The Confabulating Mind: How the Brain Creates Reality

Confabulations are recitations of events and experiences that never happened, ranging from incorrect responses to questions to a blatant confusion of reality. The Confabulating Mind provides the most up-to-date account of the causes, anatomical basis, and mechanisms of the phenomenon of false memories.

In this significant update on the first edition, the author analyses new and diverse examples of striking clinical cases, discusses children’s sense of reality, and incorporates his research on a distinct form of confabulation that is characterized by a confusion of reality. The book also examines other forms such as deja-vu, paramnesic misidentification, and anosognosia; looks at false memories as they occur in healthy people; and considers how the brain uses orbitofrontal reality filtering to create reality. By re-tracing the history of confabulations and integrating the latest insights into the mechanisms of confabulations, it summarises current interpretations of confabulations before making recommendations for future study.

This book is important reading for neurologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and other scientists and clinicians interested in the organization of memory and thought.

Armin Schnider, Professor and Chairman of Neurorehabilitation, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University Hospital of Geneva

Armin Schnider is Professor and Chairman of Neurorehabilitation at the University Hospital of Geneva. He completed his medical degree at the University of Basle, then went on to specialise in neurology in Bern, Zurich, and Los Angeles. His primary research interests are memory disorders, the neurobiological foundations of confabulations and reality control in thinking.