The Confabulating Mind: How the Brain Creates Reality - Hardcover

Schnider, Armin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199206759 ISBN 13: 9780199206759

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Comfabulations are memories of events and experiences that have never actually happened. Such false memories have fascinated scientists for hundreds of years, and recently have been the subject of much debate. This is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of an extraordinary and controversial subject. The Confabulating Mind: How the Brain Creates Reality looks at how confabulations relate to other failures of memory and considers phenomena such as deja-vu, paramnesic misidentification, disorientation, and anosognosia, also examines similarities and differences between pathological confabulations and normal false memories as they occur in healthy people.

Providing important insights into memory in general, the book will be of interest to neurologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and other scientists and clinicians interested in the organization of memory and thought.

About this title

About the Author

Armin Schnider is professor of neurorehabilitation at the University Hospital of Geneva. He did his medical degree at the University of Basle and specialized in neurology in Bern, Zürich, and Los Angeles. His primary research interests are memory disorders and the neurobiological foundations of confabulations and reality control in thinking.

Review

"This comprehensive and authoritative treatment of the remarkable phenomenon of confabulation ... will be useful to clinicians, neuropsychologists, and other scientists interested in the organization of memory and thought."--Larry R. Squire, Ph.D., University of California San Diego

"Armin Schnider's splendid book is the first definitive account of all aspects of confabulation -behavioural, neuroanatomical and theoretical- which has appeared for more than 50 years. It will be both an invaluable introduction to the disorder for neurologists, neuropsychologists and cognitive neuroscientists and an essential source book for researchers on the interface between cognition and memory."--Tim Shallice, FMedSci, FRS, SISSA Trieste & University College London

"Schnider has written an ambitious, highly-readable, stimulating and important book on confabulation and memory. He weaves descriptions of patients with sophisticated analysis of their disorder that covers neuroanatomy, behaviour, cognition, functional imaging, and neurophysiology. The reader emerges with a deep understanding not only of confabulation, but of memory in general. The book addresses the difficult problem at the heart of confabulation: How do we construct and modify our sense of reality? The provocative answers Schnider provides will stimulate discussion and thus make this book ideal for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on memory."--Morris Moscovitch, Ph.D., University of Toronto

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0199206759
• ISBN 13: 9780199206759
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 332