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I am grateful to Dr. Tallberg for her case examples and her psycholinguistic analysis of speech events.
The topic of confabulation is vast and profound. It touches on how the brain registers and constructs reality, which is important both to psychoanalysts and to neuroscientists. The original observations of confabulation in amnesic patients suggested a disorder induced by brain damage. Yet a basic question has been: is confabulation per se a process caused by certain kinds of brain damage? Or is confabulation a normal process of human mentation, which is usually subject to certain controls, and when the brain is damaged, the controls are impaired or eliminated, yielding exaggerated versions of a normal process?
The data on confabulation are quite complex and come from different sources. To simplify matters, various scientists have attempted to exclude, by definition, certain manifestations of confabulation. For example, some would exclude psychosis (DeLuca, 2000; Johnson, Hayes, D'Esposito, & Raye, 2000), an exclusion that I oppose. In a previous discussion (Blechner, 2000), I drew the distinction between wide-gaze and narrowgaze approaches to confabulation. I argued then that the more manifestations of confabulation we consider, in people with and without known brain injury, the more accurate will our theory be. I suggested, for example, that we all confabulate in our dreams. We work out stories that never happened, although, as with waking confabulation in those who are brain-injured, many elements of the story can be based on actual experiences drawn from different time periods in our lives.
In this discussion, I would like to widen our gaze even further and consider other manifestations of confabulation in populations that have no detectable brain injury. I intend to show that confabulation per se is