Self-deception and confabulation

Cases in which people are self-deceived seem to require that the person hol d two contradictory beliefs, something which appears to be impossible or im plausible. A phenomenon seen in some brain-damaged patients known as confab ulation (roughly, an ongoing tendency to make false utterances without inte nt to deceive) can shed light on the problem of self-deception. The conflic t is not actually between two beliefs, but between two representations, a ' conceptual' one and an 'analog' one. In addition, confabulation yields valu able clues about the structure of normal human knowledge-gathering processe s.