Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation

by William Hirstein

Some neurological patients exhibit a striking tendency to confabulate—to construct false answers to a question while genuinely believing that they are telling the truth. A stroke victim, for example, will describe in detail a conference he attended over the weekend when in fact he has not left the hospital. Normal people, too, sometimes have a tendency to confabulate; rather than admitting "I don't know," some people will make up an answer or an explanation and express it with complete conviction. In Brain Fiction , William Hirstein examines confabulation and argues that its causes are not merely technical issues in neurology or cognitive science but deeply revealing about the structure of the human intellect. Hirstein describes confabulation as the failure of a normal checking or censoring process in the brain—the failure to recognize that a false answer is fantasy, not reality. Thus, he argues, the creative ability to construct a plausible-sounding response and some ability to check that response are separate in the human brain. Hirstein sees the dialectic between the creative and checking processes—"the inner dialogue"—as an important part of our mental life. In constructing a theory of confabulation, Hirstein integrates perspectives from different fields, including philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology to achieve a natural mix of conceptual issues usually treated by philosophers with purely empirical issues; information about the distribution of certain blood vessels in the prefrontal lobes of the brain, for example, or the behavior 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 of confabulation breaks ground in both philosophy and cognitive science.

Genres: Psychology, Neuroscience, Science, Nonfiction, Brain

302 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2004

Reviews

[Adrian Colesberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another of those books that offers a window into the healthy brain by studying the unhealthy brain. Here are a few of my notes:

p 72
The job of the frontal lobe in general is inhibition or filtering--filtering out of defective representations.
Emotion plays a guiding function without which cognition is not only ineffective but rendered useless. Emotion plays its role at the inputs and outputs of the cognitive system. When certain emotions are in place, we perceive certain things correctly. At the output point, certain emotional processes function to keep us from acting on thoughts or intentions that are either ill-considered or based on ill-grounded beliefs. Inhibitory emotions.

Perception-action cycles begin in the perceptual areas, proceed to the front of the brain for evaluation and then loop back to the motor and perception areas to cause actions or to fine-tune perceptions. The frontal cortex runs a forward simulation of a proposed action, evaluating the value that simulation has for you, mainly be remembering the reward values from previous contexts. Inhibition in this cycle is likely to be based on social factors--embarrassment, anger, offense,
p 216
"Once the human brain initiated longer perception-action cycles during the course of our evolution, we ceased to be constantly affected by our environment, and developed the ability to attend to certain chains of thought for long periods of time, far longer than other animals. This can only be done if the attention demanding impulses from all the things that need to be attended to can be held at bay. ... much of the work of the brain goes into inhibiting representations from interfering with the dominant thought processes. This necessity has given the brain the power to deactivate representations or direct attention away from them in various ways. These functions might also be part of the mechanism behind certain types of self-deception."

p 227 there are processes in the orbitofrontal lobes that repress irrelevant memories while we are trying to assemble a coherent autobiographical memory. These repressive processes could be aimed in the wrong direction, to aid in self-delusion, etc.
Self deception may simply involve the brain's use of functions devoted to focusing and maintaining attention.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinatingly, patients with certain neurological disorders sometimes unknowingly "confabulate" information. For example, a patient with memory damage might assert (and fully believe) that they had driven to the beach that morning, when in reality, they have been confined to a hospital room for the last six weeks. The causes of confabulation remain largely unknown, and here, philosopher/neuroscientist Hirstein
tackles the issue admirably.

This is the best book I know of on the topic of confabulation in neurological disorders. It is also the only book I know of on this subject. Hirstein provides an extensive overview of the confabulation literature, carefully defines the phenomenon, and draws interesting parallels to "self-deception" in normals. Some of the neuroanatomy sections drag a bit, and could have been condensed. I am not necessarily in agreement with all the conclusions (or all the premises, for that matter), but its a worthwhile read.