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Everyone loves a good story. So much so that our brains make them up all the time, and most of the time we don’t even notice. This is confabulation – and it can make fools of us all.
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Confabulation is common in dementia, when people fabricate stories to fill in gaps in memory. In Capgras delusion, where a person insists that a loved one has been abducted and replaced by a doppelgänger, confabulation explains away the sensation of disconnection they feel in the company of someone they know they should love. More generally, we confabulate when the information we