Life is a series of events. On their basis, people compose stories, passing on their life experiences to children and grandchildren. They become precious memories, pearls of days gone by. There are many dreamers who tend to embellish these events, there are many modest people who are silent about what happened. In principle, this is the norm. But what to do when a person begins to live events that have never happened? False memories are confabulations, memory disorders, followed by amnesia.
General term
Translated from Latin confabulari translates as "stories", "chatter." Therefore, we can assume that confabulations are memories of events, facts that occurred in reality, but were transferred to other time frames or combined with incredible, fictional stories.
That's just experts in the field of psychology do not think so. In 1866, Karl Kalbaum, a well-known German psychiatrist, introduced the concept of confabulation to psychiatry. He believed that confabulation is a type of paramnesia (impaired memory, manifested in false memories), which consists in the fact that a person reports events that have never happened in his life.
In psychiatry, there is still such a thing as pseudo-reminiscence - when a person talks about what really once happened, but he doesn’t remember exactly when. This is also a violation of memory, which received the beautiful name "illusion of memories." However, modern psychiatry combines both confabulations and pseudo-reminiscences under the general term “confabulations”.
What is this?
This term describes memory disorders. Such conditions are often accompanied by amnesia. A person begins to forget about the events that really happened to him, they are replaced by fictional stories. With such fictions, the patient is trying to fill the empty spaces in his memory. But confabulations do not always occur when there are gaps in memory. Sometimes such conditions are the result of illnesses or a protective psychological reaction that can be used consciously.
Contents of memories
Often, confabulation memories have fantastic content, but psychiatrists point out that this is not entirely true. In total, there are three “genres” of confabulation. It:
- Eknestic confabulations. Memories in which a person completely loses the concept of his age, about what happened to him in childhood or more recently. You can even say that the patient falls out of the flow of time. This kind of memory is characteristic of progressive amnesia.
- Mnemonic. Man replaces current events with false memories. Turns over the features of everyday life and professional activities. This is typical for patients who have memory spaces.
- Fantastic. Such memories are simply teeming with implausible stories. Characteristic of paraphrenic syndrome, a variety of paranoid condition.
Origin
Confabulations do not occur out of the blue. Each memory has its own origin:
- Delusional . Occur in a paranoid state in patients with delusions.
- Inspired . Such memories are provoked and characteristic of people suffering from Korsakov's syndrome.
- Mnestic . Confabulations of this type replace memory spaces; they can relate to both the past and the present.
- Oneiric . These memories arise when a person has a serious consciousness disorder.
- Expansive . They can be "boasted" only by people with megalomania.
- Onyric . Derived from oneiric confabulations. Occur when the disease disappears.
Also, confabulations can be spontaneous or provoked or occur under the influence of narcotic substances. The latter are often accompanied by vocal hallucinations.
Causes of occurrence
It is believed that confabulations occur due to impaired memory, that is, they can be present with:
- traumatic brain injury;
- ischemic stroke (when brain vessels are affected);
- Korsakov's syndrome;
- atherosclerosis (cerebral);
- vascular dementia;
- diseases of Parkinson, Alzheimer, Huntington, Peak;
- psychosis
- intoxication.
The reasons for confabulation can be not only physical abnormalities. There are times when the substitution of memories is a completely conscious decision that a person made in order to protect himself. Of course, this is difficult to understand: how can consciously swap fragments of memory ?! But the human body is a unique and not yet fully studied creation of nature, and if doctors say that this is possible, then this also happens.
Syndromes
Confabulation in psychology is not a fully understood phenomenon. Each year, researchers learn more and more about it. Usually it manifests itself as an oral statement, action, or in extreme cases gestures. A person who suffers from a substitution of memories is no different from the rest. However, symptoms of confabulation have some characteristics. First, when talking about some events, a person begins to intertwine them with fairy tales, historical facts, or other aspects of semantic memory. Secondly, the events are too fantastic, and the patient expounds them very consistently. Thirdly, when changing memories there is no hidden motivation. Changing his memories, the patient is guided by practical experience, but does not realize that there is a distortion or unreliability of the statement.
For example, the patient may know that when it rains, you need to open the umbrella. However, the opened umbrella will not help from falling stones, but for a person with confabulation this does not matter.
Diagnostics
In laboratory conditions, it is impossible to control confabulations, which occur spontaneously. In order to investigate this deviation, it is necessary to deliberately trigger bouts of substitution of memories, only in this way it is possible to determine errors and distortions of memory.
Confabulations can also be detected using the Diz - Rodiger - McDermott paradigm. All participants in the experiment are given the opportunity to listen to a recording on which there are several lists of words related thematically, and after the participants are asked to recall words from a specific list, and if they name one that never sounded there, then this is a manifestation of confabulation.
Confabulations can be diagnosed using recognition tasks and memories. During the recognition experiment, participants are shown cards with pictures, some of them are shown several times, and the rest appear only once. Then the patients are asked to indicate the pictures that they saw before, and if the participant selects an image that has not been shown twice, this indicates false memories.
Diagnostics is also carried out using tasks of memories. That is, the participants in the experiment are asked to tell everyone known stories (fairy tales, historical data or events from life that are known to researchers). If distortions of facts appear in the true story, then such errors may also indicate confabulation.
Treatment
The treatment of confabulation directly depends on the source, which entailed the substitution of memories. Therefore, it must be started by eliminating the root cause of the disease. After the underlying disease is cured, the patient should undergo a course of psychotherapy. This will help to adapt and restore genuine memory. In addition, the patient is prescribed vitamins, antioxidants and nootropic drugs, which accelerate the recovery of the central nervous system.
At first glance, it might seem that confabulation is not such a serious disease: which of us does not like living in dreams? But what is a person who does not remember his life worth?