Hello, my name is Bryan Oftedahl. I’ve recently been reading up on the intriguing dysfunction of Hemispatial Neglect. I’m not so curious about the dysfunction itself, more the patient’s reactions to anybody pointing it out to them, their denial of the Neglect and the confabulations they come up with. When a victim of hemispatial neglect is asked to clap they raise the hand of their unaffected side and swing it back and forth in front of them in a kind of half clap while the hand of their affected side remains paralyzed and motionless. When asked if they’re clapping the patient claims that they are. When prodded about the certainty of their clapping the patient insists that they are. When it is pointed out that their clapping makes no sound the patient shrugs the point off, claiming that they never make noise when they do something. Instead of admit the obvious truth they choose to confabulate. I quote a bit from a Blakeslee book, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own:      If prodded for hours, patients make up stories to explain their lack of action. One woman said her arm ‘went for a walk’. A man claimed that his motionless arm did not belong to him. When it was placed in his right visual field, he insisted it was not his.      “Whose arm is it?” Dr. Berti asked.      “Yours.”      “Are you sure? Look here, I only have two hands.”      The patient replied, “What can I say? You have three wrists. You should have three hands.”      This denial and these rather absurd confabulations remind me very much of Leon Festinger’s book When Prophecy Fails. The group they were investigating - UFO occultists - were constantly making prophecies about when the UFO’s would arrive and whisk them off to safety along with prophecies concerning an apocalyptic flooding of the lands. Whenever the prophecies failed, instead of admitting the obvious truth, they came up with all sorts of often absurd confabulations and denials not unlike the patients with hemispatial neglect. I understand cognitive dissonance and that denial and even confabulation are a common reaction to it. I understand these people aren’t being liars or idiots, they genuinely believe these claims.      I guess my question is multifaceted: •     Is there anyway that this form of denial/confabulation taking place with the hemispatial neglect patients and UFO occultists is the same kind of denial and can it be the same kind of denial/confabulation used by Creationists in their denial and attempts to debunk Evolution? •     Is there a neurological basis for this denial/confabulation - i.e. is neurology aware of a general region within the brain, or network of systems, that is a likely culprit? •     Do you have any recommendations as far as literature concerning these issues?