Korsakoff's Psychosis

When you have large gaps in your memory, you’re likely to create a fiction to fill the gaps. No wonder Pilate asks, “What is truth?” Sadly, he preferred fiction to the truth that sets us free.

As always, our family plans to go to Paris for the holidays this year. Gay Par-ee. We always fly to France for Christmas. On the Concorde. For three weeks. Love the Champs Elysées. And that Louvre. Love the Louvre. Yeah, and my sister's family is joining us. They have eight kids. She's a brain surgeon. Her husband is an astronaut. Yeah, an astronaut who speaks French. And Swahili. Yeah, he speaks Swahili ....

Huh?

Sound like an encounter with an old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live? Actually, this brief moment of utter fantasy could be the fruits of Korsakoff's Psychosis, a form of permanent short- term memory loss in which sufferers create elaborate confabulations because one's grasp of reality has fizzled into oblivion. We don't fly to Paris like the family of Home Alone.

Like the guy in the TV commercial for Yellow Pages: "Yeah, I wrote that."

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