Why You've Never Had an Original Thought

Picture this: you're in a work meeting attempting to troubleshoot a problem that your team has been struggling to figure out. You suggest something—a solution equal parts ingenious and elegant. Your co-workers are impressed and shower you with praise, all except for one person who, for some reason, looks upset.

Afterwards, this person confronts you, claiming that they had mentioned the same solution to you during a private call last week, accusing you of intellectual theft. "It was my idea!" you shout back. What if I told you that both of you are technically correct? That your brain stole your co-worker's idea and convinced you that it was yours? Scary, right?

This is kryptamnesia, the reality that most of our thoughts aren't really ours, also known as inadvertent or unconscious plagiarism. Kryptamnesia is a memory error in which people mistakenly believe that a current thought or idea is a product of their own creation when, in reality, they have encountered it previously and then forgotten. It's a form of cognitive bias that uses the brain's own tendency to inaccurately recall information in such a way that it benefits us.

It can be something as simple as unintentionally stealing a co-worker's idea or as complex as accidentally recreating someone else's art. In the fall of 1970, George Harrison, formerly of The Beatles, released his first single as a solo artist. "My Sweet Lord" was an instant hit, soaring to the top of the charts around the world and becoming the number one single in the UK for 1971.

But what Harrison didn't realize was that he had unwittingly plagiarized the song's central melody. Soon after its release, a suit was filed against Harrison, accusing him of copyright infringement. "My Sweet Lord" bore a striking resemblance to the late Ronnie Mack song "He's So Fine," and Mack's former production company wanted a cut of the royalties.

What followed was one of the most notorious legal episodes in music history. Harrison found himself caught up in court battles for the next five years, and litigation related to the case would plague him until the late '90s. During the court proceedings, Harrison admitted to being familiar with the Ronnie Mack track but said that he hadn't deliberately stolen it.

Though the judge overseeing the case affirmed Harrison's claim, he still found the former beetle guilty of inadvertently copying from what was in his subconscious memory, ruling in favor of Mack's production company. The case set new legal precedence for future copyright suits and proved an enormous blow to Harrison personally, who struggled to write new music for some time after the debacle.

In his autobiography, he later confessed to having thought, "Why didn't I realize?" when he heard the two songs compared side by side. Harrison isn't the only artist to do this either. Other examples include author Robert Louis Stevenson reusing material he'd read, comedian Dane Cook retelling jokes, and singer Demi Lovato lifting samples from a small indie band.

Surgeons have even published entire papers on supposedly new techniques that, in actuality, they learned during training. But how does this happen? How is it possible that we can recall information that we have somehow simultaneously also forgotten?

This was the question posed by American psychologists Alan Brown and Dana Murphy in 1989 when they conducted what’s become known as the seminal scientific study into kryptamnesia. In a series of deceptively simple experiments, groups of students took turns coming up with examples for different categories of things, such as sports, musical instruments, and four-legged animals.

Months later, participants gathered again and were instructed to recall what items they themselves had mentioned previously. Then, a few months after that, they met for a final time and were asked to come up with new examples. During each of the later tasks, nearly 75 percent of participants listed at least one item that was mentioned by someone else in the group.

These weren't cases of simple confusion either; people also occasionally misattributed their own ideas as well, though instances of this were comparably rare. Interestingly, the pat...