You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Turnbull and coauthors begin with a definition of confabulation that is not universally accepted and is certainly not all-encompassing. They state that confabulation is “typically understood to represent instances of false beliefs: opinions about the world that are manifestly incorrect and yet are held by the patient to be true.” I must take issue with this circumscribed view of confabulation as simply “false beliefs.” In fact, confabulations are not always incorrect. Frequently, confabulations (especially following ventromesial frontal lesions) are actual memories (or actual events) that are temporally displaced, so that the actual item recalled may not be false. It is indeed true that patients will often vehemently defend their recollections as veridical. As such, it is not the “belief” that is false, but its accuracy (e.g., temporal context or intrusion of actual memories from different time periods such as past and present) that may be incorrect or “false” (see DeLuca, 2000a). Delusions are also false beliefs, but most confabulations from ventromesial frontal lesions are not delusions (DeLuca, 2000a).
Turnbull and coauthors provide several citations stating that the “emotion-based” account of confabulation may be central to the nature of confabulations provided. For instance, they quote Kinsbourne (2000) about the affective quality of the confabulation where patients “mostly confabulate about personal matters that are emotionally significant to them” (which as yet is not scientifically proven). They further state that in what appears to be a single case report (Fotopoulou, Solms, & Turnbull, 2004) 80% of the confabulations were of “positive affective transformations,” where the patient regularly described being engaged in business activities or “leisure” pursuits (are all business activities leisure?). This case was credited as being consistent with the work of Kaplan-Solms and Solms. However, the question must be asked, if in fact the content of confabulation co