Confabulations are false claims that a teller deeply believes to be true. They are a symptom of many brain diseases and types of damage that affect memory and sensory perception, but they can also occur in a mild form in healthy people.
Why? Because your brain is an unreliable narrator. It doesn't understand truth as we often define it—aligning with fact or reality. Instead, it functions on personal truth: facts and reality that sift through the filter of our personal biases and perceptions about the world.
These hacks and shortcuts (referred to as cognitive errors, in psychology) can lead our brains to essentially tell us lies and lead us to make errors in our thinking, decisions and interpretations. In turn, this distorted thinking can show up in the way in which we behave, the actions we take or the actions we avoid.
Lying Changes the Brain
Nature Neuroscience reported a study of the amygdala, the part of the brain dealing with emotional responses. The researchers said the amygdala shows up less and less, as we lie more and more. Essentially, our guilt feelings tend to weaken and shrink.
Although several brain areas appear to play a role in deception, the most consistent finding across multiple fMRI studies is that activity in the prefrontal cortex increases when people lie.
Lying arises from hedonistic nature of humans that to avoid pain and to increase pleasure. It can be also seen that we lies not only for personal gains but also for others gain too. That is to avoid harm affecting ourselves and to avoid hurting others.
While most people are generally honest, even those who subscribe to honesty engage in deception sometimes. Studies show that the average person lies several times a day.
While some people lie more frequently than others, it is not typically a sign of a mental health condition. Pathological lying is different. It may be a sign of an underlying mental health condition, such as a personality disorder.
Schnider. Because there is no intent to deceive and nothing to be gained, confabulation is sometimes referred to as “honest lying” by researchers. Confabulation usually happens after a brain injury, whether from trauma, a stroke, or a tumor.
For many lies, the reasons are complicated. Sometimes it's to protect the liar from being punished, or to protect someone else from punishment. The lie might be to avoid being embarrassed, to hide an awkward situation, or to simply have others think better of the person telling the fib.
In many cases, our thoughts can be deceiving, faulty, or even unhelpful. These distorted thinking patterns cause negative feelings, which can enhance some issues ranging from depression and anxiety to concerns such as eating disorders.
By telling you lies, anxiety works its way deep inside your brain and takes hold until you begin to believe the lies. They begin to seem like the truth. The lies are often so numerous, far beyond these 12 examples, and so vicious that it can be hard to recognize them for what they are: lies that anxiety tells you.
Intrusive thoughts or believing things that aren't actually true can happen if you have anxiety. For example, you may be so fearful or worried about something happening, you start believing it absolutely will happen.
Pathological lying is a symptom of various personality disorders, including antisocial, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders. Other conditions, such as borderline personality disorder, may also lead to frequent lies, but the lies themselves are not considered pathological.
Guilt is most likely when the liar shares values and respects the target of the lie. It is much harder to lie or cheat someone who has acted fairly. But if the wages are too low, the spouse cold and inconsiderate, the parent too strict – the liar may feel entitled to cheat, and feel no guilt about doing so.
Confabulation won't go away unless the underlying condition is addressed. Doctors can treat some conditions. For example, Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome is treated with vitamin B1. Other conditions lack effective treatments.
You can find a way to experience enough safety to tell the truth. You can learn how lying was a trauma response. You can learn about trauma and the impact it has on your life. Through healing the trauma, you can have more options about your behavior, including decrease to extinguishing the lying behavior.
The lie motif in schizophrenia seems to come into being through the attribution process of taking the others' blame on ones' own shoulders, which has been pointed out to be common in the guilt experience in schizophrenia.
Delusional disorder is a type of mental health condition in which a person can't tell what's real from what's imagined. There are many types, including persecutory, jealous and grandiose types. It's treatable with psychotherapy and medication.
Deception occurs when you deceive, a word that comes from the Latin de- meaning "from" and capere, meaning "to take." When you deceive someone, the result may be taking — like items you don't really need from people willing to give them, believing they are helping you.
In this view, self-deception can arise from, for example, selective attention, biased information search, or forgetting. In the second definition, self-deception is a motivatedfalse belief that persists in spite of disconfirming evidence[e.g.7,8].