Paramnesia - noun- (countable and uncountable, plural paramnesias)

1. An inability to distinguish between real memories and dreams or fantasies

2. An inability to remember the meaning of common words
3. A distortion of memory in which fantasy and objective experience are
confused.
4. An inability to recall the meanings of common words.
The term paramnesia was introduced by a German psychiatrist, Emil
Kraepelin, in 1886 to denote errors of memory. He distinguished three main
varieties; one he called simple memory deceptions, as when one remembers as
genuine those events imagined or hallucinated in fantasy or dream. This is not
uncommon among confused and amnesic people and also occurs in paranoid states.
Kraepelin also wrote of associative memory deceptions, as when a person meeting
someone for the first time claims to have seen him on previous occasions. This has
been renamed reduplicative paramnesia or simply reduplication. Lastly there was
identifying paramnesia, in which a novel situation is experienced as duplicating an
earlier situation in every detail; this is now known as dj vu or paramnesia tout
court. The term confabulation denotes the production of false recollections
generally.
The dj vu experience has aroused considerable interest and is
occasionally felt by most people, especially in youth or when they are fatigued. It
has also found its way into literature, having been well described by, among other
creative writers, Shelley, Dickens, Hawthorne, Tolstoy, and Proust. The curious
sense of extreme familiarity may be limited to a single sensory system, such as the
sense of hearing, but as a rule it is generalized, affecting all aspects of experience
including the subjects own actions. As a rule, it passes off within a few seconds or
minutes, though its repercussions may persist for some time. For some epileptics,
however, dj vu may continue for hours or even days and can provide a fertile
subsoil for delusional elaboration.
In view of its occurrence among organically healthy individuals, dj vu
commonly has been regarded as psychogenic and as having its origin in some
partly forgotten memory, fantasy, or dream. This explanation has appealed strongly
to psychoanalysts; it also gains support from the finding that an experience very
similar to dj vu can be induced in normal people by hypnosis. If a picture is
presented to a hypnotized person with the instruction to forget it and then is shown
with other pictures when he is awake, the subject may report an intense feeling of

familiarity that he is at a loss to justify. The dj vu phenomenon also is

attributable to minor neurophysiological abnormality; it is frequent in epilepsy.
Indeed, dj vu is accepted as a definite sign of epileptic activity originating in the
temporal lobe of the brain and may occur as part of the seizure activity or
frequently between convulsions. It seems to be more frequent in cases in which the
disorder is in the right temporal lobe and has on occasion been evoked by electrical
stimulation of the exposed brain during surgery

Reduplicative paramnesia
Reduplication is observed mainly among acutely confused or severely
amnesic people; for example, a patient may say that he has been in one or more
hospitals that are very similar to his present location and that all bear the same
name.
The effect also can be induced by showing the person an object such as a
picture and by testing him for recognition of the same picture a few minutes later.
He is apt to say that he has seen a similar picture but definitely not the one now
being shown. This effect appears to depend on loss of a sense of familiarity and on
failure to treat a single object seen on a number of occasions as one and the same.
It has been reported that reduplication of this kind is typically associated with
confabulation, speech disorder (paraphasia), disorientation, and denial of illness.
Confabulation
Spurious memories or fabrications are very common in psychiatric disorders
and may take on an expansive and grandiose character. They may also embody
obvious elements from fantasy and dream. At a more realistic level, the production
of false memories (confabulation) is best studied among sufferers of Korsakoffs
syndrome, for whom consciousness and reasoning remain clear. When asked what
he did on the previous day, such a person may give a detailed account of a typical
day in his life several months or years earlier. Evidently his retrograde amnesia and
his disorientation in time provide fertile soil for false reminiscence. When the

confabulation embodies dramatic, fanciful elements, it is the exception rather than

the rule.
Confabulation once was regarded as ones reaction to the social
embarrassment produced by a memory defecti.e., as an attempt to fill memory
gaps plausibly. Despite this possibility, many severely amnesic patients confabulate
little, if at all; and there appears to be no relation between the severity of amnesia
and frequency of confabulation. In consequence, individual differences in
preamnesic personality have been stressed, particularly in regard to suggestibility.
While many patients who confabulate are obviously highly suggestible, precise
tests of suggestibility have not been used in most clinical evaluations. It also has
been claimed that the superficially sociable, but basically secretive, individual is
particularly prone to confabulate. The most critical factor appears to be the
sufferers degree of insight into his disorder; it has been observed that the amnesia
sufferer who most strongly denies any lapse in memory is most prone to
confabulate. By contrast, it also has been claimed that in chronic Korsakoff states
the individuals insight into his condition is no guarantee of freedom from
confabulation.
While confabulation is pathological by definition, all people include an
inventive (and thus spurious) element in their remembering. Indeed, it seems valid
to say that all remembering depends heavily on reconstruction rather than on mere
reproduction alone. Among amnesiacs, reconstruction is especially drastic,
inventive, and error-prone, particularly in regard to chronological sequence. The
difference, therefore, between normal and grossly amnesic confabulation may well
be one of degree rather than kind.