Someone took credit for your work. Before you settle on a verdict, Dr. Tori has a confession - and a video from a fifth-grade play in the 1980s that dismantled his favorite origin story.

It starts on the train to Georgetown. A distracted scroll lands Ed on a self-described body language expert quoting the famous "7-38-55 rule" (the claim that 93% of communication is nonverbal). If you've heard that statistic, here's what you may not have heard: it misreads Albert Mehrabian's 1967 studies (popularized through his 1971 book Silent Messages), which applied only to a narrow case — communications about feelings and attitudes, when words and tone conflict. Mehrabian himself has spent decades objecting to how the numbers are used.

So Ed feels judgy. An expert should know better.

Then he glances at his own open slide deck. The slide on screen reads: "Assume the best."

What follows is the self-audit that slide demanded - the story of Saleem's Dream, the children's book series Ed was certain he created from scratch (a boy dreams his organs testify against him in court), and the elementary school video that proved the idea had been planted in him thirty years earlier.

The phenomenon is called cryptomnesia: the memory of an idea survives while the memory of its source decays... so borrowed ideas honestly feel like your own. The expert quoting Mehrabian's misused numbers, Ed quoting borrowed jokes as his own, and the colleague who just said your idea in the meeting are likely all running the same very human software.

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