How many of us rely on “forgotten memories”?
My question was prompted by Oliver Sacks’s article entitled
“Speak, Memory” in the New York Review of Books. In it he recounts
his discovery, some years after publishing his memoir, that one of his most
vivid childhood memories was false. Not false, as in he made it up, but
false as in it happened to someone else. His memory was based an
extensive and moving description of the event in a letter from his brother. He
“remembered” the details of the event, but he “forgot” the source of the
information.
His article went on to explore the difference between plagiarism
and cryptomnesia. Plagiarism implies intentionality, a conscious and
willing misappropriation of someone else’s ideas or images. By contrast,
cryptomnesia (“hidden memory”) describes ideas and images that emerge in
consciousness without memory of their source.
Cryptomnesia, according to Sacks, can be a vital factor in
creativity, insofar as it allows ideas and thoughts to be “reassembled,
retranscribed, recategorized, given new and fresh implications.” But how
often is that “new idea” simply a remembering of an idea whose context or
source you no longer remember?
Sacks has put a name to a phenomenon that has bothered me in
recent months. As I do my own blog and write guest posts on other blogs,
I am constantly on the lookout for inspiration and use Google Alerts to find
new sources on topics (memoir vs. fiction, letting go, mindfulness,
risk-taking) that are of particular interest to me.
Often, my new blog builds on an idea I’ve used before. But
often, it builds on someone else’s idea, much as today’s blog does. I
make a concerted effort to give credit to the author of the idea, but I do
wonder how often I use an “idea” without realizing that it really isn’t mine,
that I have “forgotten” where the idea came from.
This is, I think, a distinction that
writers of all stripes (not just memoirists) should be sensitive to.
Aren’t we all “cryptomnesiacs”?!
Mary Gottschalk
http://twitter.com/marycgottschalk
http://amzn.to/J7iiI4 [Kindle URL]
Loved the article.Posted on your blog as well: Are my childhood"memories" that I only know through the retelling of my mother because I was too young really also a case of “cryptomnesia"?
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