My impression is that humans also do more confabulation and less actual remembering than we think we do, when we answer questions about why we did particular things.
Some evidence for this, though it’s not obvious to me quite how strong it is, comes from cases where it seems like the actual reasons aren’t accessible when answering the question. For instance, someone is hypnotized and told “when you wake up, you will walk all the way around the room anticlockwise. You will not remember this instruction”; they do that; you ask them why; they say something like “oh, I felt fidgety and needed to walk around a bit”. Or you take a patient who’s had their corpus callosum severed to treat severe epilepsy, greatly reducing communication between the hemispheres of the brain; you show their right hemisphere a picture of a snowy field and their left hemisphere a picture of a chicken claw; then you provide them with a selection of other pictures and ask them to point to something relevant; their left hand picks a shovel and their right hand a chicken. Then you ask them why—language mostly happens in the left hemisphere—and they say they picked the shovel because you’d use it for cleaning out the chicken coop.
Of course these are unusual cases. But if confabulation happens so easily and naturally in these cases—and it seems it does—it’s hard not to suspect that what’s happening the rest of the time when we’re asked why we do things might also be mostly confabulation, just confabulation that’s harder for us and others to notice.
Yes, I agree that confabulation happens a lot, and also that our explanations of why we do things aren’t particularly trustworthy; they’re often self-serving. I think there’s also pretty good evidence that we remember our thoughts at least somewhat, though. A personal example: when thinking about how to respond to someone online, I tend to write things in my head when I’m not at a computer.
My impression is that humans also do more confabulation and less actual remembering than we think we do, when we answer questions about why we did particular things.
Some evidence for this, though it’s not obvious to me quite how strong it is, comes from cases where it seems like the actual reasons aren’t accessible when answering the question. For instance, someone is hypnotized and told “when you wake up, you will walk all the way around the room anticlockwise. You will not remember this instruction”; they do that; you ask them why; they say something like “oh, I felt fidgety and needed to walk around a bit”. Or you take a patient who’s had their corpus callosum severed to treat severe epilepsy, greatly reducing communication between the hemispheres of the brain; you show their right hemisphere a picture of a snowy field and their left hemisphere a picture of a chicken claw; then you provide them with a selection of other pictures and ask them to point to something relevant; their left hand picks a shovel and their right hand a chicken. Then you ask them why—language mostly happens in the left hemisphere—and they say they picked the shovel because you’d use it for cleaning out the chicken coop.
Of course these are unusual cases. But if confabulation happens so easily and naturally in these cases—and it seems it does—it’s hard not to suspect that what’s happening the rest of the time when we’re asked why we do things might also be mostly confabulation, just confabulation that’s harder for us and others to notice.
Yes, I agree that confabulation happens a lot, and also that our explanations of why we do things aren’t particularly trustworthy; they’re often self-serving. I think there’s also pretty good evidence that we remember our thoughts at least somewhat, though. A personal example: when thinking about how to respond to someone online, I tend to write things in my head when I’m not at a computer.