Confabulation
Etymology
From Latin "confabulari" (to talk together or chat), built from "com-" (together) and "fabulari" (to tell tales), from "fabula" (story). Neutral in classical Latin, it was adopted by 19th- and 20th-century psychiatry — notably in describing Korsakoff’s syndrome — for memories the brain manufactures to paper over gaps.
noun · /kun-fab-yuh-LAY-shun/
The brain’s production of fabricated or distorted memories offered sincerely as true, without intent to deceive.
What it names
A sharp term for how a mind fills gaps with a confident, invented story — useful for understanding that a false account can be honestly believed, from clinical amnesia to the everyday reasons we give for our own choices.
Example
Split-brain experiments showed confabulation vividly: patients invented plausible reasons for actions their conscious mind had not actually chosen.
Related idea
Unlike lying, confabulation lacks any intent to deceive; and unlike apophenia (already here), which finds false patterns in real data, confabulation invents the underlying facts themselves.