Types of confabulation

When the term ‘confabulation’ entered the medical literature, it referred to the emergence of memories of events and experiences that never happened. However, its Latin root—meaning ‘to gossip, to chat’—allowed for a broader use of the term. This chapter gives the classic and the present-day definitions of confabulations and proposes a distinction between memory-related (mnestic) and non-memory-related (non-mnestic) confabulations. Early clinical observations already suggested the distinction between different forms of mnestic confabulations. Based on the literature and our own studies, I propose to distinguish four forms of confabulations, which partially or completely dissociate, and suggest ways to explore them.