Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Philosophical Psychopathology) [Paperback]

William Hirstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 2006 | Series: Philosophical Psychopathology

Some neurological patients exhibit a striking tendency to confabulate -- to construct false answers to a question while genuinely believing that they are telling the truth. A stroke victim, for example, will describe in detail a conference he attended over the weekend when in fact he has not left the hospital. Normal people, too, sometimes have a tendency to confabulate; rather than admitting "I don't know," some people will make up an answer or an explanation and express it with complete conviction. In Brain Fiction, William Hirstein examines confabulation and argues that its causes are not merely technical issues in neurology or cognitive science but deeply revealing about the structure of the human intellect.Hirstein describes confabulation as the failure of a normal checking or censoring process in the brain -- the failure to recognize that a false answer is fantasy, not reality. Thus, he argues, the creative ability to construct a plausible-sounding response and some ability to check that response are separate in the human brain. Hirstein sees the dialectic between the creative and checking processes -- "the inner dialogue" -- as an important part of our mental life. In constructing a theory of confabulation, Hirstein integrates perspectives from different fields, including philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology to achieve a natural mix of conceptual issues usually treated by philosophers with purely empirical issues; information about the distribution of certain blood vessels in the prefrontal lobes of the brain, for example, or the behavior of split-brain patients can shed light on the classic questions of philosophy of mind, including questions about the function of consciousness. This first book-length study of confabulation breaks ground in both philosophy and cognitive science.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Both a neuroscientist and a philosopher, William Hirstein writes from his unique vantage point with great scholarship, precision, and clarity to tackle some of the deeper mysteries of the human mind. *Brain Fiction* is full of profound insights, and I recommend it to all who wish to better understand our human nature."--Fredric Schiffer, M. D., Harvard Medical School, author of *Of Two Minds*

"Hirstein has packed a wealth of scientific information into this book." John Bickle Journal of Consciousness Studies

' Brain Fiction offers one of the most extensive accounts of false memories and perceptions.' Armin Schnider Science

"Hirstein has packed a wealth of scientific information into this book." John Bickle Journal of Consciousness Studies

" Brain Fiction offers one of the most extensive accounts of false memories and perceptions." Armin Schnider Science

"The most comprehensive treatment of the subject of confabulation ever written, Hirstein's *Brain Fiction* represents a pathbreaking and bold synthesis of philosophy and neuroscience. I expect it will prove to be a major resource for scholars and students of this fascinating and important subject for years to come."--Todd E. Feinberg, M. D., Professor of Clincal Psychiatry and Neurology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, author of *Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self*

From the Inside Flap

"The most comprehensive treatment of the subject of confabulation ever written, Hirstein's *Brain Fiction* represents a pathbreaking and bold synthesis of philosophy and neuroscience. I expect it will prove to be a major resource for scholars and students of this fascinating and important subject for years to come."
--Todd E. Feinberg, M. D., Professor of Clincal Psychiatry and Neurology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, author of *Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self*

"Both a neuroscientist and a philosopher, William Hirstein writes from his unique vantage point with great scholarship, precision, and clarity to tackle some of the deeper mysteries of the human mind. *Brain Fiction* is full of profound insights, and I recommend it to all who wish to better understand our human nature."
--Fredric Schiffer, M. D., Harvard Medical School, author of *Of Two Minds* --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 301 pages
• Publisher: A Bradford Book (August 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262582716
• ISBN-13: 978-0262582711
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,161,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating and important study, May 29, 2005

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Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Philosophical Psychopathology) (Hardcover)

To anyone interested in modern research in neuroscience, this book will be of great interest. Confabulation, the topic discussed in the book is one that was completely new to this reviewer, but the preface and jacket summary motivated the subject in a way that definitely convinces the reader that it is relevant to both neuroscience and neurophilosophy. It is important to emphasize that both of these fields are used to discuss confabulation in the book. The author is a professional philosopher, but he makes heavy use of the latest research in neuroscience, and this is refreshing, for it makes his conclusions more credible, not being ones that are arrived at solely (and therefore incorrectly), through sophisticated rhetoric and from the safety of the academic armchair.

As a phenomenon in the human mind, confabulation is rather disconcerting, and one can only feel extreme empathy for those who are afflicted with it. The author discusses several different cases of confabulation, including Korsakoff's syndrome, anosognosia, Anton's syndrome, and Capgras' syndrome. He also gives an extensive discussion of the different explanations for confabulation by various researchers. Many of these explanations are interesting, such as the one that connects confabulation with the human storytelling. Individuals concoct stories in order to engage in self-protection and self-definition, and consequently define, however inaccurately, their identities. This can be done without conscious deliberation, and its function is to solidify the personal identity of the narrator.

Another interesting explanation for confabulation that is discussed in the book considers the time scales needed for individuals to formulate decisions and then act on them. If these time scales are very short, the decision-maker cannot consider all possibilities, and minute concentration to detail is prohibited. Therefore the human mind will omit these details, eliminate any feelings of doubt from the cognitive process, and concentrate on the "big picture." Confabulation is then essentially a smoothing function, a large-scale manifestation of this process.

For the author though, confabulation is a process that cannot only be studied empirically, but can also be connected with epistemological issues in philosophy. When confabulating, the human brain is unable to check whether an answer is not real. He attempts to justify his theories by using what is known in neuroscience, with the specific goal of showing that the brain's ability to construct an appropriate response is independent of its ability to check that response.

Since the author is a professional philosopher, and not a neuroscientist, readers of a more scientific persuasion may be concerned that the discussion on epistemology will degrade into sophistry. Refreshingly though it does not, for the author gives a fascinating discussion of confabulation as an "epistemic phenomenon," but integrating it with the neuroscience of confabulation. Two epistemic mistakes are made when confabulation is present argues the author. The first one occurs in a particular knowledge domain in which a process causes a thought to occur that is "ill-grounded". The second mistake is the result of the failure to self-correct, this process of self-correction occurring in the frontal regions of the brain. All cases of confabulation involve these two mistakes argues the author, and he connects his assertions with the more general field of naturalized epistemology, the latter of which was put on a more rigorous foundation by the philosophers Alvin Goldman and W.V.O. Quine. These philosophical musings are necessary argues the author, for they allow one to distinguish between "well-grounded" and "ill-grounded" beliefs, which one must do if a successful explanation of confabulation is to be obtained. The biology of the brain though must enter into any of this theorizing, for as has been shown experimentally, damage to the areas of the brain responsible for the construction of knowledge domains, along with damage to the monitoring processes in the orbitofrontal areas of the brain, can result in confabulation.

Most interesting in this discussion on confabulation and knowledge is the author's contention that the construction of effective representations by the human brain takes place in degrees. He then discusses an appropriate consequence of this assertion, which he calls the `degraded representation principle.' This principle asserts that if the capacity to represent events of a certain type is diminished in a particular individual, then the likelihood for this individual to confabulate about these events increases.

Self-deception, a "lighter" manifestation of confabulation is discussed at the end of the book, and is, one could argue, the most prevalent form of confabulation. The author does distinguish it from clinical confabulation, and after reading this chapter this demarcation becomes justified. The person who is engaging in self-deception frequently has a greater ability to access the information that is needed to prove his belief is ill-grounded. A clinical confabulator though does not, as the processes and brain areas needed for this proof have been destroyed. Various degrees of tension also exist in the range from that of the clinical confabulator, who experiences none when making ill-grounded claims, to that of the self-deceiver who may experience a lot.

As an example of self-deception, the author offers the educator who describes himself as being better than their colleagues. It is interesting that he chose this example, since it seems that this form of self-deception is the rule rather than the exception in the halls of academia, at least from an anecdotal standpoint. This inflated view though is accompanied by the "weakness of the warrant", wherein the justification or "warrant" for the belief is very weak. An individual engaged in self-deception has beliefs that are not constructed from the most reliable collection of beliefs that his brain could deliver if it was not crippled by self-deception. The issue of course here, as it is throughout the book, concerns the human need for belief systems that can be justified or warranted. As the author points out early in the book, the avoidance of confabulation must have an evolutionary importance for the well being of the human species. Time constraints and resources though may prohibit an exhaustive check of all assumptions and beliefs.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A difficult read, August 6, 2005

By 

George I. Chandler II "George Chandler" (Los Alamos, NM United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Philosophical Psychopathology) (Hardcover)

I was attracted to the book by a review I read in (I think it was) Science, and the topic of self-deception and confabulation. As an attorney the ability to understand the factors that influence the articulated perceptions of witnesses is critical to me. As a scientist reading outside his field (physics) I was attracted by the idea of relating behavior to brain structure.

I was rewarded in the first four chapters by being able to glean a general idea about how some types of brain damage can be related to behavior. However the author's efforts to illustrate the book and describe the affected areas was hampered by his adoption without apparent modification of images from other sources that were not carefully related to the text they were intended to illustrate. I found myself attempting, with little success, to make sense of the text and the illustrations by reference to my copy of Gray's anatomy.

The problem became worse in the later chapters where the author goes into great detail on each of the syndromes by which he attempts to demonstrate his hypothesis. I eventually gave up trying to follow the arguments, lost in the morass of poorly related detail.

It may be that a person familiar with the structure of the organ and the nomenclature can better use of this book, but without some external reference the non-specialist is going to have a hard go. Maybe a sceond edition could incorporate a chapter on these topics.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Notion of Self-Deception, September 27, 2009

By 

Joshua Ross (Atlanta GA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Philosophical Psychopathology) (Paperback)

When asked to pick a book related to neuroscience, I was interested in finding one that was able to relate the two fields that I am interested in; neuroscience and neuropsychology. This book does a great job of relating these two fields in the explanation of confabulation and self-deception. Although this book was a somewhat difficult read, the topics discussed throughout the book are extremely thought-provoking. The detailed descriptions of examples of confabulation in patients along with the idea of self-deception in normal people, really made me think about all of the ways I have exhibited these same types of symptoms. Using these patient accounts, he is able to describe and thoroughly explain his definition of confabulation as "lying without the intent or knowledge that one is actually lying."
In the more scientific field of neuroscience, Hirstein describes confabulation with a set of syndromes that express confabulation. For example, in a patient with Korsakoff's syndrome, autobiographical memory is disrupted, so that this person will create confabulations to questions about themselves; how old are you, what did you do last night, and so on... There are also some other neurological syndromes defining confabulation such a anosognosia (denial of illness), Anton's syndrome (denial of blindness), and Capgras's delusion (the delusion that people to whom the patient is close have been replaced by impostors). Looking at these different disorders, Hirstein is able to come to conclusions as to where in the brain confabulation may originate, by looking at where the brain damage takes place in these patients.
In the neuropsychology field, Hirstein explains the process by which confabulation may occur. He states that there are two pathways by which our brains create a hypothesis. First, the brain generates a plausible hypothesis. Second, the brain checks this hypothesis with memory and knowledge that that person has. For a person to confabulate, both of these pathways must be damaged. For a person who is performing self-deception, there is no damage to these pathways, yet the checking process is somehow not being used. An interesting statistic used in the book was the fact that 94% of educators describe themselves as better at their job than the average colleague. Thus, obviously these educators have a self-deception rate of 44%.
What I really enjoyed about this book was how the author relates a normal person's self-deception to the clinically impaired confabulators. Hierstein suggests that there is very little difference between these two ideas, that the only difference between confabulation and self-deception is the confidence with which a person makes a claim. Confabulators have complete confidence in their claims, because their checking process' are damaged. Those who self-deceive have the ability to use memory and knowledge that may decrease this confidence in their own claims.
Although this book was exceedingly informative, I did have some problems with the way it was written. The amount of detail on each topic made the book feel very long and repetitive. I felt like, in many instances, the author kept repeating generalizations without ever making any new inferences to the overall goal of explaining confabulation. Also, although the author hints at an overall theory that may explain confabulation, the book is mostly references of incidents where confabulation occurs. Entire chapters are dedicated to these incidents, with very little conclusions made.
Overall, this book was an interesting read. The accounts told of patients who display confabulation are extremely fascinating. Hierstein is able to relate both confabulation and normal self-deception, but makes a very loose overall confabulation theory. I recommend this book for those who would like to learn more about how we create self-deceptions in our everyday lives and how specific syndromes cause people to confabulate. But an answer to the question of confabulation is mostly filled with more hypotheses and more questions.