That's Confabulous.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: PARTING THOUGHTS - Confabulation

EVERY TIME there is a family gathering, your favorite uncle entertains the relatives with the same stories. His listeners realize they are not the same stories. The tales shift; small flourishes are added; details are lost and later denied. ("Uncle, what about the cow? You mentioned the cow in the marsh last time." "No, no--there wasn't a cow. It was a goat. It's always been a goat. Why would there be a cow in the marsh?") Emotions intensify, diminish, and intensify again; the who, when, and even the where are wobbly. Is your uncle a pathological liar? Well, he might be. More likely, he is a normal human being.

Memory is not a video recorder from an omniscient position. Our memories are constructed. Because it is imperfect--and our brains want things to make sense--we fill in the blanks. There is a little of filling-in-the-blanks in almost every memory and, in extreme cases, it is called confabulation.

Karl Bonhoeffer, German psychiatrist and father of martyred pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, coined the term. Confabulation, properly used, is the unconscious attempt to fill in the blanks in memory with made-up details, identified most with alcohol-related forms of dementia. The speaker believes it is all true--but it is not. Brain damage causes inevitable errors in processing and storing memories, and the brain valiantly attempts to weave a story out of scraps.

Related to confabulation is the tendency to 'fill in the blanks" where there is no dementia and no logical reason to do so. People make up stories about other people; ruminate on them; discuss them with their companions. Later, when the subject comes up, the remembered imaginings are woven into whatever sparse facts were available originally. Electronic media has speeded up a process that used to require substantially more time and effort. The possibility of interrupting the downward spiral is much diminished.

A nearly harmless example: last year I moved my office from the high rise where I had been for 19 years to two parish-based offices. My old office furniture was not needed in either location, so I gave it away to my parish, where it apparently is very popular with the youth group at their Sunday night meetings. Imagine my surprise when I heard from various sources that I had closed my practice, semi-retired, stopped working ... you see the drift. People took one fact (she gave away her old couches and tables) and built a story around it (she retired). I have no idea how many...