Confabulation

Abstract

When people confabulate, they make a false claim that they honestly believe is true. The book contains countless fascinating examples of confabulatory behaviour — people falsely recalling events from their childhood, the subject who was partially blind but insisted he could see, the amputee convinced that he retained all his limbs, to the patient who believed that his own parents had been replaced by imposters. Though confabulations can result from neurological damage, they can also appear in perfectly healthy people. Yet, how can confabulators so often appear to be of sound mind, yet not see their own errors? This book brings together some of the most advanced thinking on confabulation in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy, in an attempt to understand this phenomenon; what are the clinical symptoms of each type of confabulation? Which brain functions are damaged in clinical confabulators? What are the neuropsychological characteristics of each type? What causes confabulation in healthy individuals? One reason why the study of confabulation is important is that there is wide agreement that the malfunctions that produce confabulation are malfunctions in significant, high-level cognitive processes.