artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root-one that is
exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment. Both liars and
artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief - a skill
requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and
performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my
book on lying.
C. A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the
story of a middle-aged
woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent
speech, but what she
actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of
contemporary
events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. In the
language of psychiatry, this woman was
“confabulating”. Chronic confabulation
is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of
brain
damaged people. In the literature it is defined as "the production of fabricated,
distorted or
misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the
conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas
amnesiacs make errors of omission,
there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill –
confabulators
make errors of commission: they make tilings up. Rather than forgetting, they
are inventing.
Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own
condition, and will earnestly give absurdly
implausible explanations of why
