confabulate
/kənˈfabjʊleɪt
/verb [no object]
1 formal Engage in conversation; talk: she could be heard on the telephone confabulating with someone...
- Since the story broke, six staffers, including two senior editors, have spent more than 6,000 man hours attending commission hearings, and confabulating with as many as 12 lawyers.
- Chances are, you can get a large percentage of your family members confabulating with you on something that simply couldn't have happened, given that Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character.
- Broken cultures therapeutically confabulate, mythologise former ways of life, and fight off meaninglessness by shoring up crumbling identities.
2 Psychiatry Fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory: she has lapses in attention and concentration—she may be confabulating a little...
- People who confabulate experience their false memories as true.
- Why the brain stimulates and confabulates just the memories it does remains a mystery, though there are several plausible explanations.
- Does the person fumble, confabulate, get defensive and angry, etc.
Derivatives
confabulation
/ noun ...- After long confabulations, the tribal elders told him that only the old people would act in his movie.
- The story that she couldn't remember appears to be a complete Pentagon confabulation in order to cover up the phoniness of the whole operation.
- He claims it was after confabulation with the Pope.
confabulatory
/ adjective ...- Jones's skillfully woven novel is filled with colorful characters which somehow also achieve three-dimensionality; its stories are sometimes what Harlan calls ‘confabulatory’ but still manage both credibility and poignancy.
- Individual differences in hypnotic ability were associated with erroneous and confabulatory recall in the hypnosis and CI conditions but not in the MRR condition.
- So to enter the example of Korsakoff's psychosis, this is also known as confabulatory amnesia, which has essentially two features: the one is that the patient is unable to lay down any new memories.
Origin
Early 17th century: from Latin confabulat- 'chatted together', from the verb confabulari, from con- 'together' + fabulari (from fabula 'fable').
Rhymes
- empty-headed
- empty-headedness
- empty-hearted
- empty nester
- empty net
- empty-netter
- empty-pated
- empty promise
- Empty Quarter
- empty-skulled
- empty suit
- empty vessels make most noise (or sound)
- empty word
- empurple
- empusa
- empyema
- empyematic
- empyematous
- empyemic
- empyreal
- empyrean
- empyreum
- empyreuma
- empyreumatic
- empyrical