Everyone loves a good story. So much so that our brains make them up all the time, and most of the time we don’t even notice. This is confabulation – and it can make fools of us all.
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Confabulation is common in dementia, when people fabricate stories to fill in gaps in memory. In Capgras delusion, where a person insists that a loved one has been abducted and replaced by a doppelgänger, confabulation explains away the sensation of disconnection they feel in the company of someone they know they should love. More generally, we confabulate when the information we are getting from the outside world doesn’t fit with our internal knowledge and feelings. This seems to be a basic feature of our brains.
Imagine, for example, that someone asked you to pick your favourite of two images, and then surreptitiously swapped it for the other one before asking you to explain why you like it best. You might assume that you would point out their mistake, but they found that people often launched into a justification of why they chose the image they had actually spurned.
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Michael Gazzaniga at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who pioneered confabulation research in the 1960s has dubbed the part of the brain that creates such narratives “the interpreter”. And he argues that . The interpreter integrates information from different parts of the brain. It rationalises decisions we make based on subconscious processing that is not accessible to our conscious mind. And it fills in the gaps when the information coming from the outside world doesn’t fit with our expectations. In other words, the interpreter creates narratives that help us make sense of our world.
We seem compelled to do this. A new idea suggests “, akin to our drives for food, drink and sex. We derive pleasure from joining the dots between disparate information to create simple stories that explain our complex world. This urge helps explain characteristic human attributes such as curiosity, science and art. But also, why we find it so difficult to accept information that doesn’t fit our world view. It can lead to fantastical confabulations too: religion, for example, may be the result of trying to make sense of a bunch of cognitive glitches. No wonder we are so susceptible to conspiracy theories and fake news.
Even though we can’t resist concocting stories, we can try to make them less fanciful. Research on combating delusional thinking offers some tips: don’t jump to conclusions, question your initial thoughts and consider different explanations. In other words, avoid sloppy thinking. As you now know, it can get you into a lot of trouble.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Confabulation”
