Free brains lie to their owners - confabulation essay sample

People are rational beings, and the human brain has historically been anchored on stability, rationality, and coherence of existence. Therefore, even when certain brain traumas or diseases prevent the brain from producing a coherent narrative based on the surrounding reality, it finds ways of giving coherence to the individual, even if it is not true. The phenomenon of confabulation, that is, creation of a false but coherent narrative by the human brain in which a person genuinely believes, was described in the article of Heidler (2014) titled “ Honest Liars: How the Brain Leads Us to Believe False Truths.” In this article, the author explained and analyzed various reasons for which the human brain creates illusions and false memories that people believe, such as Alzheimer’s disease, certain forms of amnesia, and brain trauma. Heidler (2014) presented results of some experiments proving that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) is a brain area responsible for confabulations.
The present article is very interesting in terms of explaining irrational human behavior in an effort to seem rational. No matter how contradictory it sounds, people with a brain trauma and those unable to explain to themselves why they chose to act in a certain way have one thing in common – they want to seem rational, and their behavior should be coherent. In an effort to achieve coherence and rationality, even healthy people make up some ideas that they did not have, and explain their choices they did not make. Therefore, confabulation is a very intriguing method by which the human brain creates the coherent reality for people, even if it is objectively not so.
According to Heilder (2014), confabulations may emerge in both healthy and unhealthy brains, which is most commonly the result of disconnection between the left-hemisphere language area and the right-hemisphere VMPFC responsible for assessing memories and experiences for plausibility. However, this capability of the human mind is really dangerous, tearing people away from reality and constructing another reality for their comfort, thus depriving them of rational judgment. Therefore, confabulations may help people go through some painful experiences or memories and construct more positive scenarios, but they should still be treated with caution because of their unreal, fictional nature symptomatic of a brain disorder.