CONFABULATION

Confabulation is a term invented by psychologists to describe stories told by persons “that inaccurately describe history, background, and present situations. Confabulation is considered ‘honest lying,’ but is distinct from lying because there is typically no intent to deceive and the individual is unaware that their information is false.” Sometimes it is an attempt to account for information that cannot be assimilated, like the woman who told the psychologist in his office that she was at home. Her brain mechanism for determining where she was had been damaged. When he asked her why there was a row of elevators outside his office (she came up in one), she said, “Why, doctor, you wouldn’t believe how much it cost to have those installed!”

My brother, who was brain-damaged, could not get welfare because when the interviewer asked him about his work (he had been an MFA metalsmith), he told her he was an undercover agent for the FBI working to reveal the drug use of a specific judge. When she pressed him about this, he said he was a sworn deputy and couldn’t tell her anything. For a while this woman was going to have him arrested for impersonating a law officer. He was also called for jury duty but didn’t make the final panel. He told us it was because the lawyer slapped a witness in the face.

Lately there have been huge controversies over writers exaggerating either exploits or suffering, with the cynical assumption being that they were lying in order to make a personal profit. They were the “cons” in confabulation. But fabulizing is at the heart of writing. We all love Garrison Keillor’s preposterous scenarios which are really an excuse for sound effects. Holly Black, author of Black Heart and the Spiderwick Chronicles, writes YA fantasy in which her hero is a con artist. She says the most important thing she learned from writing about con artists is that writers are all con artists. “And all readers are their marks. Not all readers, of course: just the right readers. . . The mark has to want to be conned.”

Much depends upon the purpose of the con, of course. Religious confabulation (“God is watching you!”) is meant to be taken as literal so as to encourage good behavior (and conscientious tithing) among the faithful. Political confabulation is meant to persuade voters. Journalistic confabulation is meant to demonstrate the superior insight and detective skills of the reporter, while increasing the circulation of the newspaper with a dimension of scandal. Kid confabulation is meant to cover for incidents that would get them into trouble. Persons who are abused confabulate to others outside the family out of shame and to their abusers out of fear. Sherazade confabulated to save her life.

Videos reveal that when people were interviewed, the interviewer often unconsciously gave clues about the answer they wanted, triggering the confabulation. This had tragic results in the hysterical cases of suspected pre-school abuse a few years ago that had children reporting satanic rituals and horrific sexual abuse, though they barely understood what those might be. Psychologists design clever experiments to trick people into confabulating, in hopes of discovering what it is the brain does -- under our conscious monitoring. Sometimes, of course, startling things are quite true. Whatever that is.

For a while, when research about the memory organ, the hippocampus, it appeared that fMRI’s could distinguish “true” memories from fabulized memories even if the remembering person couldn’t tell the difference. The clue was supposed to be whether the brain pulled up sense memories, which showed on the instrument. It turned out to be a false promise, something like believing that hypnotism would reveal the truth, though hypnotism subjects are notoriously susceptible to suggestion. It’s well-known that memories that seem real can be derived from familiar photographs.

“Confabulated memories of all types most often occur in autobiographical memory, and are indicative of a complicated and intricate process that can be led astray at any point during encoding, storage, or recall of a memory. This type of confabulation is commonly seen in Korsakoff's syndrome, a neurological disorder caused by a lack of thiamine (vitamin B1) in the brain. Its onset is linked to chronic alcohol abuse and/or severe malnutrition.” (This is from Wikipedia which does not report the authors of entries, so we are forced to assume their qualifications. We do not know whether they are confabulating.)

What we know about secretive underground groups or foreign cultures is highly shaped by fictive imagining. When I was an animal control officer in the Seventies, an old man claimed that the neighbors’ barking dog annoyed him. He agreed to take this charge to court, where it became apparent that he was nearly stone deaf, so his testimony was discredited. In the process of testifying, he told a long elaborate story about the marriage of the young couple who owned the dog, claiming that the woman was abused. It turned out to be the plot of a soap opera he watched regularly. He wasn’t lying, but that vivid media story had filled the gaps in what he knew about his neighbors.

So let’s go back to Holly Black saying that a person conned by fabulizing has to WANT to be conned. Maybe that suggests why people who believe a story become very angry when it is proven inaccurate. Maybe they are reacting to more than just being fooled. There’s something about a need to control, to be in charge, to trust their judgment, to feel virtuous, that makes them over-react. New facts may discredit their judgment in hiring or rewarding someone, let alone believing a wild tale that shows them there are huge areas of reality they really don’t understand. We insist on a distinction between “journalism” (which is supposed to be a “gotcha” that reveals the “facts”) and fiction which is supposed to be unconfined, and yet fiction often gets to human truths that are much deeper than anything journalists reveal. I take it that’s what Oprah calls “truthiness.”

To tell you the truth, I have never read a story about me and mine written by a journalist that got all the facts right, even the spelling of names. One woman in the Sixties reported that Bob made his sculptures from “Petrolane” (the name of the energy company) instead of “plasticine” (a form of clay) and then baked them directly. (They would burst into flame -- plasticine is oil-based.) Maybe she thought explaining molds was too hard, or maybe she thought molds were cheating and so she should hide them, or maybe someone had explained what the ideal material would be. (It was invented later.) Maybe “no journalist ever got the facts right” is an exaggeration. Is that a lie?

This blog post cannot do very much beyond sticking a flag in a dilemma where we are flooded with information, unsorted, variously motivated, often seemingly fabulous, and yet sometimes a real truth that we need to hear but just don’t want to. Follow your heart, but question it closely.