Talk:Confabulation

King Henry VIII Solved
It is this portrait (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Holbein_henry8_full_length.jpg) which many have falsely remembered as a depiction of Henry VIII holding a chicken leg. In his right hand it almost looks as if that is what he is holding. Upon subsequent cultural reproductions and parodies of this image he was in fact depicted in this pose with a chicken leg in his right hand.

My
My understanding of confabulation from my medical dictionary and from my experience working in psychiatry is that there is no confusion between imagination and memory. The individual manufactures (confabulates) answers to questions to cover up the embarassing fact that they can't remember. They are aware that they're making it up, they're just hoping that you don't notice. Matt 17:01, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * That's absolutely not the case at all in neurology/medicine. Confabulation is a recognized term that is only used to describe the creation of false details which the speaker doesn't realize are false. It's a common symptom of damage to the mammilary bodies in the brain. --70.72.19.133 04:32, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

No awareness that memory is imaginary
I listed to a BBC Radio4 programme about this this morning 16 August 2006 from 9.30 am to 9.45am, and it said that the individual was unaware that the memories were false - they believed them to be true. Perhaps this awareness or not varies with the psychiatric condition - but I dont know, I'm just guessing.

I believe the common meaning of confabulation has changed recently. In older dictionaries, or dictionaries which are just modern printings of old content, the word confabulate meant making up a story - the sort of thing a criminal would do. So this adds to the confusion.


 * The medical meaning of confabulation is different from the general meaning of confabulation. From a medical point of view confabulation has never implied any form of deviousness or lying; it's always referred to those who are unaware that they are making things up. --70.72.19.133 04:29, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Alcohol induced confabulation
I've heard alcoholism eventually leads to so essential memory gaps that confabulation ultimately becomes the result; and many strange stories in pubs.. I've got no references, though. Anyone? - Sigg3.net

Yes, see the Merck Manual now free online as it relates to alcohol and thiamin interaction http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec01/ch004/ch004f.html#sec01-ch004-ch004g-311 71.114.190.5 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 21:27, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Alzheimer's and related dementias in confabulation
From my reading in this area, and personal experience with my older sister, confabulation occurs with many persons who have dementia. The created memories seem to be at least as well-remembered as actual events. My sister remembers the memories she creates much better than nearly all actual ones. She will repeat them periodically for weeks, and elaborate on them over time. A form of dementia called Lewy Body dementia (http://www.lewybodydementia.org/index.php) seems to have confabulation as a frequent symptom, more so than other dementias. Signupslls 00:43, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

re writain psychological causes and added fuzzy trace and source monitoring
I've added a bit to psychological causes. a bit rushed but it will do for now. if anyone else wants to edit it go ahead. I may add more and put some subheading in later. Ralphmcd (talk) 19:17, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Lithium Treatment of Confabulations due to Brain Injury
I had a relative who had severe brain injury from falling out of a truck. He was in a coma for months. When released the doctor releasing him had him on lithium. My relative was referred to a local psychiatrist who took the view that since the patient did not have mania before the injury he should not now, so the psychiatrist took the patient off lithium. Confabulations soon followed, which alcohol seemed to intensify.

It is known that many epileptics become that way from head injury, and that drugs that lower the convulsive threshold (like with alcohol withdrawal, or antipsychotic drugs) promote seizures. From a practical standpoint it looks like these confabulations are a type of seizure.

When I was in pharmacy school years ago the explaination of how lithium worked was that it replaced potassium to some extent in the neuron, but it could not flow as easily out of the neuron during an action potential therefore it toned the electrial activity of the brain down to some extent. Now there are newer explaination of litium's mechanism of action, but the former seems more practical and understandable. 71.114.190.5 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 21:38, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Confabulation in healthy people?
This article focuses a lot on disorders, but is it not possible to talk about confabulation in healthy people? I'm sure I've heard the word used when describing our less-than-perfect memory, and how everybody fills in gaps in their memories with made up details.

Also, very small children can seem to have a blurry line between imagination and memories. Isn't confabulation an appropriate term in this case? Sverre (talk) 18:13, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The term only applies when it is "as a result of neurological or psychological dysfunction." - SummerPhD (talk) 18:36, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not so sure. I think it makes perfect sense to speak of a non-dysfunctional person confabulating.  It just would not be considered a symptom for that person.  One might think, for example, that a consequence of Daniel Wegner's theory of conscious will is that everyone confabulates quite a substantial portion of the time (i.e., whenever they explain their behavior as an act of conscious will). http://www.skepdic.com/confab.html is just one of probably many sources that agree with me.  KSchutte (talk) 03:29, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Whether or not confabulation occurs in non-clinical cases is a hotly contested issue. The predominant opinion seems to lean toward extension to non-clinical cases. See some of Bortolotti's work on this issue, as well as Hirstein's. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:245:C300:E930:49E3:5DCB:898E:213A (talk) 14:22, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Edits to the "Confabulation" Article
Our plan for the introduction section is to make it more concise and general. We are going to focus on the psychological causes of confabulation, including some relevant literature on confabulation as it relates to several diseases (ex: Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and Korsakoff's). Finally, we plan to add sections on the models and theories of confabulation, including prevalence data and possible correlates, as well as a section on specific results.

Here is a brief summary of what the new article may look like:

Confabulation

Introduction In psychology, confabulation is the spontaneous narrative report of events that never happened. It consists of the creation of false memories, perceptions, or beliefs about the self or the environment—usually as a result of neurological or psychological dysfunction. Patients with some psychological diseases (such as Alzheimer's, Schizophrenia, and Korsakoff's) exhibit confabulation as a symptom. When it is a matter of memory, confabulation is the confusion of imagination with memory, or the confused application of true memories. Confabulations are difficult to differentiate from delusions and from lying. With respect to memory, wild confabulations about one's past are rare in the absence of organic causes (e.g., brain damage), and the term "confabulation" is often restricted to these types of distortions. In contrast, even neurologically intact people are susceptible to memory errors or confusions due to psychological causes.

Organic causes
Berlyne (1972) defined confabulation as "...a falsification of memory occurring in clear consciousness in association with an organically derived amnesia". He distinguished between:


 * "momentary" (or "provoked") confabulations—fleeting, and invariably provoked by questions probing the subject's memory, sometimes consisting of "real" memories displaced in their temporal context.
 * "fantastic" (or "spontaneous") confabulations—characterized by the spontaneous outpouring of irrelevant associations, sometimes bizarre ideas, which may be held with firm conviction.

Patients who have suffered brain damage or lesions, especially to the prefrontal cortical regions, may have confabulation of memories as a symptom. Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome characteristically confabulate by guessing an answer or imagining an event and then mistaking their guess or imagination for an actual memory. In some cases, confabulation results from the brain's chemistry, a mapping of the activation of neurons to brain activity. Confabulation can also occur as a result of damage to the anterior communicating artery (ACoA), in the Circle of Willis. Patients with a split-brain will confabulate under experimental conditions.

Some military agents, such as BZ, and deliriant drugs such as those found in datura, notably scopolamine and atropine, may also cause confabulation.

Within personal relationships, confabulation may be difficult to detect. Regardless of its biological or psychological etiology, simple lies and purposeful deception are included in the confabulation differential, as well as deep rooted psychopathological disturbance and early-stage dementia. The historical background of the confabulating individual rarely provides supporting evidence for their "fables", however tangentially related. Fables may be embellished beyond any possible evidentiary support and will usually ultimately reveal the disorder if appropriate investigations are applied. Those with long term relationships are most likely to recognize the disorder most quickly. Confabulations usually involve harmless matters, unlike the paranoid and psychotic delusions expressed in defense of abnormal actions or serious criminal actions.

Psychological Causes
-We will discuss a brief history of confabulation, most likely this will not differ from that already presented in the article. -Here is where we will include a few subunits, briefly touching on Alzheimer's, Schizophrenia, and Korsakoff's Syndrome. -We will include a discussion of confabulation as it relates to memory retrieval and encoding

Theories & Models
-We will discuss Gilboa et al. (2006), and their "Mechanisms of spontaneous confabulation."

Methods
- We will select a few case studies from our list of references and display their general methods to gain a sense of how cognitive psychologists are testing confabulation in a controlled setting

Specific Data
- See methods section.. We may touch on the diseases again in this section. We will include some of the rough data provided by the above studies (found in methods).

Some Constructive Criticism of Confabulation
There are a few criticisms: 1) Criticism of Confabulation as a medical term or idea. This overlaps with the next point quite significantly, but Confabulation seems to be overly general.

2) Criticism of the lack of empirical indicators which might provide an indication that confabulation is occurring within the person's brain. For example, are certain brainwave patterns observed when the difficult types of confabulation occur?  What about PET and MRI scans of someone's brain?

3) There is some mention of the legal implications of confabulation in witness testimonies. This would definitely be worth more comment.

4) There seems to be a general lack of “quantified empirical” basis for confabulation when it occurs (though this might not be true of the references – though I imagine that many looking at wikipedia will not be able to chase them up). This links with point (2) – what are the quantified experimentally verifiable indicators that show that confabulation is probably occurring?  One imagines that, as the confabulation involves believing false memories, then there must be some difference (at least up to a month or some other reasonable period after the recollection of an event, a recollection which has had confabulated data added to it) between actually observed info (which is encoded correctly) and either (i) non-encoded information which was later falsely recalled, or (ii) falsely encoded information which is them recalled normally (though this seems less likely).

5) Confabulation is also a dangerous term as it can be used to over-rule a patients (possibly correct) recollections of important events – for this reason, the article ought to have a MEDICAL ETHICS section which caters to the ethical problems that attributed confabulation can cause.

AnInformedDude (talk) 00:53, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Ambiguous sentence
The article says "It is currently unclear how completely healthy individuals produce confabulations." I think the word "completely" is modifying "healthy" (ie. we are discussing "completely healthy individuals"). However it's also possible to parse this sentence so that "completely" modifies "produce", producing an entirely different meaning (ie. that the completeness of healthy individuals' confabulations is unclear). Someone who knows for sure what this sentence is saying should rephrase this to eliminate the ambiguity. Mnudelman (talk) 02:36, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Why Is The "Mandela Effect" Being Hidden On Wikipedia?
I returned to Wikipedia to post my rejection to Wikipedia rewriting the definition of the term "Mandela Effect" to replace the meaning of the term with a critical explanation for it. I discovered that the page has been removed altogether and that the term now brings one to this article, which doesn't even mention the term in it at all (yet this page is linked by the term.) Imagine if one searched for "exorcism" and a general page on "superstition" were to come up instead. It amuses me how much the concept apparently bothers someone modding for this site, to go through all of this to squash the concept. One does not need to believe in a supernatural occurrence in order to acknowledge its existence in the abstract (in theory,) or to acknowledge how common of a claim it is for many people around the world.

Is Wikipedia a tool for selecting what ideas need to be expelled from human existence according to __ Mod, or is it an encyclopedia?

Neurolanis (talk) 10:05, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree. I have a memory of my mother pooh-poohing the Paul-Is-Dead rumor of 1969...and she died in 1968. Does that mean I have "brain damage or dementia"? And I expect nine out of ten people "remember" that nonexistent painting of Henry VIII eating a turkey leg. If you want to make "Mandela Effect" synonymous with confabulation, you should rewrite the article to explain that it is nearly universal. Tom Mazanec — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.74.105.124 (talk) 20:46, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Are you sure you're not just remembering the Mandela Effect Wikipedia page from another timeline? Haha But in all seriousness, I think there should be a page on the Mandela Effect. The redirect was nicely informative, but I was hoping for an actual page about the "theory", or whatever it's referred to, when I searched it. NaaAAAaathan 22:25, 3 May 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ndugger1 (talk • contribs)


 * Just a minor side question: Does anybody know if any of the people who promote and claim to have experienced the "Mandela Effect" have said who they believe was the first post-apartheid president of South Africa instead? I ask this mostly out of idle curiosity although it could be included in the article if there is any RS coverage of it. --DanielRigal (talk) 09:57, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

As an FYI, there is a discussion on Talk:Mandela Effect that you may wish to comment on.-- CaroleHenson (talk) 20:17, 27 November 2016 (UTC)


 * I initially created the page on the Mandela Effect, and I believe that there is enough evidence/stuff written about it to create its own article. With that being said, I feel like it and confabulation are very similar. Perhaps a section on this page could be added to talk about the effect and its life as an internet meme? It wouldn't have to be huge, but I do believe it's worth mentioning. Also, if this were to happen, there would need to be lots of good, reliable sources. Someone resurrected the page the other day and added a bunch of pseudo-babble with no citations, and that's not acceptable on this site.-- Gen. Quon   (Talk)   14:41, 28 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Confabulation means a specific thing. You don't take all the different wikipedia pages and start smooshing them together based on similarities.  It's similar, but it's not confabulation.  Even if neurologically, it ends up resulting from the same causes, the phenomenon are clearly different.  One is personal level, one is shared.  Until there's psych journals that lump them together professionally, Mandela Effect should simply have it's own page.


 * I think WP:NEOLOGISM applies. The problem with documenting an internet "meme" is this promotes the "meme". Anyway, I don't think the examples referred as part of the Mandela Effect really confabulation. Of the sources cited, only The Telegraph says that they are. Most of them are common misspellings or misquotations. There are many Commonly misspelled English words, but we wouldn't normally call them confabulations. Equally there are many misquotations, such as "Play it again, Sam!" or "Elementary, my dear Watson". So what? The people promoting the Mandela Effect, of course, don't see it as a case of confabulation.
 * The other problem is the name. The sources are not really interested in Mandela. As the Globe and Mail says, not many people actually think they remember him dying in the '80s. So why perpetuate the name the "Mandela Effect" here? None of the people whose accounts are provided on Fiona Broome's website have clear memories of his death in the '80s. And the accounts aren't consistent with each other or internally consistent. Some say it was the early '80s; some say it was the late '80s; some were too young to remember anything. Some memories relate to the Oprah Winfrey Show or the Cosby Show. Some remember him being released; some don't. Some remember a public funeral — which would have been unlikely under Apartheid. Some remember a legal wrangle over his estate, which is also unlikely. To answer the question above, some say that his widow became president. OK, so I don't believe the parallel universe theory. But there's not even a phenomenon here. I am sure if you picked any notable person or event from recent decades you could find people that remembered the details wrong. (By the way, the Paul is Dead rumour began in 1967, so perhaps the above-mentioned memory was true.) Is this confabulation, in the sense of being a medical disorder? I don't think so. Is it notable? I don't think so either. We don't want to get into a kind of Ponzi scheme where the "meme" gets a Wikipedia page and then the Wikipedia page spawns "reliable sources" which sustain the page and make the "meme" grow larger.--Jack Upland (talk) 00:06, 3 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Why are you debating the merits of the specific memories? That has zero relevance on the existence of the phenomenon as deserving it's own page.  It's not a meme either, despite people calling it that.  It's a clear cut phenomenon, regardless of the veracity of any of the purported memories.


 * It's a fact that human memory is fallible. People misremember names and quotes; people have hazy recollections of events. These particular examples are not a phenomenon. If a large group of people had consistent, coherent "memories" of Mandela dying in the 1980s, that would be a phenomenon. But they don't.


 * By the way, I've started a discussion about this at the Fringe Theories Noticeboard: --Jack Upland (talk) 20:59, 22 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Another editor has removed the "Mandela Effect" section, and I have removed the remaining "Examples" material because they weren't examples of confabulation but examples of the Mandela Effect. The relevant policy is WP:ONEWAY. We do not have strong sources that link the Mandela Effect to confabulation. I have changed the redirect to False memory. This seems more appropriate. Everyone agrees that the memories described are false, at least in this universe. The article shows that it is quite easy to induce false memories, hence providing a scientific explanation for the Mandela Effect.--Jack Upland (talk) 20:45, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

False Memories vs Confabulation
We've seen various studies showing how easily memories can be manipulated -- planting completely false memories, changing details about real memories, etc. Participants report being just as convinced such memories are correct as any other memory they recall. I have certainly had times in my life where a friend will (with apparently 100% honesty) claim some event we were both a part of happened rather differently than I remember. At different times, I've been proven right and other times proven wrong. People whose jobs rely on gathering others' memories of events (historians, law enforcement, etc.), generally report that it's pretty common for people to disagree about events in ways which (i) are entirely inconsistent with each other and (ii) would be hard to explain in any way besides imperfect recall of events, but where each witness is also 100% convinced their memory is correct. When you combine the fact that people recall things dramatically differently, with the fact that people's memories can be changed long after the fact, we get a view of memory plasticity that is not much different than the confabulation being described in the article. How is such "regular" memory plasticity/imperfection (which probably everyone is capable of, and probably everyone is guilty of, to at least some extent), different from confabulation? Is it merely degree, where confabulation results in memories that are obviously false to any third-party, while the day-to-day memory plasticity is more subtle? Most importantly, as this is not just an academic question for discussion, does there exist a reference contrasting confabulation with such other memory imperfections that we can incorporate into the article?

The reason I bring this up is that there have been many cases of false memories -- the 1980s era satanic cult example being perhaps one of the most egregious and widespread -- where people seem just as convinced of their false memories as the article state confabulators are. But where there's no evidence of the kind of brain damage that the article claims is typical of the condition.

Chuck (talk) 00:01, 10 September 2016 (UTC)


 * See False memory.--Jack Upland (talk) 20:39, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Mandela Effect does not belong on this page, redirect to its own page at most.
Some people want to conflate confabulation with the Mandela Effect, and there may very well be overlap in some instances. However, no theory of confabulation accounts for multiple people of differing backgrounds remembering the same thing wrongly in the same way. Confabulation as a psychology term is a personal phenomenon, not a shared one.

You'll notice how poorly cited and written that bottom section is. Either clean it up without the heavy handed warning, or more appropriately remove it, as it is not even a subset of confabulation.

24.255.202.38 (talk) 17:23, 22 January 2017 (UTC)AT


 * I agree. It's not a subset of confabulation.--Jack Upland (talk) 21:43, 23 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I have redirected Mandela Effect to False memory, as that seems more appropriate.--Jack Upland (talk) 20:38, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Alternative meaning
There must be a mention of the alternate definition of confabulation, so regular people like me won't get confused when they are reading a fancy, formal WP article, and they come across the word confabulation being used in its alternate definition (in conversation with...look on Wiktionary), and they search WP for the meaning of this word.

The alternate definition of confabulation is to be in conversation with somebody. Look on Wiktionary. This must be mentioned somewhere here, so that regular people reading these fancy, formal Wikipedia articles who come across this word and ask WP what it means won't get confused. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:3CA:4180:4AD0:B5E5:A176:C6F4:2A35 (talk) 07:08, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I haven't encountered this meaning before, but the OED does list "conversation" as a meaning of "confabulation". I've added a hatnote to the article, which should hopefully remove any potential for confusion. – Uanfala (talk) 14:00, 1 November 2019 (UTC)
 * If you look at confabulate, it doesn't follow that someone who's confabulating is unaware of it. Same case in Polish: konfabulować has one meaning in everyday language ("to talk bull") and another in medicine ("to produce bull without realizing that it is bull"). This is way more confusing than the collision with the "conversation" meaning (probably a dated one). 89.64.69.177 (talk) 15:28, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Davidson College supported by WikiProject Psychology and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program&#32;during the 2011 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from by PrimeBOT (talk) on 15:55, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

External link
Will the following link be accepted: What to Know About Confabulation? תיל&#34;ם (talk) 17:19, 14 June 2024 (UTC)