"Oh, I had a lovely breakfast with my sister"
An 68-year-old woman with a long history of alcohol dependence is admitted to hospital with a new memory problem. Asked what she did that morning, she answers readily and without hesitation, "Oh, I had a lovely breakfast with my sister, we had tea and toast in the garden." Staff confirm she has been in the ward all morning and has no sister; the answer is entirely invented. She gives this account with complete confidence and no sign that she finds it odd or is aware it might not be true, and when asked again an hour later gives a different, equally detailed but unrelated account of the same morning.
This is confabulation: the fabrication of material to fill a gap in memory, produced without any conscious intention to deceive and without awareness that the account is false, distinguishing it from lying. The confident, detailed, but inconsistent nature of the answer — a different fabricated account given only an hour later — is characteristic, since the content is generated fresh each time rather than recalled from a fixed, stored (if false) memory.
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Ch. 5, 'Disorders of Memory'.