Confabulation

The propensity to just make it all up - and be totally convinced it's all true!

One of the many remarkable findings in split brain studies is the propensity for the left hemisphere, in the absence of the right, to just make things up - to confabulate. Not in a disingenuous way, but in an automatic way that seems, to the left hemisphere, to be totally reasonable and truthful. Let me explain…

The left hemisphere by itself does not pay attention to anything outside of its limited field of awareness. Visually this would be anything to the left of the visual field. Here’s an explanation from Iain McGilchrist…

Image, if you can, what life is like for a patient of mine who we’ll call Mike, and educated middle-aged man, an actuary, whose intellectual faculties are sharp. Since he sustained a stroke on the right parietal region, he lives in only half a world. Looking straight ahead, he is aware of everything to the right of him clearly, but of little or nothing to the left. Reading a book or newspaper, he seems to take in only the right page, or only the right side of the page, and ignore the rest. If I ask him to draw his house, he will draw the right-hand end only; when asked to draw a clock face, he will start off well, but approaching the bottom of the clock he will stop prematurely there at 6, or, if the numbers go on, allow them to spill out of the clock face down the right side of the paper. If someone stands to the left of him, he seems unaware that he or she exists. He behaves as if there simply is no left side to his body; he will wash and shave only the right half of his face. He eats all that’s on the right of this plate and leaves everything to the left, so that his plate has to be turned round by his wife.

There’s a lot of really interesting facts about this neglect of the left side of the world (it also extends into perceptions of time and emotion - but we won’t complicate things right now), where the left side of the visual field doesn’t exist to the left hemisphere. Someone, with say a blind left eye or even left hemisphere damage that inhibits their visual field to the left, will acknowledge that there’s a deficit, something is wrong, they would move the newspaper so the rest of the words come into view or turn the plate so they can see the rest of the dinner. But not so the left hemisphere - it just doesn’t attend to the left field at all and doesn’t consider its existence.

In fact, and this is where we come to confabulation, when the left hemisphere is made aware of something on the left (by another person), it makes up a story to explain what it was previously unaware of. The stories are implausible yet held with absolute conviction. The left hemisphere makes up stories to fill in gaps of its knowledge but it lacks the contextualising of the right hemisphere to come up with anything remotely believable. Those with right hemisphere strokes more than likely have left side paraplegia, to some extent, and when doctors draw these patients attention to their left arm they can come up with some strange conclusions…

Todd Feinberg reports a series of such patients. ‘I told my brother to remind me to take this thing home with me or I’ll leave it here’, one says. ‘It’s a piece of useless equipment’. Other possibilities suggested by patients include that their left arm was a remote control, a telephone pole, ‘a stock option’, a perfume bottle, mother-in-law’s hand, a breast or a deodorant. A second patient who thought the hand was her mother’s also believed it was her mother who was in hospital and who had had the stroke, not she herself. Another repeated several times the same story that it was ‘a hand that was left on the subway and they brought it here and they put it on me.’ Another’s arm was his brother’s, which had been chopped off by gangsters and placed in a coffin. Another patient’s was still in the garbage, with a plastic cover: ‘You’ll find [it] there… but be careful, thought - the nails are very long, and very sharp!”

There is also a strong tendency for the left hemisphere to disown problems, have nothing to do with it, and to blame others. If there’s a problem, for the left hemisphere, there’s always a story blaming another person or thing.

A colleague told me the story of one of his neglect patients, who had hit his car on the left side no less than six times while driving it into the garage. ‘My garage was designed by a friend who is an architect’, he said. ‘Some “friend”! He has come back and changed the size of the garage entrance without telling me. Now I see who is my “friend”. And to think - for so many years he was just pretending to be kind to me.”

Paranoia, blame shifting, making up stories to explain stuff without having a clue, and denying the existence of half the world. These are some of the hallmarks of the left hemisphere if given free reign without the wisdom of the right hemisphere.

Now if the Western world is shifting toward (or has shifted toward) a more left-hemispheric bias in attention/perception and reasoning, what would this look like? Admittedly it would not look like a brain injured patient who’s operating primarily out of his functioning left hemisphere, but it might have some of those tendencies. I’m asking you to think of society, or part of society, as metaphorically having a left and right hemisphere and extrapolating an individuals propensities to a societal level.

The one I’m picking on today is the tendency to confabulate about things we know nothing about (or have not seen, or don’t consider existing), and to be supremely confident in such explanations¹. Not only making up nonsensical stories to explain a thing, but if there is any problem involved then it is ALWAYS the fault of someone else (even if the laying of blame is superfluous or nonsensical in itself). This is done with great self-assurance and conviction. The big picture and the overall context does not exist - there is only attention and perception of half the world, and this is the totality of reality.

Can we associate any of these tendencies to our bureaucrats and their bureaucratic system?

I wonder.

1. Although probably rather annoyed at having to provide an explanation about a thing that’s someone else’s fault, as you’d never offer any explanation unless prompted because it probably doesn’t exist! (Sometimes patients operating out of their left hemisphere will just go silent and not offer any explanation about things on the left - but not in an objectionable way - it just doesn’t seem to register as anything to respond to.)