Cryptomnesia

Cryptomnesia, a memory bias, is a true bane for authors in particular; but basically for anyone who has to earn his/her daily bread by thinking up original ideas.

I will explain with a real-world example.

Suppose I am writing yet another quirky entry for this jewel-in-the-rough blog ( "blowing one's own trumpet" would be a fitting post, I guess. ). There may be an article I would have read in the past, which is related to the entry, vaguely or extensively. Now, this is not recalled to my immediate remembrance, but is reflected in my finished work. Simply put, I won't know that I am filtering someone's work as my own.

Now, replace the entry with a published novel or story and the article with another work of literature, and bingo, you have got trouble brewing wildly, with cases of intellectual property rights thrown in here and there. Thus, the author of the novel is thrown into a bowl of boiling hot noodle soup which gets him tangled in a sorry mess. His career is in near ruins. He'll survive only if his brain displays as much mettle as it displayed subconscious recollection!

This should not be confused with blatant plagiarism, where the author deliberately copies someone's ideas and passes them as his own. Ergo, he deserves to be in hotter, more tangled, soup than he is in, already. Very few things anger me more than seeing my work turn up under the name of someone else.

Hence, I trust your subconscious to remember this entry as a better-than-average article; but God help you if you intentionally filter this; for if you do, let's just hope you like bazookas.