Brain fiction : self-deception and the riddle of confabulation / William Hirstein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hirstein, William, author.

Series:

Philosophical psychopathology. Disorders in mind.

Philosophical psychopathology. Disorders in mind

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Deception.

Mythomania.

Self-deception.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vi, 289 pages) : illustrations.

Other Title:

MIT Press CogNet.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2005]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Some neurological patients exhibit a striking tendency to confabulate-to construct false answers to a question while genuinely believing that they are telling the truth. A stroke victim, for example, will describe in detail a conference he attended over the weekend when in fact he has not left the hospital. Normal people, too, sometimes have a tendency to confabulate; rather than admitting "I don't know," some people will make up an answer or an explanation and express it with complete conviction. In Brain Fiction, William Hirstein examines confabulation and argues that its causes are not merely technical issues in neurology or cognitive science but are deeply revealing about the structure of the human intellect. Hirstein describes confabulation as the failure of a normal checking or censoring process in the brain-the failure to recognize that a false answer is fantasy, not reality. Thus, he argues, the creative ability to construct a plausible-sounding response and some ability to check that response are separate in the human brain. Hirstein sees the dialectic between the creative and checking processes-"the inner dialogue"-as an important part of our mental life. In constructing a theory of confabulation, Hirstein integrates perspectives from different fields, including philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology, to achieve a natural mix of conceptual issues usually treated by philosophers with purely empirical issues; information about the distribution of certain blood vessels in the prefrontal lobes of the brain, for example, or the behavior of splitbrain patients can shed light on the classic questions of philosophy of mind, including questions about the function of consciousness. This first book-length study of confabulation breaks ground in both philosophy and cognitive science.

Contents:

1 What Is Confabulation? 1

1.2 Confabulation Syndromes 7

1.3 Features of Confabulation 15

1.4 Three Concepts of Confabulation 19

1.5 Mirror-Image Syndromes 21

1.6 Conclusion: Setting the Problem of Confabulation 22

2 Philosophy and Neuroscience 25

2.1 The Growth of Neuroscience 25

2.2 Principles of Brain Structure and Function 31

2.3 The Limbic and Autonomic Systems 36

2.4 Philosophy's Role 37

2.5 Approach of This Book 40

3 Confabulation and Memory 43

3.1 Fictional Autobiographies 43

3.2 The Brain's Memory Systems 46

3.3 Korsakoff's Syndrome 49

3.4 Aneurysms of the Anterior Communicating Artery 55

3.5 Frontal Theories of Confabulation 60

3.6 Separating Amnesia and Confabulation 65

3.7 False Memories 66

4 Liars, Sociopaths, and Confabulators 71

4.1 Unhappy Family: The Orbitofrontal Syndromes 71

4.2 Symptoms of Orbitofrontal Damage 74

4.3 Anatomy and Physiology of the Orbitofrontal Cortex 82

4.4 Sociopathy 90

4.5 Lying and the Skin-Conductance Response 93

4.6 Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as a Mirror-Image Syndrome 97

5 Mind Reading and Misidentification 101

5.1 Knowledge of Others' Minds 101

5.2 Mind-Reading Systems 104

5.3 Misidentification Syndromes 114

5.4 A Mind-Reading Theory of Misidentification 122

6 Unawareness and Denial of Illness 135

6.1 Denial 135

6.2 Theories of Anosognosia 140

6.3 The Neuroscience of Denial 143

6.4 Denial of Blindness 145

6.5 Anosognosia and the Other Confabulation Syndromes 147

7 The Two Brains 153

7.1 Confabulations by Split-Brain Patients 153

7.2 Hemispheric Differences 155

7.3 Anatomy of the Cerebral Commissures 158

7.4 Lateral Theories of Confabulation 160

7.5 Evaluating the Lateral Theories 166

7.6 Other Confabulations about Mental States and Intentions 170

8 Confabulation and Knowledge 177

8.1 Confabulation as an Epistemic Phenomenon 177

8.2 The Neuroscience of Confabulation 179

8.3 Creation and Checking of Mental Representations 181

8.4 Defining Confabulation 187

8.5 Other Candidate Criteria and Conceptions 198

8.6 Epistemic Features of Confabulation 203

8.7 Knowing That We Do Not Know 209

9 Self-Deception 213

9.1 Confabulation: Clues to Self-Deception 213

9.2 Deception and Lying 218

9.3 What Is Self-Deception? 221

9.4 The Maintenance of Self-Deceptive Beliefs 226

9.5 Questions about Self-Deception 228

9.6 Self-Deception and Mind Reading 233

9.7 The Neuroscience of Self-Deception 234

10 Epilogue: Our Nature 239

10.1 The Meaning of Confabulation 239

10.2 Further Questions 241.

Notes:

"A Bradford book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Hirstein, William. Brain fiction.

ISBN:

9780262275477

0262275473

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.