kleptomnesia
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Coined by Dan Gilbert in or before 1999.[1]
Noun[edit]
kleptomnesia (uncountable)
- (neologism) The situation where a person comes up with an idea that they believe to be original, but which was in fact created by someone else and previously encountered by the person.
- 2015 January 2, Adam Grant, “The Biggest Reason We Steal Other People’s Ideas”, in Time[2], archived from the original on 20 March 2016:
- Kleptomnesia happens due to a pragmatic, but peculiar, feature of how human memory is wired. When we encode information, we tend to pay more attention to the content than the source. Once we accept a piece of information as true, we no longer need to worry about where we acquired it.
- 2016 January 5, CM Bauman, BAR Hege, R Kleckley…, “The “make your own religion” project”, in Teaching Theology & Religion, volume 19, number 1, pages 99–110:
- Chad Bauman has offered a great model for the “make your own religion” exercise, and I will engage in repeated acts of “kleptomnesia” in appropriating his ideas.
- 2016 July 19, Tanya Basu, “Melania Trump's Speechwriters Apparently Suffer From Kleptomnesia”, in Inverse[3], archived from the original on 1 October 2021:
- It’s fair to say that psychologists haven’t exactly figured out a way around kleptomnesia, and maybe Melania Trump’s speech might instigate research into this fuzzy area.
- 2017, Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, New York: Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 3:
- We're all vulnerable to “kleptomnesia”—accidentally remembering the ideas of others as our own.
- 2019, Andy Cope, The Little Book of Being Brilliant, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 169:
- Like every other author, I'm vulnerable to 'kleptomnesia' – accidentally remembering the ideas of others as your own.
- 2021, Lisa Grossman Liu, The Transparent, Concurrent, and Collaborative Health Record (thesis), New York: Columbia University, , page xviii:
- I worry that I will wake up tomorrow in a cold sweat, having forgotten to thank someone who assuredly deserved it. Everyone is vulnerable to "kleptomnesia," or accidentally remembering the ideas of others as our own.