Confabulation and the Brain

Karl Bonhoeffer, a German psychiatrist, is credited with coining the term “confabulation” in 1900 to describe a type of memory loss that negatively impacts an individual’s higher-reasoning ability. Not a disorder in and of itself, confabulation is—in manyt cases—the symptom of an underlying condition that impacts memory accuracy. Although not relegated to one specific cause, it appears that individuals exhibiting confabulation tend to have damage in the frontal lobes of the brain and in the corpus callosum, the largest bridge that connect the two cerebral hemispheres. Confabulation is typically a subconscious strategy used when an individual has a condition that impacts his or her memory. These individuals create stories as a way to hide their memory loss. Although many have the mistaken idea that these people are “telling lies,” the individuals themselves are unaware that they are not telling the truth. They have no doubt that what they are saying is true, even though others know that the story is false. More tomorrow.