You went to a wedding yesterday. The service was beautiful, the food and drink flowed and there was dancing all night. But people tell you that you are in hospital, that you have been in hospital for weeks, and that you didn’t go to a wedding yesterday at all. The experience of false memories like this following neurological damage is known as confabulation.

The reasons why patients experience false memories such as these has largely remained a mystery. Studies in amnesic patients have associated confabulation with damage to the orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortices. However, neuroimaging studies have associated memory-control processes which are assumed to underlie confabulation with the right lateral prefrontal cortex.

A new study by Dr Martha Turner and colleagues at University College London offers some clues as to what might be going on. They used a confabulation battery to investigate the occurrence and localisation of confabulation in an unselected series of 38 patients with focal frontal lesions.   Read More...