Confabulation views from neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy

by Hirstein, William

• ISBN13: 9780199208913
• ISBN10: 0199208913
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

People who confabulate continually make false claims that they actually believe. This book contains countless fascinating examples of confabulations produced by people whose minds are otherwise sound-patients who are blind but insist that they can see, and who make up descriptions of their surroundings; paralyzed patients who claim they can move their arms; patients who believe that their parents have been replaced by impostors, who confabulate reasons why. Though confabulations can result from neurological damage, they can also appear in perfectly healthy people. We are all capable of producing false memory claims that we believe are true, and children are especially vulnerable to this type of confabulation. Why do our minds tend to fail in this why? How can we be basically sound mind, yet not see such errors?

Author Biography

William Hirstein is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Elmhurst College, in Elmhurst, Illinois, USA. He received his PhD from the University of California, Davis, in 1994. His graduate and postdoctoral studies were conducted under the supervision of John Searle, V. S. Ramachandran, and Patricia Churchland. He is the author of several books, including On the Churchlands (Wadsworth, 2004), and Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (MIT, 2005). His other interests include autism, sociopathy, brain laterality, and the misidentification syndromes.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. vii
Introduction: What is confabulation?	p. 1
Confabulation in anterior communicating artery syndrome	p. 13
False memories: A kind of confabulation in non-clinical subjects	p. 33
The cognitive consequences of forced fabrication: Evidence from studies of eyewitness suggestibility	p. 67
Confabulation, the self, and ego functions: The ego disequilibrium theory	p. 91
He is not my father, and that is not my arm: Accounting for misidentifications of people and limbs	p. 109
Delusional confabulations and self-deception	p. 139
Confabulation as a psychiatric symptom	p. 159
Confabulation and delusion	p. 173
Anosognosia for hemiplegia: A confabulatory state	p. 189
Everyday confabulation	p. 203
Temporal consciousness and confabulation: Escape from unconscious explanatory idols	p. 223
Disentangling the notivational theories of confabulation	p. 263
Subject Index	p. 291
Author Index	p. 297
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