Confabulation
I had minor surgery on my left big toe on Thursday of last week. (The present discussion is about psychology and won't include any gory details!)
One really remarkable result was that I had my first clear personal experience of confabulation. Confabulation is a term for the mind's creation of false-but-plausible explanations for behavior, especially false memories that replace missing memories.
For example, someone who's lost memories might make up other memories to replace them (and then believe that the confabulated memories were real). People who've suffered from some kinds of paralysis, had split brain surgery, or (in a smaller number of cases, as I understand it) people who've had amputations all may sometimes confabulate explanations for how their body is behaving. Someone will ask them why they did something, or why they didn't do something, and so on. And the patients may respond with a completely wrong story that they completely believe. I don't have a good example of that, but I believe Oliver Sacks and others have written about quite a few cases.
The other situation I know where people may confabulate is posthypnotic suggestion. Supposedly people acting on or influenced by posthypnotic suggestions will naturally come up with rationalizations for their behavior that may have nothing to do with hypnosis (and may not have been part of the suggestion at all). But they don't think of themselves as rationalizing at all. They think they're just providing the correct explanation of what happened, of what they just did. (Douglas Adams has a somewhat over-the-top example of confabulation with hypnosis in one of his Dirk Gently books.)
My impression is that a key element of confabulation is that it is seamless and unconscious. That is, a confabulator isn't struggling to lie, or making any conscious effort to lie; and the confabulation is indistinguishable from a true memory or a correct explanation.
Here's how my confabulation went. My toe had been anesthetized with a local anesthetic. When the procedure was over, I stood up and started talking to Zack. I discussed with him whether or not I could walk comfortably. "Well, I really don't want to put any weight on my toe", I said. "I probably could, but I would rather keep all my weight off it and keep holding it in the air."
Having said this, I looked down at my foot and found that my toe was resting on the ground, and that I was already putting weight on it. I had misinterpreted the anesthesia as a deliberate decision on my part to hold my toe off the ground -- but of course I was doing no such thing, and I had made no such deliberate decision. In fact, I was standing perfectly normally. It was just the anesthetic that prevented me from feeling any weight on the toe. So I figured that if my toe felt like I was holding it off the ground, it must be off the ground and I must have chosen to hold it there.
Some people have suggested that most of our beliefs and most of the things we say are confabulations, that confabulation is actually our normal method of thinking.
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