Brain Fiction: Self-deception And the Riddle of Confabulation

Some neurological patients exhibit a striking tendency to confabulate -- to constructfalse answers to a question while genuinely believing that they are telling the truth. A strokevictim, for example, will describe in detail a conference he attended over the weekend when in facthe has not left the hospital. Normal people, too, sometimes have a tendency to confabulate; ratherthan admitting "I don't know," some people will make up an answer or an explanation and express itwith complete conviction. In Brain Fiction, William Hirstein examines confabulation and argues thatits causes are not merely technical issues in neurology or cognitive science but deeply revealingabout the structure of the human intellect.Hirstein describes confabulation as the failure of anormal checking or censoring process in the brain -- the failure to recognize that a false answer isfantasy, not reality. Thus, he argues, the creative ability to construct a plausible-soundingresponse and some ability to check that response are separate in the human brain. Hirstein sees thedialectic between the creative and checking processes -- "the inner dialogue" -- as an importantpart of our mental life. In constructing a theory of confabulation, Hirstein integrates perspectivesfrom different fields, including philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology to achieve a natural mixof conceptual issues usually treated by philosophers with purely empirical issues; information aboutthe distribution of certain blood vessels in the prefrontal lobes of the brain, for example, or thebehavior of split-brain patients can shed light on the classic questions of philosophy of mind,including questions about the function of consciousness. This first book-length study ofconfabulation breaks ground in both philosophy and cognitive science.

William Hirstein is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmhurst College.