Everyday Canvas

Is Cryptomnesia a Possibility?

Prompt: Cryptomnesia is a certain type of a memory bias where a memory is mistaken for imagination. It is said that this happens to writers quite often. What do you think about this memory quirk? Have you ever written something that you didn’t know at first if it was a memory or a derivative of it or totally your imagination?

===================

According to neuroscientists, the brain stores memory and imagination in its different sections, but then, no scientific finding is clear cut and newer findings do away with the older ones. This finding, therefore, must be taken with a grain of salt.

Now that I've sent the neuroscientists away on their merry way, I have to take on wishful thinking. I think sometimes our wishes for something is so strong that we think we did have that something in our hands or around our proximity. Still, because we are mostly realistic beings, we sooner or later realize what that wishful thinking created is imagination.

So good-bye to wishful thinking as well. Now, I have to take on cryptomnesia itself. Let’s start with reality. We writers frequently draw upon existing sources in a conscious way, from quotations, other people’s writings, experiences, and ideas, and our own experiences. Talking about our own experiences, what if an experience is a forgotten one? I have found myself, for example, writing similar pieces without recalling I have written the first one or using phrases I deemed original and then found the same phrase in an earlier story or poem. Can this practice be called unintentional auto-plagiarism? If so, why can’t I do the same thing with the memories stored in my brain?

I think this is possible. Anyhow, there are some events in my life that I remember differently from my husband or other people or I don't remember them at all, but if I were to write about those events, thinking I am imagining them, wouldn’t the storage part of my brain come to my rescue? I think this, too, is highly possible.

I don’t exactly remember imagining something and then somehow knowing it that it was a memory, but as in any other writer’s work, I have recurring themes, feelings, settings, and scenes inside my stories and poems. Are my feelings taking a long-ago experience and presenting it to me in its different forms? This idea somehow feels uncomfortable, but is this feeling of discomfort, also, a result of cryptomnesia? If so, cryptomnesia seems to be a pathological condition, and I know, in my chewing the fat over this memory bias, I asked more questions than I came up with answers. As Andre Dubus III said, “I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”

Maybe, some things are better left unsaid or unsolved and kept as questions because, if cryptomnesia really exists, it seems to help us, writers.