ABSTRACT
It would be pleasant to record that Endel Tulving’s theories of memory sparked my interest in confabulation, but the truth is that I became interested in the topic because of a patient at Baycrest Hospital in Toronto. At first, I merely listened to his confabulating stories with fascination; then I tried to elicit them when they did not occur spontaneously, and finally I began to investigate the syndrome more systematically in an attempt to understand it. I learned quickly that studying single cases is much more difficult than I had anticipated. As a consequence, my study of the confabulating patient consists more of a series of observations than of controlled experiments. Nonetheless, the observations suggest some interesting hypotheses about the nature of the phenomenon and its relevance to theories of memory.
