A few months ago, my sis Annette & and her friend Jennifer, were working on a pop-up greeting card. Both of them were doing a course in Early Childhood care (& now are Kindergarten {sounds better than K.G. ;) } teachers at schools), and this card was part of their assignment. Ann & Jen showed me the semi-complete card, and asked me how it was. The card had a drawing of a small chick hatching out of an egg, with pieces of eggshell flying all over. Something like the hatching of a superchick shot using a split-second-camera. I liked the idea, but technically, the drawing was wrong. The chick was standing in the shards of the hatched egg, one leg in one half and the other one in the other half. And above the chick were some more fragments of the cracked egg. If one tried a logical reconstruction, one would come up with an egg and a half. I pointed this out to them, to which they said, the drawing was copied from a book. I criticized the quality of the books they were referring. But this wasn't enough, I had to give them some advise on how they could improve the drawing. I personally love cartooning, and by habit pay attention to the little nuances of cartooning. I would let myself down, if I wouldn't be able to come up with some original ideas to better the drawing.
After a minute of thought, I was lecturing both of them about how the drawing would look much better, if a piece of the eggshell would rest on the head of the chick, like a cap. It would give it the appearance of an Anne Geddes baby. I knew it was a small suggestion, nonetheless I was proud of it. My sis smiled at me, and then said, "Well I know where you got this from". I was surprised. I told her it was a completely original idea. She insisted that she knew where I got this from. I told her that I probably would have come across something of this sort in a cartoon show or something along the way. She still said, she knew exactly where I had got this idea from. Then she pulled out one of her journals (the kind she shows all of her family after completion). She flipped the pages, and turned the journal to show me one page. It was exactly the image I suggested a few minutes ago. I was shocked. It was the exact image I had picturised in mind a few minutes ago.
I could bet my life on the fact that I thought my idea was kinda original. Atleast not the carbon copy of something that I had seen a few months ago. But the evidence was against me here. This was the first time I realized how powerful the subconscious is.
My point is that this happens, and it doesnt take an expert to know that it does. Along the way, as we keep picking up ideas and concepts developed by other, snowballing down the hill of information, we lose quite a bit of what comes at us, but a lot of it gets tightly packed into that huge snowball of data. Somewhere deep inside in that vast sea of experiences, it gets hidden under some more important concepts/ideas/skills that the brain has to remember. But it still is there waiting for its time. When a trigger of some sort goes off, this thought is pulled out by the subconscious, now hazier than before, it easily gets thrown out by the brain, which deceives itself into making the person believe that the idea is original.
As I was googling for "Subconcious Plagarism", I came across the following-
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Friedrich had been accused of plagiarism, when the book that he wrote,
I couldn't agree less that this is obviously more than true. But the above statement in isolation may not be complete, especially when discussing SP. If your memory is too good, it would be conscious plagiarism. For it to be subconscious, the memory needs to pass out from the conscious zone into the subconscious zone.
The first time the term "Subconscious Plagiarism" came to me, It came to me in thought, as an original idea. I had never ever before read the word anywhere, anytime. But I know that to have an original Idea today is extremely difficult. Somewhere, somebody has already thought about it. And something as obvious as Subconscious plagiarism could never go unnoticed. So I decided to find out using Google. When I Googled it, there were some vague mentions of Subconscious Plagiarism, but no concrete definition of the same was found. In highest probability, In fact I was almost sure that this phenomenon/habbit/behaviour/whatever it is, must be documented somewhere in some Psychology book of some kind. Then I came across Cryptomnesia.
Cryptomnesia is the actual scientific word for Subconcious Plagarism. Following is the Wiki definition of Cryptomnesia:
Cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, is a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else. In these cases, the person is not deliberately engaging in plagiarism, but is rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.Read the whole article on wiki. Worth reading!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia
To sum it up, everybody sometime, somewhere may experience bouts of Cryptiomnesia. Human beings are wired up that way, to use past experience to better future experience. But if we are aware of this behavior that the Human brain exhibits, we will be more cautious the next time that "Original" idea pops up in our mind.
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