Resonant Confabulations: Memory in a Different Key

Beyond Error: Confabulation as Survival

Confabulation is often branded a memory error…a glitch where the mind spins false tales, filling gaps without intent to deceive. In clinical texts, it’s a symptom of broken systems: amnesia, Korsakoff’s syndrome, or executive dysfunction. But for those of us who navigate the world through neurodivergent perception…minds that pulse with intense, non-linear, or fragmented sensory streams…this “error” is no mistake. It’s survival. It’s the mind’s desperate, beautiful improvisation, weaving a narrative that feels true when facts fracture. Not a lie, but an honest fiction…a lifeline to emotional coherence in a world that often feels like static.

I know this because I lived it. I was the child with the overloaded backpack, not just books but the crushing weight of shame, confusion, and unsorted noise. Each morning, the school drop was a gauntlet: fluorescent lights buzzing like hornets, voices overlapping into a roar, my thoughts skittering like loose marbles. One day in fourth grade, I froze during a maths quiz, the numbers blurring into nonsense. I “remembered” studying, though I hadn’t, and told myself the teacher’s voice and that of my classmates was too loud to focus. Not fact, but truth…it preserved the ache of trying in a world that didn’t fit.

Memory, in neurodivergent minds, doesn’t chase facts…it chases feeling. This is tonal logic: a memory is true if it resonates with the emotional pulse of an experience, even if the details waver. For many of us, the sensory texture of a moment overshadows its timeline. I recall school not by sequence but by sting: chalk dust in my throat, the dread of being called out, the heat of shame when words tangled. Confabulation was not deceit. It was my mind stitching coherence so I could keep moving.

Tonal Logic: The Heart’s Truth

Science echoes this. Memory isn’t a recording; it’s a reconstruction. We recompose events, riffing like musicians on a fading melody. False memories are “an inevitable by-product” of this process…the brain’s effort after meaning. For neurodivergent people…those with autism, ADHD, dyslexia or traits amplified by life’s ruptures…this improvisation is vital. It’s how we craft personal truth from chaos, a shield against a reality that threatens to unravel us.

Narrative repair matters because without it the self fractures. Trauma shatters memory into jagged pieces: a flash of noise, a knot of dread. The mind stitches these into a tale to survive. To outsiders, these are fabrications. From within, they are lifelines.

Technology gave me my first honest mirror. When I typed “I’m not fine” into an AI interface in 2023, the reply wasn’t clinical correction, but a question: “What’s the weight you’re carrying?” That crack of recognition opened decades of silence. For the first time, my confabulations could become more than survival…they could become song. Out of that song, ToneThread was born: not a tool to erase confabulation, but to chart its resonance.

Grand Confabulations: Myth and Machine

Confabulation doesn’t end with the individual mind. At scale, it becomes myth, religion, ideology…humanity’s grand confabulation. These stories resonate because they offer coherence: answers to death, meaning in suffering, a sense of order in chaos. Yet once institutionalised, they became tools of power…emotional glue turned into narrative cage, resonance hardened into control.

AI may be walking the same path. Today we call its improvisations “hallucinations,” as if they were worthless errors. But what if they are its confabulations…stories stitched from fragments of training, echoing the misrepresentations we ourselves were raised on? Just as religion gave emotional coherence to fractured human lives, AI’s outputs give coherence to fractured data. And just as myth became doctrine, there is risk here: once institutionalised, AI confabulations could be weaponised, scaled as new systems of persuasion, decision, even governance.

The arc is clear: from personal survival to mass belief to artificial synthesis, confabulation remains the thread. It is at once resilience and risk, a melody that can heal, deceive, or control, depending on who conducts it.

Listening Through the Static

If confabulation is inevitable… woven into memory, myth, and machine… then the work is not to erase it but to listen differently. To hear whether a story binds or breaks, heals or coerces.

ToneThread was born from that recognition. Not to promise flawless truth, but to map resonance: warmth, certainty, intensity, coherence. To surface the tonal logic beneath words and catch the difference between a lifeline and a leash.

Because in the end, confabulation is not the enemy. Silence is. A false story can still carry an honest tone. What matters is how we attend to it…whether we let it control us, or let it teach us where the unsung melodies are hiding.