I would like to talk about something that I call the Neuroscience of Narratives for my last two diary entries. It's hard to call this neuroscience, given that we have no way of empirically studying these types of effects, but I feel that it will become possible with the development of novel techniques.
Let me begin by talking about the funny phenomenon of cryptoamnesia. Cryptoamnesia is characterized by having a thought you've had before without realizing that you have had the thought before. The easiest way to observe cryptoamnesia is in episodes of plagiarism where the plagiarist is completely unaware that the text existed previously.
A book by Daniel L. Schacter describes an instance of supposedly unintentional plagiarism by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. One of Nietzsche's characters goes on a dreamlike journey that closely mimics a classic german fable. Presumably, Nietzsche heard this fable before, but forgot it until he wrote what he thought was a novel story.
I read a newspaper article recently detailing a similar story about Helen Keller. In her autobiography "The Story of My Life," Ms. Keller describes how, at age 12, she wrote a story — "The Frost King" — that created her own publishing scandal. "Mr. Anagnos was delighted with 'The Frost King,' and published it in one of the Perkins Institution reports," Ms. Keller wrote (Chapter 14 at afb.org/mylife). "This was the pinnacle of my happiness, from which I was in a little while dashed to earth. I had been in Boston only a short time when it was discovered that a story similar to 'The Frost King,' called 'The Frost Fairies' by Miss Margaret T. Canby, had appeared before I was born in a book called 'Birdie and His Friends.' The two stories were so much alike in thought and language that it was evident Miss Canby's story had been read to me, and that mine was — a plagiarism."
These anecdotes elucidate a common underlying mechanism of memory. Every time we recall a memory it is immersed in a narrative context. Usually the context of the memory is correctly recalled, however, in certain circumstances, it can be forgotten. Without a narrative context for an idea or memory, we tend to make one up. Therefore we may consider a memory remembered out of context a novel idea. This neural mechanism for providing narrative context to an event strikes me as key to understanding the neuroscience of religion, which I will deal with next week.