“Do you remember what you did on March 13, 1985?” A case study of confabulatory hypermnesia

Abstract 

We report on a patient, LM, with a Korsakoff's syndrome who showed the unusual tendency to consistently provide a confabulatory answer to episodic memory questions for which the predicted and most frequently observed response in normal subjects and in confabulators is “I don't know”. LM's pattern of confabulation, which we refer to as confabulatory hypermnesia, cannot be traced back to any more basic and specific cognitive deficit and is not associated with any particularly unusual pattern of brain damage. Making reference to the Memory, Consciousness and Temporality Theory – MCTT (Dalla Barba, 2002), we propose that LM shows an expanded Temporal Consciousness – TC, which overflows the limits of time (“Do you remember what you did on March 13, 1985?”) and of details (“Do you remember what you were wearing on the first day of summer in 1979?”) that are usually respected in normal subjects and in confabulating patients.

Keywords: Confabulation, Episodic memory, Semantic memory, Temporal consciousness