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Why is the brain prone to florid forms of confabulation?
aeon.co ^ | Jules Montague

Posted on 04/18/2017 7:08:34 AM PDT by BenLurkin

She had visited Madonna’s mansion the week before, Maggie told me during my ward round. Helped her choose outfits for the tour. The only problem was that Maggie was a seamstress in Dublin. She had never met Madonna; she had never provided her with sartorial advice on cone brassieres. Instead, an MRI scan conducted a few days earlier – when Maggie arrived at the ER febrile and agitated – revealed encephalitis, a swelling of the brain.

Now she was confabulating, conveying false memories induced by injury to her brain. Not once did Maggie doubt that she was a seamstress to the stars, no matter how incongruous those stories seemed. And that’s the essence of confabulation: the critical faculty of doubt is compromised. These honest lies were Maggie’s truth.

In its most extreme form, confabulation emerges from brain damage caused by encephalitis, strokes, trauma, or thiamine deficiency caused by chronic alcohol dependence. Some confabulators with these conditions produce bizarre fabrications: they recount past lives as spaceship captains or report aliens on UFOs.

...

...deliver nuanced elaborations and embellishments, or simply scramble their facts – a bit like the rest of us. Our intuitions often carry an automatic feeling of rightness; we immediately accept them to be plausible.

But for those without brain damage, the brain tends to inspect information and perceptions that simply couldn’t be true. Could I really have seen a kangaroo on the road to Edinburgh? We set such information aside unconsciously for further fact-checking using ‘doubt tags’ traced by neuroscientists to the orbitofrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex towards the front of the brain. Such tags tell us: ‘There might be something fishy here.’ These regions are disrupted in confabulators with brain injury who have trouble applying doubt tags even in the face of outrageous ideas and thoughts.

(Excerpt) Read more at aeon.co ...


TOPICS: Health/Medicine
KEYWORDS: braininjury; confabulation; memory
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To: jiggyboy

I’ve had dreams that seemed so real that I had a hard time realizing that they didn’t actually happen. The brain is an amazing thing!


21 posted on 04/18/2017 8:32:39 AM PDT by Twotone (Truth is hate to those who hate truth.)
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To: jiggyboy

So, you went to Michigan Tech too?


22 posted on 04/18/2017 9:13:28 AM PDT by Kommodor (Terrorist, Journalist or Democrat? I can't tell the difference.)
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To: jiggyboy
For example, how can a man, maybe in his 40s, dream that he's still in college or even high school, naked, walking down the hallway, wondering how it is that he's going to the final exam for a class he just remembered he had but never went to the entire semester?

And all this time I thought it was just me...

Or when I dream about a person that I have known all of my life but had never met before.

23 posted on 04/18/2017 9:17:59 AM PDT by rjsimmon (The Tree of Liberty Thirsts)
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To: DocRock

Alcoholics go to meetings...drunks die or go to the lockup ward


24 posted on 04/18/2017 10:23:43 AM PDT by Nifster (I see puppy dogs in the clouds)
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To: jiggyboy

I hate that dream.


25 posted on 04/18/2017 10:29:48 AM PDT by Defiant (The media is the colostomy bag where truth goes after democrats digest it.)
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To: jiggyboy

Those are actually not all that uncommon, I’ve dreamed them myself. I went through a period of years when I was fascinated by lucid dreaming, though, and did manage to take control of my dreams, which could be very amusing up to a point, for instance “remembering” that I could fly by holding my arms straight out, clenching my fists and thinking really hard to will myself up. Sometimes had to jump a bit to get it going but it always worked. But, there was a point not to go beyond when dabbling with this, kind of like staring into the abyss too long and discovering that it’s staring back at you. I stopped doing it, found it disturbing. I think that’s what drove Carlos Castaneda nuts. Merging the dream state and the waking state is ultimately a dangerous thing.


26 posted on 04/18/2017 10:32:57 AM PDT by RegulatorCountry
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To: BenLurkin

That explains so much about my mother. Her lies, to her, were facts.


27 posted on 04/18/2017 1:22:28 PM PDT by Excellence (Marine mom since April 11, 2014)
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To: BenLurkin

“In its most extreme form, confabulation emerges from brain damage caused by encephalitis, strokes, trauma, or thiamine deficiency caused by chronic alcohol dependence.”

In other words, there are any number of factors that could explain Hillary’s constant lying on the campaign trail.


28 posted on 04/18/2017 1:31:12 PM PDT by Boogieman
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To: BenLurkin

two years ago i found the 50ish woman next door out in front of my house all dressed up and ranting and raving, kept calling some guys name over and over.
After about 45 minutes of this i went up to her and asked her if everything was all right and who was she looking for.
She said Walter or somebody was picking her up to go see the boy band One Direction concert and he was late, this was at like 8am on a Tuesday morning.
After she calmed down a bit she told me the boy band had spent the night at her house, had a great time and that she had a secret, told me not to think that she was a pedophileor anything but that she had a serious crush on band member Harry Styles, I’m like oooookkk, and told her have fun at the concert.

A while later i was talking to another neighbor about what had happened, this neighbor had the the crazy woman mothers phone # and said she has a history of mental illness since after her husband left her.

Next day i find her being carted off in an ambulance never to be seen again.
Talking to the movers a few days after that one mover told me the whole house was full of One Direction posters and Harry’s name written everywhere.

Anyways, Was a weird day...


29 posted on 04/18/2017 1:50:17 PM PDT by mowowie
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To: mowowie

Fan Goil


30 posted on 04/18/2017 1:52:27 PM PDT by BenLurkin (The above is not a statement of fact. It is either satire or opinion. Or both.)
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To: BenLurkin

Thank you so much for leading me to the source site. This is a fantastic article and I am going to use it as a warning to all...especially those being medicated.

Spiritual emergency

After decades of practising as a psychotherapist, I am convinced that our treatment of psychosis is thoroughly wrong-headed

https://aeon.co/essays/treating-acute-psychosis-with-drugs-can-prolong-the-anguish


31 posted on 04/18/2017 3:52:20 PM PDT by huldah1776 ( Vote Pro-life! Allow God to bless America before He avenges the death of the innocent.)
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To: mowowie

Please see my post #30 :)


32 posted on 04/18/2017 3:53:31 PM PDT by huldah1776 ( Vote Pro-life! Allow God to bless America before He avenges the death of the innocent.)
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To: huldah1776

Pretty interesting article.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that this woman’s problem started occurring soon after suffering apparent trauma during her marriage and divorce.
My other neighbor told me she used to be a completely normal fun loving woman, would come over and hang out on her back porch and drink wine by the fire a lot.
She said something changed suddenly and soon after the marriage ended the woman completely changed, became a recluse.
Apparently the ambulance started showing up on a regular basis, she would spend weeks at a time in the hospital.
Like i said she absolutely believed that she hosted the boy band at her house the night before, that she had back stage passes for their Tues morning concert that next day.
Be interesting to know what happened during that marriage that may have triggered her.
Betrayal?
Abuse?


33 posted on 04/18/2017 5:39:39 PM PDT by mowowie
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To: mowowie

could have triggered old buried memories.


34 posted on 04/18/2017 5:44:02 PM PDT by huldah1776 ( Vote Pro-life! Allow God to bless America before He avenges the death of the innocent.)
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