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aftermath, and praise him for doing what they were not able to do. It became apparent to Fotoupolou that RM’s stories of high-velocity heroism were his attempts to assuage deep feelings of powerlessness, by rewriting his memories of the horrific incident in which he had lost part of mind.
    Fotopoulou has learned to read between the lines of her patients’ confabulations to find the ways in which they are trying to make sense of troubles of which they are only dimly aware. Another of her patients, a wealthy Italian businessman who had suffered a stroke, would constantly fret that he had lost boxes of important files. Fotopoulou took this to be his metaphor for his memory problems. Sigmund Freud would have had no trouble recognising the stories of confabulators as wish-fulfilments that the rest of us work through in dreams and fantasies. He not only looked for hidden psychological meanings in the dreams and speech of his patients, but in works of art. For Freud, dreaming, storytelling and lying are inextricably intertwined, because we can never tell the truth of the unconscious. He noted the prevalence of novels by male authors with a ‘hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympathy by every possible means’ – by rescuing distressed women, for instance.
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    Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting to be called Lying For A Living (it has never been released). On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic if somewhat bemused Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from Los Angeles and persuaded them to improvise (the footage includes a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). ‘If you can lie, you can act,’ Brando told the writer Jod Kaftan, when asked about the title he had chosen for the series. ‘Are you good at lying?’ asked Kaftan. ‘Jesus,’ replied Brando, ‘I’m fabulous at it.’
    Actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive you, because the rules are laid out in advance: you come to the theatre, and we’ll lie to you. But as Brando and others have observed, artistic storytelling and lying are very close: both involve making up fictional stories and asking others to believe in them, and the mental processes involved are similar. Having said that, the differences between the artist, the liar and the confabulator are as revealing as the similarities.
    Unlike artists, chronic confabulators can’t stop telling tales. At certain moments, this is also true of artists, who will sometimes describe an act of creativity as being beyond their control – as something happening to them. When Dylan is outside the pet shop there’s a sense of the words tumbling out of him of their own accord, and he famously scrawled what became the lyrics to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in one long rush of inspiration (Dylan later referred to his first draft, fondly, as ‘a piece of vomit, twenty pages long’). However, the artist ultimately knows he’s engaged in creating a fiction and is able to draw on his subconscious processes at will. Robert Louis Stevenson came to rely on his unusually vivid dreams to provide the basis of his stories; The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde began in a nightmarefrom which he awoke screaming. If chronic confabulators are trapped in what Fotopoulou calls ‘a waking dream’, artists dip into their confabulatory resources quite deliberately.
    Dr Charles Limb, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, is an ear surgeon and a devoted music fan (he is, he told me, obsessed by sound). Limb is an accomplished saxophonist, composer and music historian, and the music he loves most is jazz. He is fascinated by the mental processes that enable