Confabulation

CONFABULATION (from Latin confabulor - I chat, I invent), invention. In psychopathology, this term is sometimes used for persistent or changing false stories about oneself and one's past, which are accompanied by subjective certainty of their truth, and which characterize patients with severe memory disorders or with abundant but unstable delusional thoughts. Jaspers (K. Jaspers) distinguishes 3 forms of C.: 1. C. from confusion, covering the absence of actual traces of memories; patients use them so as not to show their ignorance of circumstances that seem to them to be common knowledge. 2. Productive C., also serving to fill gaps in memory, but already significantly exceeding what is necessary to mask the defect due to the richness of their content; these are usually detailed stories about non-existent events, usually referring to the most recent time. 3. Fantastic C., completely disregarding reality and logic and very unstable delusional inventions of some paranoid patients, continuously developing in the direction of the main content of the delusion, so that new, increasingly incredible C. displace those that were expressed earlier. The first two forms of C. are observed mainly in patients with phenomena of amnestic, or Korsakov's, symptom complex; the latter - in some cases of paranoid dementia in so-called fantastic paraphrenia, sometimes in manic patients and expansive paralytics. The psychophysiological mechanisms underlying confabulation have been little studied so far; apparently, in different cases, these mechanisms are different.