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
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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