ABSTRACT
Making a sincere claim to someone, especially in response to a specic request, is similar in many ways to giving someone a present. We tell people things because we care about them. The present may be small or large, expected or a complete surprise, and it may be of great value, or worthless. False claims make bad presents; their normal value is nothing. Or worse than nothing, we may still waste time and energy because we believed the claim. Our minds track the value of these presents with great accuracy, especially when we are considering offering one. We do not give away valuable information to just anyone. We also do not give worthless items to someone for no reason. We do not deliberately make false claims to our friends, and lying to random strangers is considered pathological. To care about someone is to care about what you say to her. Confabulators fail exactly here; they dispense worthless claims sincerely, while not seeming to care that they are disbelieved. Their claims seem valuable to them, but they are actually worthless because they were generated by malfunctioning brain processes. “Confabulation” was rst applied as a technical term by the neurologists Bonhoeffer, Pick, and Wernicke in the early 1900s to false memory reports made by their patients, who suffered from an amnesic syndrome that later came to be known as Korsakoff’s amnesia. When asked what they did yesterday, these patients do not remember, but will report events that either did not happen, or happened long ago. During the remainder of the twentieth century, however, the use of “confabulation” was gradually expanded to cover claims made by other types of patients, many of whom had no obvious memory disorder. This list grew to include patients who deny that they are injured, paralyzed, or blind; split-brain patients; patients with misidentication disorders (i.e., they make false claims about the identities of people they know); and patients with schizophrenia, as well as normal people, and children. Thus there are currently two schools of thought on the proper scope of the concept of confabulation, those who remain true to the original sense and so believe that the term should only be applied to false memory reports, and a growing number of those who believe that the term can be usefully applied to a broader range of disorders.
