what is confabulation

"most writers on the subject do not consider confabulation to be lying, because it lacks at least two crucial components: the intent to deceive, and knowledge contrary to what is claimed."

" The creative ability to construct plausible-sounding responses and some ability to verify those responses seem to be separate in the human brain;"

"Confabulation involves absence of doubt about something one should doubt:..It is a sort of pathological certainty about ill-grounded thoughts and utterances. The phenomenon contains important clues about how humans assess their thoughts and attach either doubt or certainty to them"

"There is also a clear connection here to the human gift for storytelling....? Philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that one sort of meaning we can give to the overworked term ‘‘the self’’ is that the self is the subject of a story we create and tell to others about who we are: ‘‘Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others—and ourselves—about who we are’’ (Dennett 1991, 418)."

"Confabulation may also share with Dennett’s storytelling an unintentional quality: ‘‘And just as spiders don’t have to think, consciously and deliberately, about how to spin their webs, and just as beavers, unlike professional human engineers, do not consciously and deliberately plan the structures they build, we (unlike professional human storytellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell, and how to tell them’’ (1991, 418). In this Dennettian conception, confabulation is also a social phenomenon, but one that is more directly in the service of the individual than those mentioned earlier about the need for leaders to be confident....Making categorizations always involves a risk of error, but doubt is a cognitive luxury and occurs only in highly developed nervous systems.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262582711_sch_0001.pdf