Talk:Confabulation

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: My

message: 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)
thread_title:  No awareness that memory is imaginary 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Alcohol induced confabulation 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Alzheimer's and related dementias in confabulation 

message: 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)
thread_title:  re writain psychological causes and added fuzzy trace and source monitoring 

message: 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)
thread_title: Lithium Treatment of Confabulations due to Brain Injury

message: 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)
replies: text: The term only applies when it is "as a result of neurological or psychological dysfunction." - SummerPhD (talk) 18:36, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  Confabulation in healthy people? 

message: These will be re-cited in the appropriate format pending our final decision of what we will include in the article.
Attali, E., De Anna, F., Dubois, B., & Barba, G. (2009). Confabulation in Alzheimer's disease: Poor encoding 	and retrieval of over-learned information. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 132(1), 204-212. 			doi:10.1093/brain/awn241
Bajo, A., Fleminger, S., & Kopelman, M. (2010). Confabulations are emotionally charged, but not always for the best. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 16(6), 975-983. doi:10.1017/S1355617710000913
 
Dalla Barba, G., Attali, E., & La Corte, V. (2010). Confabulation in healthy aging is related to interference of overlearned, semantically similar information on episodic memory recall. Journal of Clinical and ExperimentalNeuropsychology, 32(6), 655-660. doi:10.1080/13803390903425251
Fotopoulou, A. (2010). The affective neuropsychology of confabulation and delusion. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 15(1-3), 38-63. doi:10.1080/13546800903250949
 
Gilboa, A. (2010). Strategic retrieval, confabulations, and delusions: Theory and data. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 15(1-3), 145-180. doi:10.1080/13546800903056965
Gilboa, A., Alain, C., Stuss, D. T., Melo, B., Miller, S., & Moscovitch, M. (2006). Mechanisms of spontaneous confabulations: A strategic retrieval account. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 129(6), 1399-1414. doi:10.1093/brain/awl093
Glowinski, R., Payman, V., & Frencham, K. (2008). Confabulation: A spontaneous and fantastic review. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 42(11), 932-940. doi:10.1080/00048670802415335
Jellinger, K. A. (2010). Review of 'Confabulation: Views from neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy'. European Journal of Neurology, 17(1), doi:10.1111/j.1468-1331.2009.02829.x
Kan, I. P., Larocque, K. F., Lafleche, G., Coslett, H., & Verfaellie, M. (2010). Memory monitoring failure in confabulation: Evidence from the semantic illusion paradigm. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 16(6), 1006-1017. doi:10.1017/S1355617710000536
 
Kopelman, M. D. (2010). Varieties of confabulation and delusion. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 15(1-3), 14-37. doi:10.1080/13546800902732830
 
Langdon, R., & Bayne, T. (2010). Delusion and confabulation: Mistakes of perceiving, remembering and believing. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 15(1-3), 319-345. doi:10.1080/13546800903000229
Metcalf, K., Langdon, R., & Coltheart, M. (2007). Models of confabulation: A critical review and a new framework. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 24(1), 23-47. doi:10.1080/02643290600694901
Metcalf, K., Langdon, R., & Coltheart, M. (2010). The role of personal biases in the explanation of confabulation. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 15(1-3), 64-94. doi:10.1080/13546800902767703
 
Rovira, E., Santos Gómez, J. L., Moro, M. M., Villagrán, J. M., & Mckenna, P. J. (2010). Confabulation in schizophrenia: A neuropsychological study. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 16(6), 1018-1026. doi:10.1017/S1355617710000718
Turner, M., & Coltheart, M. (2010). Confabulation and delusion: A common monitoring framework. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 15(1-3), 346-376. doi:10.1080/13546800903441902
 
Van Damme, I., & d’Ydewalle, G. (2010). Confabulation versus experimentally induced false memories in Korsakoff patients. Journal of Neuropsychology, 4(2), 211-230. doi:10.1348/174866409X478231
--Emmatiak (talk) 00:34, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: 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)
thread_title:  Some Constructive Criticism of Confabulation

message: 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)
thread_title:  Ambiguous sentence 

message: 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)
replies: text: See False memory.--Jack Upland (talk) 20:39, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  False Memories vs Confabulation 

message: 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)
replies: text: I agree. It's not a subset of confabulation.--Jack Upland (talk) 21:43, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I have redirected Mandela Effect to False memory, as that seems more appropriate.--Jack Upland (talk) 20:38, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mandela Effect does not belong on this page, redirect to its own page at most. 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: If you look at wikt:confabulate#English, 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)
thread_title:  Alternative meaning