Confabulation: views from neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy

by William Hirstein

Overview

When people confabulate, they make an ill-grounded claim that they honestly believe is true. There have been countless fascinating examples of confabulatory behaviour - people falsely recalling events from their childhood, the subject who was partially blind but insisted he could see, the amputee convinced that he retained all his limbs, to the patient who believed that his own parents had been replaced by imposters. Though confabulations can result from neurological damage, they can also appear in perfectly healthy people. Yet, how can confabulators so often appear to be of sound mind, yet not see their own errors?

This book brings together some of the most advanced thinking on confabulation in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy, in an attempt to understand this phenomenon; what are the clinical symptoms of each type of confabulation? Which brain functions are damaged in clinical confabulators? What are the neuropsychological characteristics of each type? What causes confabulation in healthy individuals? One reason why the study of confabulation is important is that there is wide agreement that the malfunctions that produce confabulation are malfunctions in significant, high-level cognitive processes.

With contributions from a range of leading psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and philosophers, the book develops an interdisciplinary dialogue that promises to increase our understanding of confabulatory neurological patients, and perhaps help us better understand memory, consciousness, and human nature itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199208913
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/11/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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

1. Introduction: what is confabulation?, William Hirstein2. Confabulation in anterior communicating artery syndrome, John DeLuca3. False memories: a kind of confabulation in non-clinical subjects, Maryanne Garry, Lauren French & Elizabeth Loftus4. The cognitive consequences of forces confabulation: evidence from studies of eyewitness suggestibility, Quin M Chrobak & Maria S Zaragoza5. Confabulation and ego functions; the 'ego dysequilibrium theory', Todd Feinberg6. 'That's not my arm, Doctor': accounting for misidentifications with a two-phase theory, William Hirstein & V S Ramachandran7. Delusional confabulations and self-deception, Alfred Mele8. Confabulation as a psychiatric symptom, Elvira Lorente, Peter McKenna & German Berrios9. Confabulation and delusion, Max Coltheart & Martha Turner10. Anosognosia for hemiplegia: a confabulatory state, Kenneth Heilman11. Everyday confabulation, Thalia Wheatley12. Temporal consciousness and confabulation: escape from unconscious explanatory idols, Gianfranco Dalla Barba13. Distentangling the motivational theories of confabulation, Aikaterini Fotopoulou

Editorial Reviews

Picked as one of The New Scientist's Best Books of 2009!

From the Publisher