Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [37]
This tendency to conflate feeling we know with actually knowing is not limited to the domain of memory. It can be evoked by any sufficiently powerful belief—and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, we have powerful beliefs about many, many things. We’ll also see in subsequent chapters how the feeling of knowing is reinforced by other factors, ranging from who we hang out with to how our brains work. For now, though, I want to look at what happens when this feeling of knowing collides with the reality of not knowing. And for that, we need to go back to where we started—to blind Hannah, who “knows” that she can see.
No doubt about it: it’s weird for a blind person to think that she can see. As it turns out, though, this particular problem—Anton’s Syndrome—is just the beginning of the weird things going on for Hannah. What’s even stranger is that she goes on to confidently describe her doctor’s clean shave and fetching tan, not to mention the location and characteristics of a nonexistent notebook. Likewise, as Justice Douglas demonstrated, many people who deny their paralysis do not stop there. If they have somehow accomplished a tricky task with one hand—say, buttoning their shirt—they will report that they did it with both. If you invite them to get up and stroll around the room with you, they’ll decline, but not by saying they can’t move. Instead, they’ll say that they would love to but their arthritis is acting up, or they slept poorly the night before, or they are a bit tired because they just returned from a round of golf. These responses are patently untrue, not to mention crazy-sounding, and yet the patients themselves are neither dishonest nor insane. They don’t set out to deceive anyone, and they don’t have any awareness that what they are saying is false. Furthermore, many of them are lucid, intelligent, articulate, and, right up until the subject of their disability arises, entirely in touch with reality. So what is going on with these people?
The answer is that they are confabulating. To confabulate means, basically, to make stuff up; the most relevant etymological ghost is the word “fable.” The confabulations that arise from brain damage are spontaneous fables. They explain things, as many fables do, but they are manifestly works of fiction. Like many works of fiction—the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, say, or the novels of Haruki Murakami—confabulations seamlessly blend the mundane with the incredible. And confabulation has another thing in common with literature as well: both are manifestations of our unstoppable drive to tell stories that make sense of our world.
We’ll hear a lot more about that drive in the next chapter. For the moment, though, the important point is that, under normal circumstances, the stories we generate are subject to a fairly extensive process of verification. But not so with confabulators. “The creative ability to construct plausible-sounding responses and some ability to verify those responses seem to be separate in the human brain,” wrote the philosopher William Hirstein (not to be confused with the memory scientist William Hirst) in his 2005 book on confabulation, Brain Fiction. “Confabulatory patients retain the first ability, but brain damage has compromised the second.”
Imagine, by way of analogy, that each of us possesses an inner writer and an inner fact-checker. As soon as the writer begins devising a story, the fact-checker gets busy comparing it with the input from our senses, checking it against our