“Has it ever occurred to you,” the old lady went on, “how much we go by what is called, I believe, the context? There is a place on Dartmoor called Grey Wethers. If you were talking to a farmer there and mentioned Grey Wethers, he would probably conclude that you were speaking of these stone circles, yet it is possible that you might be speaking of the atmosphere; and in the same way, if
you were meaning the stone circles, an outsider, hearing a fragment of the conversation, might think you meant the weather. So when we repeat a conversation, we don’t, as a rule, repeat the actual words; we put in some other words that seem to us to mean exactly the same thing.Agatha Christie – Miss Marple, The Thumb Mark of St Peter
How reliable is memory? We like to think we can recall the gist of what was said. Still, as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple observed, the mind naturally falls into retelling: we blend words, and thoughts, and intentions until, over time, the original phrases are replaced by something almost, but not entirely the same. All recall is partial translation, colored by our own background and the context signals we pick up.
Cryptomnesia is a psychological phenomenon in which a person believes they have created a new idea, thought, or work. Still, in reality, they are recalling something they previously encountered, often without realising it. The term comes from Greek roots, specifically crypto (hidden) and mnesia (memory), meaning “hidden memory.”
What sets cryptomnesia apart from plagiarism is intention. Plagiarism is the deliberate act of passing off someone else’s work as our own, fully aware of its origin. Cryptomnesia, by contrast, is an unintentional, unsconscious memory error: the creator genuinely believes the idea is new and original, because their memory has lost all trace of the source. Instead of consciously copying, the mind mistakes a memory for an inspiration. This can happen to anyone, even the most careful scholars, artists, and writers, because our ability to monitor the source of our thoughts and ideas is fallible, especially when mentally busy or distracted.
Helen Keller (1880–1968) was a pioneering American author and a disability rights advocate who lost her sight and hearing in early childhood. At age 12, she wrote a story called “The Frost King,” only to be accused of plagiarism when it was discovered to closely resemble Margaret Canby’s “The Frost Fairies”, a story read to Keller years earlier but forgotten. Keller was devastated by the accusation and doubted her ability to generate original thought for years after.
In Keller’s agonising words:
I wrote the story when I was at home, the autumn after I had learned to speak. […] My thoughts flowed easily; I felt a sense of joy in the composition. Words and images came tripping to my finger ends, and as I thought out sentence after sentence, I wrote them on my braille slate. Now, if words and images came to me without effort, it is a pretty sure sign that they are not the offspring of my own mind, but stray waifs that I regretfully dismiss. At that time I eagerly absorbed everything I read without a thought of authorship, and even now I cannot be quite sure of the boundary line between my ideas and those I find in books. I suppose that is because so many of my impressions come to me through the medium of others’ eyes and ears.
No child ever drank deeper of the cup of bitterness than I did. I had disgraced myself; I had brought suspicion upon those I loved best.
The Story of My Life. Parts I & II by Helen Keller, 1880-1968
Another case of creative anxiety about cryptomnesia comes from the creation of the Beatles’ song “Yesterday.” Paul McCartney awoke with the melody fully formed in his mind, so complete that he was convinced he must have heard it before. McCartney spent weeks playing the tune for friends and industry colleagues, repeatedly asking if it came from another song, fearing he might be unconsciously recalling someone else’s work. Only after no one recognised the melody did he feel confident declaring it his own and began writing lyrics to accompany the melody.
For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.
From the Wikipedia entry of Yesterday
Sometimes, what we remember as inspiration is more mysterious than direct borrowing or invention.
Umberto Eco, the renowned Italian scholar and novelist, recounted how, when he was a graduate student, he stumbled upon a forgotten volume by a little-known Abbot Vallet, and there, amid “preconceived ideas and nothing new,” Eco believed he had found a key that would solve a thorny problem in his thesis. He remembered the page vividly, even the exclamation point he had marked in the margin. For decades, Eco expressed gratitude to Vallet for the “magic key” that unlocked his thinking. But years later, returning to the book with a friend, he was astonished to discover that the idea he’d so valued was nowhere to be found. In Eco’s words:
Vallet wrote of something else. Stimulated in some mysterious way by what he was saying, I made that connection myself… I attributed it to Vallet. And for more than twenty years I had been grateful to the old abbot for something he had never given me. I had produced the magic key on my own.
Umberto Eco – How to Write a Thesis
From this, Eco derived a pragmatic philosophy:
This is academic humility: the knowledge that anyone can teach us something… The point is that we must listen with respect to anyone, without this exempting us from pronouncing our value judgements.
Umberto Eco – How to Write a Thesis
Eco’s story, in its way, is the opposite of cryptomnesia. Rather than unconsciously claiming someone else’s idea as his own, he credited an original breakthrough to a source who primed his mind for connection. Yet both forms, the forgetting of origins and the invention of new associations, prove one thing: our sense of authorship, memory, and intellectual credit is fragile and often inaccurate.
As I recalled this episode, I became aware that many times over the course of my readings, I had attributed to others ideas that they had simply inspired me to look for; and many other times I remained convinced that an idea was mine until, after revisiting some books read many years before, I discovered that the idea, or its core, had come to me from a certain author [note: cryptomnesia; Eco reminescenced about a particularly soiled book as being pivotal for his The Name of the Rose plot]. One (unnecessary) credit I had given to Vallet made me realise how many debts I had forgotten to pay. I believe the meaning of this story, not dissonant with the other ideas in this book, is that research is a mysterious adventure that inspires passion and holds many surprises. Not just an individual but also an entire culture participates, as ideas sometimes travel freely, migrate, disappear, and reappear. In this sense, ideas are similar to jokes that become better as each person tells them.
Umberto Eco – How to Write a Thesis
And perhaps no other idea becomes better as each new voice reshapes it than
“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
attributed to Picasso
This famous phrase is itself a brilliant example of the process it describes. Its origins, as tracked by Quote Investigator (a great resource for cryptomnesia), seem to be mirrors upon mirrors: T. S. Eliot observed, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Faulkner said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal outright.” Earlier still, W. H. Davenport Adams and C. E. M. Joad offered similar views, suggesting that true originality is “skill in concealing origins.” Picasso may have popularised the phrase, but he almost certainly did not invent it. Oh, the irony that even one of our best-known witticisms about creativity and originality turns out to be appropriated and repackaged.
After all these stories of accidental plagiarism and forgotten debts, what ideas can we truly call our own? Are we trapped in a hall of mirrors and echoes, where every seemingly new thought is potentially a variation on someone else’s wisdom? Or, counterintuitively, perhaps our capacity for invention depends on our imperfect, leaky memory?
Because the solution is not perfect memory. In Jorge Luis Borges’s haunting story “Funes the Memorious,” the protagonist, after a crippling accident, is gifted, or cursed, with total recall of every visual detail, every moment, every sensation he has ever experienced. The present itself becomes “almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness.” And yet, despite this miracle of memory, Funes “was not very capable of thought,” because, as Borges explains, “to think is to forget a difference, to generalise, to abstract.”
“My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap,” Funes confesses.
It is the unreliability and mortality of memory, the forgetting, the blending, the gaps and guesses, that enable us to discriminate, to abstract, and, in the end, to create meaning. Intellectual humility becomes necessary not just as a moral posture, but as a simple recognition of fact: we literally cannot distinguish with certainty between invention and recollection.
Laszlo Bock, Google’s former Senior Vice President of People Operations, distilled this paradox in:
You need a big ego and a small ego in the same person at the same time.
He explains, in conversation with Thomas L. Friedman for The New York Times (February 22, 2014), what Google looks for in their most innovative people:
The people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.
This is intellectual humility in practice: the confidence to create boldly, and the humility to listen and self-correct when necessary. It is not perfect memory or perfect isolation that safeguards originality, but the willingness, when evidence arrives, to accept we were wrong and incomplete.
Great thinkers don’t run from uncertainty or influence; they live in that fertile ambiguity.
Determined to improve his writing, Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, reverse-engineered writing excellence by using memory recombination and cryptomnesia to his advantage. He read selected essays from The Spectator, the pinnacle of English prose in his day. Then he set aside each essay for days, letting the specifics fade. From memory, he reconstructed the argument or story in his own words. Finally, he compared his version to the original: examining where his phrasing, structure, or ideas improved, fell short, or drifted in new directions.
With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.
Benjamin Franklin (1868) – Autobiography, accessed from Project Gutenberg
Each round of practice allowed Franklin to internalise the rhythm and logic of great writing while forcing new connections to surface organically from his own mind. He adapted deliberate forgetting into one of his greatest tools.
I wish my readers to find many abbots Vallet over the course of their lives, and I aspire to become someone else’s abbot Vallet.
Umberto Eco – How to Write a Thesis
In this way, Eco pays homage not just to a forgotten scholar, but to the process of intellectual inheritance. And indeed, Eco is one of my personal abbot Vallet, as I incorporate his thoughts throughout my articles.
And perhaps an article that discusses cryptomnesia and intellectual humility needs to leap like a frog from thought to thought to thought, as ideas are never truly ours but are also never purely derived. Perhaps it is our willingness to reshape, credit, and add our own imperfect voice that makes the chorus richer.
Further reading:
Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes the Memorious” can be read in full here.
Related articles:
Shoshin, the Zen Concept that Applies to Companies, Science, and Personal Development – In Zen Buddhism, academic humility is referred to as shoshin, the beginner’s mind, where even the expert greets each problem with humility, curiosity, and a willingness to be surprised.