A confabulation, also known as a false, degraded, or corrupted memory, is a stable pattern of activation in an

artificial neural network Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

or neural assembly that does not correspond to any previously learned patterns. The same term is also applied to the (nonartificial) neural mistake-making process leading to a false memory (

confabulation In psychology, confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage (especially aneurysm in the a ...

Cognitive science

In cognitive science, the generation of confabulatory patterns is symptomatic of some forms of

brain trauma A traumatic brain injury (TBI), also known as an intracranial injury, is an injury to the brain caused by an external force. TBI can be classified based on severity (ranging from mild traumatic brain injury TBI/concussionto severe traumatic br ...

. In this, confabulations relate to pathologically induced neural activation patterns depart from direct experience and learned relationships. In

computational modeling Computer simulation is the process of mathematical modelling, performed on a computer, which is designed to predict the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be dete ...

of such damage, related brain

pathologies Pathology is the study of the causes and effects of disease or injury. The word ''pathology'' also refers to the study of disease in general, incorporating a wide range of biology research fields and medical practices. However, when used in t ...

such as

dyslexia Dyslexia, also known until the 1960s as word blindness, is a disorder characterized by reading below the expected level for one's age. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, r ...

and

hallucination A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the qualities of a real perception. Hallucinations are vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space. Hallucination is a combinatio ...

result from simulated

lesion A lesion is any damage or abnormal change in the tissue of an organism, usually caused by disease or trauma. ''Lesion'' is derived from the Latin "injury". Lesions may occur in plants as well as animals. Types There is no designated classifi ...

ing and

neuron A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. N ...

death. Forms of confabulation in which missing or incomplete information is incorrectly filled in by the

brain A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a v ...

are generally modelled by the well known neural network process called pattern completion.

Neural networks

Confabulation is central to a theory of

cognition Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

and

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

by S. L. Thaler in which thoughts and ideas originate in both biological and synthetic neural networks as false or degraded memories nucleate upon various forms of

neuronal A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. No ...

and synaptic fluctuations and damage. Such novel patterns of neural activation are promoted to ideas as other neural nets perceive

utility As a topic of economics, utility is used to model worth or value. Its usage has evolved significantly over time. The term was introduced initially as a measure of pleasure or happiness as part of the theory of utilitarianism by moral philosopher ...

or value to them (i.e., the thalamo-cortical loop). The exploitation of these false memories by other artificial neural networks forms the basis of inventive

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

systems currently utilized in

product design Product design as a verb is to create a new product to be sold by a business to its customers. A very broad coefficient and effective generation and development of ideas through a process that leads to new products. Thus, it is a major aspect of n ...

, materials discovery and improvisational

military robot Military robots are autonomous robots or remote-controlled mobile robots designed for military applications, from transport to search & rescue and attack. Some such systems are currently in use, and many are under development. History Broad ...

s.Hesman, T. (2004). The Machine That Invents, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 25, 2004. Compound, confabulatory systems of this kind have been used as

sensemaking Sensemaking or sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. It has been defined as "the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing" ( Weick, Sutcliffe, ...

systems for

military intelligence Military intelligence is a military discipline that uses information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to assist commanders in their decisions. This aim is achieved by providing an assessment of data from a ...

and planning, self-organizing control systems for robots and

space vehicle A space vehicle is the combination of a spacecraft and its launch vehicle which carries it into space. The earliest space vehicles were expendable launch systems, using a single or multistage rocket to carry a relatively small spacecraft in p ...

s, and

entertainment Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousa ...

. The concept of such opportunistic confabulation grew out of experiments with artificial neural networks that simulated

brain cell Brain cells make up the functional tissue of the brain. The rest of the brain tissue is structural or connective called the stroma which includes blood vessels. The two main types of cells in the brain are neurons, also known as nerve cells, an ...

apoptosis Apoptosis (from grc, ἀπόπτωσις, apóptōsis, 'falling off') is a form of programmed cell death that occurs in multicellular organisms. Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes (morphology) and death. These changes incl ...

. It was discovered that novel perception, ideation, and

motor planning In psychology and neuroscience, motor planning is a set of processes related to the preparation of a movement that occurs during the reaction time (the time between the presentation of a stimulus to a person and that person's initiation of a motor r ...

could arise from either reversible or irreversible

neurobiological Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...

damage.

Computational inductive reasoning

The term confabulation is also used by

Robert Hecht-Nielsen Robert Hecht-Nielsen (July 18, 1947–May 25, 2019) was an American computer scientist, neuroscientist, entrepreneur and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He co-founded HNC Software Inc ...

in describing

inductive reasoning Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which a general principle is derived from a body of observations. It consists of making broad generalizations based on specific observations. Inductive reasoning is distinct from ''deductive'' re ...

accomplished via

Bayesian network A Bayesian network (also known as a Bayes network, Bayes net, belief network, or decision network) is a probabilistic graphical model that represents a set of variables and their conditional dependencies via a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Bay ...

s.Hecht-Nielsen, R (2005)
"Cogent confabulation"
. Neural Networks 18:111-115. Confabulation is used to select the expectancy of the concept that follows a particular context. This is not an Aristotelian deductive process, although it yields simple deduction when

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...

only holds unique events. However, most events and concepts occur in multiple, conflicting contexts and so confabulation yields a consensus of an expected event that may only be minimally more likely than many other events. However, given the winner take all constraint of the theory, that is the event/symbol/concept/attribute that is then expected. This parallel

computation Computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that follows a well-defined model (e.g., an algorithm). Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historically, people) that perform computations are known as ''computers''. An es ...

on many contexts is postulated to occur in less than a tenth of a second. Confabulation grew out of

vector analysis Vector calculus, or vector analysis, is concerned with derivative, differentiation and integral, integration of vector fields, primarily in 3-dimensional Euclidean space \mathbb^3. The term "vector calculus" is sometimes used as a synonym for ...

of data retrieval like that of

latent semantic analysis Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the do ...

and

support vector machine In machine learning, support vector machines (SVMs, also support vector networks) are supervised learning models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for classification and regression analysis. Developed at AT&T Bell Laboratorie ...

s. It is being implemented computationally on parallel computers.

References

{{reflist, 30em Artificial neural networks Neural circuits