A patient produces content that turns out not to be a genuinely new creation. Before revealing the answer, decide what distinguishes cryptamnesia from confabulation.

Ask whether the reproduced material was actually previously encountered somewhere by the patient, or whether it was invented outright to fill a genuine gap in memory. Cryptamnesia specifically involves material that really was encountered before — a phrase, an idea, a piece of writing — being reproduced with the sincere, mistaken belief that it is original, without any awareness that it is a memory at all. Confabulation, in contrast, involves content that is genuinely invented to fill a gap left by an underlying memory impairment, rather than being drawn, unrecognised, from a real prior encounter. Whether real prior material exists behind the reproduced content, even if its source has been forgotten, is the key distinguishing detail.