Confabulation - the easiest way to define it is the occurrence of false memories in people. They are usually not "extra" memories, but they come in to fill existing memory gaps. It would seem that confabulation is a typically psychiatric problem, but due to its causes, it is actually more often encountered by neurology specialists. Read what exactly is confabulation and how it is treated.
Contents:
- Confabulation: what is it?
- Confabulation: causes
- Confabulation: treatment
Confabulationis included in the group of qualitative memory disorders (paramnesia), and in an even more precise division, confabulations are treated as alleged memories (pseudomnesia). The first description of memory disorders in the form of confabulation appeared in 1889, its author was a Russian psychiatrist and neurologist, Wiktor Korsakov. The name of this problem comes from the Latin wordfabulari , which can be translated as "talk" or "fairy tale".
It has already been mentioned that confabulations belong to the group of memory disorders associated with the appearance of alleged memories. Generally speaking, it can be said that confabulations occur due to the existence of memory gaps in patients - confabulation is a false memory, the task of which is to fill various "holes" in human memory.
Confabulation: what is it?
Confabulations can take various forms. For example, when asked about what he did yesterday, a patient may talk about spending a good time by the lake, while … he was resting at home all day.
Another example of confabulation is a situation in which a person is asked, for example, what kind of departure from his past he liked the most. The confabulating patient may then answer that the most wonderful trip in his life was a trip to Africa, he may even tell in detail what attractions he experienced in this country, and at the same time, in fact … such a person could never really go abroad.
The confabulating patient does not deliberately mislead other people, moreover - the person is not aware that his memories are false.
Confabulations can also consist ofclumps of various memories, but reproduced in an incorrect way (e.g. a conversation with a loved one that was conducted a year ago may be treated as an event that took place the previous day).
However, they can also be completely fantastic in nature, as in the above-mentioned example with travels or, for example, when a person without a driving license starts to tell how he traveled in a car on roads at dizzying speeds in the past.
There are two main types of confabulation. The first and most frequent of these are provoked confabulations, which are related to the fact that the patient is asked a question and he answers it, but there are false memories in the statements. On the other hand, spontaneous confabulations are much rarer, in which the patient begins to tell his false memories by himself.
Confabulation: causes
Patients may experience confabulation in a number of different pathologies. First of all, filling memory gaps with false memories occurs in those people who suffer from individuals directly related to impaired memory processes, such as amnesia, dementia (such as Alzheimer's disease) or Korsakoff's syndrome.
Other conditions that result in brain damage can also lead to confabulation. The causes of confabulation are especially taken into account where the right frontal lobe of the brain and the structures of the corpus callosum are damaged.
Not mentioned so far, as well as potential reasons for the occurrence of false memories, may be:
- tumors of the central nervous system,
- head injury,
- damage (e.g. related to aneurysm rupture) of blood vessels supplying the aforementioned structures of the brain.
Sometimes confabulations also appear in patients who suffer from some mental diseases - such a situation can be encountered especially in people who suffer from schizophrenia. You can also encounter confabulations in children. In this group of patients, however, false memories are not usually related to the occurrence of any disease, but result from incomplete memory control in children as well as from its immaturity.
Confabulation: treatment
In fact, confabulations themselves cannot be treated - they are not a disease in themselves, but rather their occurrence can be treated as a symptom of one of the diseases mentioned earlier. For this reason, it is most important in patients experiencing confabulationthere is treatment for those individuals that led to this memory impairment.
For example, in patients with Korsakoff's syndrome (caused by chronic alcohol abuse and associated with vitamin B1 deficiency), it is necessary to start supplementing the vitamin deficiency, as well as to maintain abstinence from alcohol.
There are times when the patient cannot find the reason for the confabulation. In this case, it is possible to use the so-called cognitive rehabilitation (rehabilitation of cognitive functions), thanks to which not only the functioning of the patient's memory can improve, but also his ability to concentrate or improve motor coordination and language skills.
About the authorBow. Tomasz NęckiA graduate of medicine at the Medical University of Poznań. An admirer of the Polish sea (most willingly strolling along its shores with headphones in his ears), cats and books. In working with patients, he focuses on always listening to them and spending as much time as they need.