to misidentify non-famous names as 'famous,' likely as a result of misbelieving the name refers to a famous person from their past life. Cryptomnesia Cryptomnesia is unintentional plagiarism occurring when a person produces something believing that it was self-generated, when it was actually generated earlier, either internally or by an external source. This may occur because of distractions during initial exposure to information. Even if the information is acquired unconsciously, the area of the brain related to that information will be highly activated for a short amount of time. This may lead a person to generate ideas that were actually acquired from an outside source or personally generated earlier. Heuristic judgement processes are typically used for source judgements; since there was interference during initial exposure, the heuristic processes will likely judge the source of the information to be internally generated. Related disorders Source-monitoring errors can occur in both healthy and non-healthy individuals alike. They have been observed in neurological and psychiatric populations such as amnesics, individuals who have undergone a cingulotomy, obsessive compulsive individuals and alcoholics. Schizophrenia Source-monitoring errors have been found to be more frequent among individuals with schizophrenia than among individuals without the condition; the inclination to make such errors may be phenotypic and related to hostility. Studies have suggested that source-monitoring difficulties in people with schizophrenia are due to failure encoding the source of self-generated items and the tendency to attribute new items to a previously presented source; another suggestion is that the affected perceive internal stimuli as real events. Several of the symptoms associated with schizophrenia imply that patients with the disorder are not capable of monitoring the initiation of certain kinds of self-generated thought, leading to a deficit called autonoetic agnosia: an impairment in the ability to identify self-generated mental events. See also Memory conformity Source amnesia References Neuropsychology Memory Memory disorders