Confabulation: views from neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy

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could see, the amputee convinced that he retained all his limbs, to the patient who believed that his own parents had been replaced by imposters.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 app…