Confabulation
I’ve been listening to President Biden and he sometimes errs about his experiences and ranking in law school, what happened during his vice presidential tenure, and even having had cancer (which he did not). I’m not making any political judgments.
What I am doing is pointing out an interesting phenomenon that affects many of us and is represented by a truly wonderful word: confabulation.
Confabulation is the fabrication of imaginary experiences to compensate for actual memory loss, and we come to believe those experiences as being true because we use them to explain what we otherwise don’t remember and repeat them so often that we believe them, deeply. They become “reality” for us.
We all know about the third-stringer on the bench who believes he was in the championship football game in high school, and perhaps actually caught the winning touchdown pass. We’re told by people they’ve visited countries they’ve never set foot in, seen performances they’ve never attended, and received plaudits for successes they’ve never had.
The intention is not deceit (although sometimes it is, see the story of George Santos), but the condition is considered a neuropsychiatric disorder. Hillary Clinton seemed certain she had landed in a war zone under sniper fire. Newscaster Brian Williams cited many false experiences around his experiences in the Iraqi War, such as landing with a Seal team.
Did these people lie, or simply tell the story to fill in poor memories so often that they actually believe it? Have you ever had people tell you, “That was a great story, but that’s not the way it happened!”?
Well, that’s enough from me, I have to see if Michelle Pfeiffer, whom I met on an elevator once and asked for my card, has left me a message yet.
