Confabulation, Repression, and Memory Replacement: Remembering Creatively

The specific purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the factors that would permit an individual to dissociate himself from his true identity, including at a minimum threshold the change in knowledge of some personal events. It is not required that a person believe he is superman to have dissociated from his true identity; all that is required to fit the definition is for the person to blot out a memory of a single event and replace it with another. If someone goes to the store and buys apples yet distinctly remembers buying pears, this would be a perfect example of the phenomenon. With this scenario in mind, this paper asks: what could make a person replace an existing memory with a new one?

The two main concepts involved in this discussion are confabulation and repression. A secondary factor called the “misinformation effect” can provide additional elucidation on the subject. Confabulation is the falsification of memory in which gaps in recall are filled by fabrications that the generating individual accepts as fact (APA, 2006). Patients with confabulatory disorders have been known to fabricate information, remember the confabulation, be presented with proof of the truth and continue to believe their initial confabulation. Sometimes this disparity causes them to produce a secondary confabulation to justify the first one (Gilboa et al., 2006). The process of secondary confabulation brings to mind a tongue-in-cheek witticism attributed to a fictitious philosopher who observed that “No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated”.  Repression is a psychological defense mechanism in which painful experiences are removed from consciousness (APA, 2006).

A low intensity form of confabulation is a very common phenomenon that can be best observed through the children's game of “broken telephone”. One child whispers a phrase in another's ear and due to noise from fidgeting and giggling the recipient receives only a portion of the original message intact. The receiving child must then translate the garbled message into a coherent phrase and will attempt to infer the first child's intention. More often than not this inference will be incorrect and a similar sounding, but corrupted message will be transmitted. When the second child tries to edit the garbled portions of the message into something coherent he is confabulating: skipping over the unintelligible phonemes leaves gaps in the word; the new phonemes that make the word different are pure fabrications to fill in these gaps in his recall. The addition of new phonemes is an example of provoked confabulation.

Frederick Bartlett was a British psychologist who worked in the period following World War I. His work is significant in that he was one of the first to study the combination of confabulation and repression in some form. One of his other interests was anthropology and he wanted to study similarities and differences in cultures through the differences in very similar folk tales (Bartlett, 1920). Many cultures, for example, have stories about the creation of the world or of a great flood that destroyed everything except for a family in a boat with animals. He surmised that over generations of retelling the original story had become corrupted, hence the differences in the legends. Bartlett was one of the first researchers to study confabulation.

To simulate the transmission of a folk tale he first adapted a Native American folk story entitled The War of the Ghosts. The adapted version of the story was very short but contained a lot of confusing language: it used many unfamiliar words, much vague language, did not make clear which characters were speaking and was overall very difficult to read.

Bartlett had subjects read the story and asked them to write down what they remembered at various intervals, sometimes extending to months, afterward. He noticed a pattern in the sort of corruptions and with the help of observations about the subjects during the reproduction sessions came to the conclusion that people have a concept about how things should be and that images that contradict that schema are uncomfortable and are quickly amended to less offensive images. The jerky flow of the narrative was very uncomfortable for the subjects and was often “corrected” with both errors of omission and errors of commission (Bartlett, 1928). The conclusion that the presentation of confusing material often results in errors of commission has been corroborated in more recent controlled experiments (Loftus et al., 1978). This phenomenon is called the misinformation effect.

One of the first things Bartlett noticed was that his subjects felt a need to “rationalize” the experience: they needed to integrate the confusing information into their schema of the world in a way that the inconsistencies of the story would disappear and there would be no more nagging questions. Many subjects simply remarked that the story was “not English” or “a dream”. One exemplary subject passed the story off as “a murder concealment dream” and in his subsequent reproductions, corrupted the story to better fit the schema he had established.

Brewer and Treyens set up an experiment to show the effects of schema congruity on memory. The experimenters made individual subjects wait in their office for a short while and then took them out and asked them to list as many objects that were in the office as they could. The objects that fit the schema of the office were remembered by a greater number of subjects than the objects unusual for an office were (skull, picnic basket, bottle of wine). Some office schema objects that had not been present were also listed by many subjects (Brewer & Treyens, 1981).

An experiment by Attali et al. further demonstrated Bartlett’s findings that incongruity of experience with the existing schema, rather than mere gaps in knowledge contribute to confabulation. The experimenters had three kinds of information for Alzheimer’s and non-Alzheimer’s subjects to hear and be tested on: commonly known fairy tales, brand new fairy tales, and familiar fairy tales that have been altered in content to clash with the original story i.e. Goldilocks enters a house belonging to dogs and eats all of their spaghetti. The results were that in both groups there was more confabulatory and “I don’t know” responses for the altered fairy tales than for the completely knew fairy tales, which would contain more gaps in knowledge. This experiment shows that gaps in memory AND schema conflict contribute to confabulation and forgetting (Attalli et al., 2009).

More potent forms of confabulation are less common and are associated with memory loss conditions, primarily Alzheimer's Disease (AD), Korsakoff's Syndrome (KS) and various strokes and aneurysms in the brain. Confabulation was first described in 1887 by Russian neurologist Sergei Korsakoff concerning certain heavily alcoholic patients who often made up anecdotes about their past (Borsutzky et al., 2008). As a result of brain damage from malnutrition and alcoholism, KS patients have severe memory impairments. Patients often develop both anterograde and retrograde amnesia (Korsakoff's Syndrome, 2006) which often leads to a feeling of temporo-spatial distortion (Kopelman, 2009); about a quarter of KS patients require hospitalization.