by Ian Leslie
During this part of his testimony, Galloway spoke confidently and fluently, as he had throughout the trial, and even seemed to be enjoying himself. The uninformed observer, and even most informed observers, would never have guessed he was making it all up.
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A psychiatric case study published in 1985 by the neurologist Antonio Damasio tells the story of a middle-aged woman who had suffered brain damage following a series of strokes. She retained most cognitive abilities, including coherent speech. What she said was rather unpredictable, however. Checking on her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. She spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband, and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there she replied, ‘Falklandese. What else?’
In the language of psychiatry, this woman was ‘confabulating’. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem which affects a small proportion of brain damaged people. In the literature it is defined as ‘the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive’. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission – there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill – confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.
Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of their circumstances – of why they’re in hospital, or talking to a doctor. Some invent occupations for themselves, or pretend that they are doing their work as they talk. One patient, when asked about his surgical scar, explained that during World War II he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The same patient, when asked about his family described how at various times they had died in his arms, or been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren’t out to deceive – they engage in what the neuropsychologist Morris Moscovitch calls ‘honest lying’. Uncertain, and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a ‘compulsion to narrate’: a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand.
Chronic confabulation is usually associated with damage to the brain’s frontal lobes, particularly the region responsible for self-regulation and self-censoring. Hearing a question, or just a word, triggers a whole set of associations for the patient. Of course, this happens to all of us – hear the word scar and you too might think about war wounds, old movies, or tales of near-death experiences. But you don’t let all of these random thoughts reach consciousness – and if you do, you don’t articulate them. You self-censor for the sake of truth (I wasn’t in World War II), sense (you can’t be killed and come back to life) and social appropriateness. Chronic confabulators do none of these things. They randomly combine real memories with stray thoughts, wishes and hopes, and summon up a story out of the confusion.
The wider significance of confabulation is what it tells us about the normal human mind: specifically, it exposes the mind’s gushing stream of invention. We are natural-born fabulists, constantly spinning stories out of our experience and imagination, testing the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. It’s just that, most of the time, we exercise our cerebral censors, exerting control over which stories we tell, to whom – and which we want the hearer to believe. The degree of control exercised, however, can depend on personality, and on the moment.
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Mark Howard may have been surprised at the length and detail of Galloway’s extemporisation but he was more than happy to let him continue, because he knew he was lying. In the course of conducting an exhaustive background check on Galloway, Sky’s legal team had discovered that there was not and never had been a Concordia College on St John; there was not, nor ever had been, a Coca-Cola office or facility on the island. Nor was there an airport; it was not possible to fly onto the island. The barcode and stamp on the book Galloway produced marked it as the property of a library in Missouri, near Galloway’s home. A few days after Galloway’s testimony, Howard presented to the court an MBA certificate that his pet schnauzer Lulu had been awarded by Concordia College and University, an unaccredited institution based in Delaware that awards degrees based on ‘Life Experience’. The barrister pointed out that Lulu had managed to achieve a higher mark than Joe Galloway. He also displayed a letter of recommendation written on behalf of Lulu by Concordia College’s president and vice-chancellor.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Joe Galloway’s lying was its unnecessary elaborateness. Once Howard began to ask Galloway about his MBA, Galloway’s best tactic would have been to confess to its origin, since a moment’s reflection would have told him that in a case with such high stakes it was likely that every aspect of his witness statement would be pored over for veracity; a second option would have been to stonewall most of the barrister’s questions by claiming not to remember much about it. Instead, he recalled his year on St John at length and in finely drawn detail. Galloway was exhibiting something that lying experts term ‘duping delight’ – although perhaps his delight lay less in the duping than in the exercise of his own fertile imagination.
Explaining his decision in favour of Sky, the judge said that the apparent ease and confidence with which Galloway had lied about the MBA had destroyed his entire credibility as a witness, and indicated a propensity to deceit in his business dealings. Lying about an educational qualification was one thing, said the judge, but Galloway had demonstrated something else: ‘an astounding ability to be dishonest’. EDS was ordered to pay Sky over two hundred million pounds.
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In the film The Usual Suspects, detectives engage in a desperate search for the mysterious Keyser Söze, a ruthless, violent and brilliant criminal who has acquired a mythical reputation in the underworld. Though his brutal deeds are legion, barely anything is known about Söze’s identity, his past, or even what he looks like – those that meet him have a habit of dying horrible deaths. In their investigations the detectives rely on the testimony of Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint (played by Kevin Spacey), a lowly con-artist with a pronounced limp, who has been granted immunity from prosecution in return for telling what he knows of Söze’s story.
Verbal describes how he and a small group of career criminals were blackmailed by Söze, through Söze’s lawyer Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), into destroying a large drug shipment belonging to Söze’s rivals, during which operation all but Verbal and one other man were killed. He also tells the investigators what he knows of Söze’s life; of his beginnings as a low-level drug dealer in his native Turkey, and of how, after the Hungarian mafia kill one of his children, he wreaks terrible revenge on them and becomes a faceless, fearsome one-man force of destruction. Verbal’s tale directs the police to a man called Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne); apparently the real Söze.
In the movie’s famous final sequence, however, it is revealed to Verbal’s interrogator – and to us – that Keyser Söze is none other than Verbal Kint. Verbal’s story was an elaborate lie, an improvised concoction of strung-together details snatched from his immediate surroundings, including the crowded bulletin board in the office where the interrogation took place. As the investigator stares at the board, he recognises random words and phrases from the story he has just been told, and feels the cold rush of revelation. He drops the coffee cup he has been sipping from during the interrogation. In slow motion, we see it fall to the floor and smash. The manufacturer’s logo, printed on the bottom of the cup, reads KOBAYASHI.
Like the appropriately nicknamed Verbal, confabulating patients make up their stories using whatever comes to hand. As with the woman who told of her holiday in the Falklands, their stories are conjured up instantane
ously – an interlocutor only has to ask a question, or say a particular word, and they’re off, like a jazz saxophonist using a phrase thrown out by his pianist as the launch-pad for a solo. A confabulating patient might explain to her visiting friend that she’s in hospital because she now works as a psychiatrist, that the man standing next to her (the real doctor) is her assistant, and they are about to visit a patient. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been ‘suicided’ by her family. These patients are like novelists as described by Henry James: people on whom ‘nothing is wasted’ though, unlike novelists, or liars, they are entirely at the mercy of their material.
Both Verbal Kint and the Falklands woman are exercising one of the core processes of the creative imagination. In A Treatise on Human Nature the philosopher David Hume writes:
To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects . . . But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted . . . In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: the mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and will.
William James (Henry’s brother) called the ability to make novel connections between ideas ‘divergent thinking’, a mode of thought in which ‘the unexpected seems the only law’. When I asked the writer Will Self about his creative process he echoed this theme, describing the creative mindset to me as a continuous willingness to pick up on aspects of the world, aspects of thought, and put them together with other things to produce juxtapositions. We get a glimpse of a creatively focused confabulatory process in No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the early career of Bob Dylan. It’s 1966, and Dylan is standing on a street corner in Kensington, London, wearing a blue suede jacket, Ray-Bans, and pinstripe trousers. He is on his first trip to Britain and in a playful, high-spirited mood. Dylan has come across a series of three painted signs on a pet shop, which evidently doubles as a tobacconist. He reads them aloud:
WE WILL COLLECT, CLIP, BATH & RETURN YOUR DOG
CIGARETTES AND TOBACCO
ANIMALS AND BIRDS BOUGHT OR SOLD ON COMMISSION
Dylan then uses these words as the raw material for a series of verbal riffs that are part nursery rhyme, part Beat poetry. Dancing around, waving his cigarette in the air and giggling at his own inventiveness, he spits out new versions faster than most of us can think:
I want a dog that’s gonna collect and clean my bath, return my cigarette, and give tobacco to my animals and give my bird a commission.
I’m looking for a place to bathe my bird, buy my dog, collect my clip, sell me cigarettes and commission my bath.
I’m looking for a place that’s gonna animal my soul, clip my return, bathe my foot, and collect my dog.
Part of what makes this vignette so compelling is that it lays bare one of the key operations of improvisational creativity: taking elements of the familiar or mundane and remixing them until something new is born. It would be stretching it to call the resulting doggerel art, but this is where much art begins: in the power of confabulatory combination. Dylan’s creativity often spilt over into lying, especially when it came to his own biography. When first making a name for himself in New York he told interviewers that he was raised in Gallup, New Mexico, had lived in Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota and Kansas, and had been taught guitar by the blues singers Arvella Gray and Mance Lipscombe. In fact, Dylan had lived only in Minnesota and New York by that point, and had never met Gray or Lipscombe. This is exactly the sort of story a confabulating patient would tell, mixing truth with fantasy and wish-fulfilment. The difference is that Dylan presumably knew he was fibbing.
In 1996, during a now-famous libel case, the former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken recounted a tale to court which vividly illustrated the horrors he was having to endure after his name was besmirched by a national newspaper. He told of how, on leaving his home in Lord North Street, Westminster one morning with his teenage daughter Alexandra, he found himself ‘stampeded’ by a documentary crew. Upset and scared by the crew’s aggressive behaviour, Alexandra burst into tears. Aitken bundled her into his ministerial car, but as they drove away, he realised that they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raising chase across central London ensued. The journalists were only shaken off when Aitken executed a cunning deception: he stopped at the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles.
Aitken, a wealthy, handsome, and highly articulate man, had a weakness for melodrama. The year before, at a press conference announcing his intention to sue the Guardian newspaper, he declared: ‘If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight. The fight against falsehood and those who peddle it.’ The case, which stretched on for over two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitken’s relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them as their guest in the Ritz Hotel in Paris while he was a government minister. As Aitken knew when he delivered this stirring battle-cry, the key allegations made by the Guardian were all true. He went on to lose the case, which destroyed his reputation and his career.
As the trial unfolded, what amazed the Guardian journalists, who knew he was lying – and what astonished everyone else after his case collapsed – was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told. Some were necessary to maintain his original lie, but others were told, it seemed, for the sheer thrill of invention. Like Galloway, Aitken was led further and further into deceit by his own pleasure in confabulating. There was another, subtler aspect to Jonathan Aitken’s lies: like a novelist, he used them to illuminate character. The florid rhetoric of his press conference set the tone for his self-presentation at the trial as a man of oak-like virtue, a patriot beset on all sides by frivolous, malign and bitter critics. The story he told of being chased by journalists wasn’t necessary to his case, but it had a clear dramatic purpose: to burnish the portrait he was painting of a dashing and gallant hero.
Aitken’s case collapsed on 17 June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable evidence that he had lied about his trip to Paris, and presented it to the court. Until then, his charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory. The first big dent in the façade of his integrity had been made days before, however, when the unedited rushes of the encounter in Lord North Street were shown to the court. They revealed a very different story. Aitken had indeed been doorstepped that day, but Alexandra Aitken was not with him. The minister walked out of his house alone, got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.
The stories invented by confabulating patients aren’t entirely random – like Aitken’s lie, they tend to depict an idealised version of the protagonist, who often stands at the centre of a heroic drama. Unable to admit the truth of their condition or its cause, their stories are told to make metaphorical sense of their predicament. Aikaterini Fotopoulou, a psychiatrist at King’s College, London, specialises in the theory and treatment of confabulation. She told me about one of her patients, a nineteen-year-old window-fitter known as RM who had been a passenger in a car that crashed at high-speed. He was left with damage to his brain’s frontal lobes. Six months later, RM had made a strong physical recov
ery but was disoriented in time, had severe difficulty planning ahead, and had become, according to his friends and family, a more boastful, irritable and emotional person than he was before the accident. He had also become a chronic confabulator. As far as RM was concerned, he had made a full recovery, and during rehabilitation sessions he invented long and complicated stories to explain why he was in a hospital, being attended to by doctors. He rewrote unpleasant events from his past in ways he would have preferred them to have happened: shortly before the accident he had been greatly upset by his parents’ divorce, yet during therapy he would tell and retell the story of how he had persuaded his parents to stay together after they threatened to separate. RM also told tales of implausible derring-do, in which he would respond to a call of distress from a girlfriend or family member under threat from an anonymous attacker. He would race to the scene at impossible speed and be forced to use violence to subdue or even kill the assailant. At the end the police would arrive, survey the bloody aftermath, and praise him for doing what they were not able to do. It became apparent to Fotoupolou that RM’s stories of high-velocity heroism were his attempts to assuage deep feelings of powerlessness, by rewriting his memories of the horrific incident in which he had lost part of mind.
Fotopoulou has learned to read between the lines of her patients’ confabulations to find the ways in which they are trying to make sense of troubles of which they are only dimly aware. Another of her patients, a wealthy Italian businessman who had suffered a stroke, would constantly fret that he had lost boxes of important files. Fotopoulou took this to be his metaphor for his memory problems. Sigmund Freud would have had no trouble recognising the stories of confabulators as wish-fulfilments that the rest of us work through in dreams and fantasies. He not only looked for hidden psychological meanings in the dreams and speech of his patients, but in works of art. For Freud, dreaming, storytelling and lying are inextricably intertwined, because we can never tell the truth of the unconscious. He noted the prevalence of novels by male authors with a ‘hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympathy by every possible means’ – by rescuing distressed women, for instance.