is the famous blind and deaf woman Helen Keller. She is the only person we know of who was able to unconsciously reproduce extensive selections from others' writing that were very close to the original. Other authors have reproduced only small sections, and a person would have to have a truly amazing memory to be able to do what Hellen Keller did.

Helen was able to reproduce entire stories, poems and large excerpts from other literature with only minor changes, sometimes years after hearing them only once.

At the age of 11 or 12, she wrote a story called "The Frost King" which was later discovered to be a very close reproduction of Dorothy Canby's story "The Frost Faeries", which had been read to her by a family friend two or three years earlier and not repeated since. Helen had no memory of having had this story read to her and was devastated to realize that she had accidentally copied someone else's work as her own.

Dorothy Canby wrote in a letter to Helen's teacher Anne Sullivan, "What a wonderfully active and retentive mind that gifted child must have! If she had remembered and written down accurately, a short story, and that soon after hearing it, it would have been a marvel; but to have heard the story once, three years ago, and in such a way that neither her parents nor teacher could ever allude to it or refresh her memory about it, and then to have been able to reproduce it so vividly, even adding some touches of her own in perfect keeping with the rest, which really improve the original, is something that very few girls of riper age, and with every advantage of sight, hearing, and even great talents for composition, could have done as well, if at all. Under the circumstances, I do not see how any one can be so unkind as to call it a plagiarism; it is a wonderful feat of memory, and stands ALONE, as doubtless much of her work will in future, if her mental powers grow and develop with her years as greatly as in the few years past. I have known many children well, have been surrounded by them all my life, and love nothing better than to talk with them, amuse them, and quietly notice their traits of mind and character; but I do not recollect more than one girl of Helen's age who had the love and thirst for knowledge, and the store of literary and general information, and the skill in composition, which Helen possesses. She is indeed a 'Wonder-Child.'"

I think part of the reason Helen was able to do this is that she was not, like most of us, exposed to a constant stream of variations in language and expression. Most of us hear words and phrases from so many different sources and contexts at once that we assimilate all of it and mix it up so well that it's nearly impossible to unknowingly reproduce an extensive portion of any one source. But Helen was not even exposed to language at all until much later in life than most of us, and almost all of her exposure to it was in large, cohesive chunks of literature. She never experienced, for example, sitting in a room and hearing or seeing mixed conversations taking place all around her. Her only exposure to language and even most sensory experience was through the words of others, one source at a time.

Mark Twain said, in a letter to Helen Keller, "Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul--let us go farther and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances in plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them any where except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. . . .

Then why don't we unwittingly reproduce the phrasing of a story, as well as the story itself? It can hardly happen--to the extent of fifty words--except in the case of a child; its memory tablet is not lumbered with impressions, and the natural language can have graving room there and preserve the language a year or two, but a grown person's memory tablet is a palimpsest, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase. It must be a very rare thing that a whole page gets so sharply printed on a man's mind, by a single reading, that it will stay long enough to turn up some time or other to be mistaken by him for his own. No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and how imagined to be our own, but that is about the most we can do. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes's poems, in the Sandwich Islands. A year and a half later I stole his dedication, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my "Innocents Abroad" with. Ten years afterward I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass--no, not he; he was not a collection of decayed human turnips, like your "Plagiarism Court," and so when I said, "I know now where I stole it, but who did you steal it from,"he said, "I don't remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anyone who had!"

I think Mark Twain said it well. For most of us, it is not even possible that we would be able to reproduce more than bits and pieces of someone else's work without intentionally copying it. If we know it well enough to extensively reproduce someone else's unique phrasing, we will almost certainly know that we are copying it.

It is only bits and pieces, an idea here and a turn of the phrase there, from a million different sources, that become a part of our consciousness in such a way that we can use them with originality.

For example, in college I wrote a poem which contained these lines:

Here is a fragment of robin's-egg shell--
A tiny blue dome like a piece of the sky
Where, feathered, its long-ago occupant flies.

I was certainly aware when I wrote it that the stanza was inspired by these lines from one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his poem Spring:

Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing ;

I'm confident that Hopkins was not the first or only writer by far to compare a blue egg to the blue sky. He did it in a unique way, though, and my variation on it was completely different even though inspired in some way by the image he created. That's an example of inspiration without plagiarism.

However, I did a Google search for pages that included the phrase "little low heavens" but not the word Hopkins, and found a music piece with the title Look Little Low Heavens. If the author of this music piece does not give credit to Hopkins, this would be unmistakable plagiarism. Even though it's only 4 words, the phrase "look little low heavens" is so unusual and unique (especially leaving out the word "like" as it would normally be phrased) that we can be certain it was copied directly from Hopkins.

A series of studies by cognitive psychologists Marsh, Landau and Hicks "showed that the rate of cryptomnesia was greater under specific conditions. It increased, for example, when there were fewer perceptual and contextual cues--such as the distinctiveness of the voice associated with other-generated information--that participants could use to perform source monitoring during the task, when less time was provided during which participants could monitor the source of incoming information, and when sources of incoming information were more credible. In contrast, plagiarism rates dropped when participants were asked to focus on the origins of their ideas, heightening their awareness of the source of ideas."

These studies suggest that we will normally use bits and pieces of things we take in during our own communication, but that if we pay attention to where ideas come from while composing we'll greatly reduce the likelihood of accidental plagiarism. When we come up with a phrase or paragraph that seems unusually wonderful or seems to write itself, we would do well to stop and think about where we might have heard it before. If we develop the habit of noticing and giving credit when we use an idea or phrase we've heard elsewhere, we'll be much less likely to engage in cryptomnesia.

In other words, most cryptomnesia (at least if extensive) is the result of not caring enough to pay attention to the fact that we're plagiarizing. Cryptomnesia is no excuse for real plagiarism.