Born Liars by Ian Leslie

rather than simple misunderstanding, was at the root of the dispute.
    On day thirty-seven of the trial, Joe Galloway, the EDS executive whose integrity was most at issue, faced Sky’s barrister Mark Howard across the courtroom. Taking a break from the complex substance of the allegations, Howard questioned Galloway about the Masters in Business Administration he had been awarded by Concordia College in the US Virgin Islands, mentioned by Galloway in his witness statement. Galloway needed little prompting to expand on his year of study on the beautiful island of St John. He said that he had attended Concordia College while on the island in the service of a previous, Texas-based employer who had tasked him with overseeing a project for a number of Coca-Cola distributors based on St John. This required him to fly to and from the island by plane, on ‘a small commuter flight . . . a four or six-seater airplane’ . He described the three main college buildings, which he had got to know well – a rigorous progamme of evening classes required him to spend three hours a night on campus, several evenings a week. He promised to provide textbooks from the course to the court, and eventually did submit one.
    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.
    * * *
    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