Confabulation and the Brain, 7

Several studies have found that confabulation is rather common among individuals who have not been diagnosed with any type of brain disorder. The book Brain Fiction includes a review of expanding scientific research that provides evidence and conclusions that confabulation is not something restricted to psychiatric patients or to those who fantasize. The evidence shows that human beings produce a body of narratives or stories every day. Many of these stories are thought to help explain how they feel, the reason they made a specific decision, the underlying prompts for judgments they made, why they exhibited the behavior they did and the reason they took the actions they did, and so on. Typically, these stories are a combination of fact and fiction, although the individuals involved believe that what they said was completely true. It gives one pause and perhaps can provide some impetus for becoming more aware of and evaluating the stories one tells the self and others.