Cryptomnesia? The accidental plagiarist in you

Cryptomnesia? The accidental plagiarist in you

In a world flooded with information, cryptomnesia is something all of us could be guilty of

Dolly Parton, the famous country musician, has described a creative process that psycholo gists might refer to as cryptomnesia. “You don't set out to try and steal anything, but it can happen,“ Parton said in an interview last week. “Especially in music, because there's so much of it. If you write all the time, you're going to collect those things and not know it.“

Cryptomnesia occurs when someone claims to have had an original thought (or in the case of a song, a melody or beat) but actually encountered the notion or sound earlier and forgot about it. To different degrees, we have all been guilty of cryptomnesia. And in a world flooded with information, we are especially prone to forgetting where ideas originated. Perhaps you tell a friend, “Hey , I have an idea, let's go to this new place for dinner.“ And then your friend says, “Yeah ... I said we should do that a week ago.“ You might be certain the idea was yours, when in reality, you had a lapse in memory, said Amanda Gingerich, associate professor of psychology at Butler University. “It's a common error that we all do, all the time.“

Psychologists think cryptomnesia happens when we fail to register the source of information -what's known as a source-monitoring error.As our brains amass memories, details are ranked. In this filtering process, the origins of facts often fall secondary to the facts themselves.

Cryptomnesia may actually be a byproduct of an otherwise efficient memory system, Dr Gingerich said.“If you think about it, it's not very cognitively efficient to remember every single detail of everything that happens to us.“

Recent studies have confirmed that cryptomnesia is relatively easy to induce. In 2015, Gayle Dow, of the Christopher Newport University, published a study in which she asked participants to draw a picture of an alien creature. If she first showed them an illustration, they were more likely to include features from that drawing than when they had no image that might influence them. In other experiments, Dr Dow found that novices were more likely to commit accidental plagiarism, and that people were more prone to cryptomnesia when multitasking.

As people are bombarded with more and more material, “how we store that information is so much more challenging,“ Dr Gingerich said. “You scroll through a Facebook feed, and there's a huge number of pieces of information coming from so many different sources.“ Joshua D Landau, a psychology professor at York College of Pennsylvania, said there were ways to avoid being accidentally derivative by consciously reviewing materials. That can help to reduce rates of cryptomnesia by two-thirds, he said. 

Source | Times of India | 28 August 2016