Cryptomnesia: when your brain plagiarizes itself

A strange psychological effect: our memory betrays us.

It is quite common to believe that the emotional aspects of people are unconscious and that, on the contrary, the world of cognition is of a conscious nature. However, the truth is that cognitive processes such as decision-making and memory retrieval do not escape the logic of the unconscious either.

The cryptomnesia is proof of this.

What is cryptomnesia? Starting with an example

It is possible that in one of those intervals of dead time of which the day to day is plagued you have come to mind, without hardly intending it, a catchy tune that, after the first few seconds, you have been developing until you have composed in your imagination something that looks very much like a complete piece of music, ready to be marketed.

These cases are very frustrating for people who do not know how to translate music onto staves and do not even have the means at hand to record the sound of the new composition. However, these same people have reason for optimism. They are spared having to find out, later, that what sounded like an original melody is in fact an overloaded and unnecessarily long version of the jingle that plays in a shampoo commercial.

Of course, this kind of experience is difficult to explain, experiences of this kind are difficult to explain to someone who believes that our own memory has no secrets for us because, being subjects of our own memory for us because, being subject to the orders of our consciousness, it cannot be governed by rules that are too capricious or beyond our control. If you are one of these people, you may be interested in reading about cryptomnesia, or hidden memory.

Memories falsely anchored in memory

The example of the musical melodies you have just read is intimately connected with the cases of unintentional plagiarism that have come to be captured in all kinds of albums and vinyls and from which even some famous rock bands do not escape. In the same way, certain "evidences" about memories of past lives are not even hoaxes cleverly concocted by a group of people eager for prominence, but situations in which people who theoretically do not know certain past information have previously accessed this information, although they do not remember it and therefore are totally sincere about their beliefs.

In all of these events, one rule holds true: there are memories that have been seemingly forgotten only to reappear confused with the present time..

All these cases and anecdotes are examples of a phenomenon we call cryptomnesia or, in other words, hidden memory. In short, cryptomnesia is a psychological process by which memories are recovered as if they were original experiences lived for the first time and that apparently have been forged directly in the thoughts of the person experiencing it. This recovered information is actually that which corresponds to a memory that had been forgotten, although not entirely.

Cryptomnesia can be understood as the opposite of what is experienced during Déjà vu. If in the latter a new experience is lived as if it were a memory forgotten up to that moment, in cryptomnesia there is a new experience as if it were a memory forgotten up to that moment, in cryptomnesia there is a real memory that passes unnoticed to the conscious mental processes for a time until it manifests itself again as a new experience..

Not everything is just plagiarizing

What has been explained so far may give the false impression that cryptomnesia occurs in cases in which other people are plagiarized unintentionally, as if the memories that pass through this false forgetfulness had to refer to the ideas of others or to experiences linked to the outside world.

The truth is that among the forms in which the hidden memory expresses itself, there can also be the self-plagiarism. One's own idea or thought is perfectly susceptible to pass under the cloak of cryptomnesia, although surely these cases will not be as frowned upon as the previous ones.

Cryptomnesia as seen from the laboratory

Although hidden memory has its raw material in the great variety of experiences to which we are subjected in our daily lives, it is also possible to study cryptomnesia in a much simpler and aseptic environment: the experimental laboratory. These investigations usually involve groups of volunteers who give possible answers to a question posed to them.

In a second phase, the volunteers have to recall whether or not certain contributions are of their authorship. In this context, cryptomnesia has been found to be relatively frequent, and it is not uncommon for many individuals to become convinced that the ideas that others have expressed a few minutes earlier are theirs. It has even been shown that people's emotional state can influence the frequency with which such unconscious plagiarism occurs..

So, the next time you think you have power over the processes that govern your memory, remember that both memory and the illusion of consciously controlling it are run by the unknown: your hidden psychological processes.

Bibliographical references:

• Brédart, S., Lampinen, J. M. and Defeldre, A. C. (2003). Phenomenal characteristics of cryptomnesia. Memory, 11(1), pp. 1 - 11.

• Gingerich, A. C. y Dodson, C. S. (2012). Sad mood reduces inadvertent plagiarism: Effects of affective state on source monitoring in cryptomnesia. Motivation and Emotion, 37(2), pp. 355 - 371.