Confabulous Mister Memory
On the myth of autobiography
Looking back on our lives, most of us connect the dots with remarkable ease and specificity. The reason we became a botanist? Thank our eighth-grade biology teacher, Mrs. Schrubber. The reason we’re averse to small dogs? Well, to be honest, we once had a traumatic experience with a chihuahua at a train station in Philly. The reason we’re so compulsive about making our bed? Well, how could we have turned out any other way when our father, a retired U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant, would blast “Semper Paratus” every morning on the stereo and shout at us to tuck those corners, boys!
The problem with these kinds of explanations is that they’re mostly bullshit.
Specifically, they’re a species of bullshit called confabulation: false or distorted explanations that are believed to be true by their speaker.1 It’s a phenomenon we’re all highly susceptible to, and psychologists can prove it. In one study, for example, subjects shown images of unfamiliar college campuses later claimed they’d visited schools they’d never actually been to. In another, people given three identical laundry detergents in different boxes invented reasons for preferring the one just that happened to come in the most colorful packaging. Split-brain patients will even confabulate explanations with their (verbal) left hemisphere as to why they pointed to an image shown to the (nonverbal) right one.2 If people give fake reports of visiting Duke University or what soap works best, how can we possibly expect them to reliably narrate the impact of decades-old events? The answer is obvious: We can’t.
And yet…It’s surely not the case that lived experience is immaterial. Genetics, science tells us, explain thirty to sixty percent of the variance in our personalities; this leaves a minimum of forty percent to be explained by the environment, and maybe as much as seventy.
Put another way: Our personal histories matter a lot—just not necessarily for the reasons we think they do.
In a sense, our self-narrativization—while often false on an object level—does speak to deep truths of development: Choices matter. Luck matters. Relationships matter. Feeling these ripples in our lives, is it any wonder we think we’ve seen the stone striking the water? Confabulation, in other words, is the abstract or metaphorical reflection of the literal reality we cannot access. It’s like the distinction made by author Tim O’Brien between “story truth” and “happening-truth”:
Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.
Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.
Life happens to us; we’re changed forever; we make up how it happened.
Is it a problem that we confabulate our own stories? In general, I think not. If we had access to every single detail of our development, our heads would probably explode with embarrassment and information overload. And besides, some of our explanations probably are true, or close enough to count.
Where I think we get into trouble, though, is when we project our false coherence forward. That is, because we have the illusion of understanding the ins and outs of our past, we assume we can exercise greater control over our future than is really possible. We obsess about where to live, who to marry, how to raise our children, all because we think X will lead to Y—when it could just as well lead to Z, or to 42, or to nothing observable at all.
Instead, I’d offer this frame: It all matters—but your active control over your fate is vanishingly small. The truth will be stranger, more beautiful, more complex than you could ever possibly imagine. Your job, mostly, is to live—Confabulous Mister Memory will take care of the rest.
Clinically speaking, “confabulation” refers to demonstrably false memories that are believed in earnest. I’m using it slightly more broadly here: Many of our autobiographical assertions can’t be definitively proven wrong—yet they are nonetheless unverifiable, and likely incomplete or incorrect.
Full excerpt, just because it’s so bonkers:
Consider the following experiment: a split-brain patient was shown two images, one in each visual field. The left hemisphere received the image of a chicken claw, and the right hemisphere received the image of a snowed-in house. The patient was asked verbally to describe what he saw, activating the left (more verbal) hemisphere. The patient said he saw a chicken claw, as expected. Then the patient was asked to point with his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) to a picture related to the scene. Among the pictures available were a shovel and a chicken. He pointed to the shovel. So far, no crazier than what we've come to expect from neuroscience.
Now the doctor verbally asked the patient to describe why he just pointed to the shovel. The patient verbally (left hemisphere!) answered that he saw a chicken claw, and of course shovels are necessary to clean out chicken sheds, so he pointed to the shovel to indicate chickens. The apologist in the left-brain is helpless to do anything besides explain why the data fits its own theory, and its own theory is that whatever happened had something to do with chickens, dammit!