Biden’s false tales are increasing: Is it a sign of a memory disorder?

President Biden has a long history of telling stories that are embellished, if not outright fabricated, but his falsehoods are increasing rapidly.

Mental health experts say the false memories might be signs of confabulation, a neurological disorder linked to dementia.
 
“Confabulation is most closely associated with dementia-related memory loss,” said Dr. Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatrist. “You are trying to tell a story, but your brain can’t fill the space, so your brain protects you by making stuff up.”

Dr. Ahmed has not personally assessed Mr. Biden but said evidence of confabulation is “overwhelming.”

In a speech this month in Milwaukee, Mr. Biden entertained the audience with previously debunked tales about his grandfather’s death, a conversation with an Amtrak conductor, his father’s education and an eyewitness account of a bridge collapse in Pittsburgh.
 
A week later, Mr. Biden attended a campaign fundraiser where he repeated the debunked Amtrak story and then spun a yarn about encountering a same-sex couple in 1960s Delaware. Although the story is impossible to prove or disprove, several fact-checkers, including The Washington Post, responded skeptically.

In Hawaii last week, Mr. Biden told survivors about a house fire that threatened his wife, Corvette and cat. Media reports at the time described a small kitchen fire under control in roughly 20 minutes.
 
Republicans and others accuse Mr. Biden of outright lying. Some supporters are concerned that Mr. Biden’s age could plague his reelection bid.

At 80, Mr. Biden is the oldest serving U.S. president. If he fulfills a second term, he will be 86 upon leaving office.

In an Economist/YouGov poll last month, 45% of independent voters said Mr. Biden’s health and age “severely limit his ability to do the job.” Only 11% of independents said Mr. Biden’s age and health do not impact his ability to do his job.

A fellow Democrat, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, says Mr. Biden is too old for the job burdens. He is exploring a challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. When asked about his age, Mr. Biden insists he is healthy and vigorous enough for a second term.

As if to prove it, the president took a pilates class and a spin class on Wednesday while on vacation at Lake Tahoe in Nevada. Mr. Biden ensured that reporters knew about his exercise session. “I’ve been working out for the last hour and a half,” he told them.

After Mr. Biden’s annual physical in February, the president’s physician gave him a clean bill. The five-page doctor’s report did not indicate that Mr. Biden had undergone any kind of mental cognitive assessments that could detect changes linked to dementia.

During negotiations with the president on spending this year, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, California Republican, told allies that he found Mr. Biden mentally sharp, The New York Times reported.

Some say voters should be concerned about Mr. Biden’s false tales for reasons beyond attempts to deceive the public.
 
Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist and media personality in Beverly Hills, California, who has not personally examined Mr. Biden, agreed that the president may be dealing with confabulation. A little-studied neurological disorder, confabulation is a memory error that generates false, fabricated or distorted memories. It is commonly associated with other brain disorders, including dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

“The stories he’s been telling — he doesn’t realize that they’ve been debunked or otherwise he wouldn’t tell them. That is confabulation,” she said. “He’s missing the part of his brain that tells him he shouldn’t say those things because he’s convinced himself those stories are true.”
 
Confabulation is the creation of false memories in the brain that lead to untrue stories. Those afflicted are not trying to deceive people but rather sincerely believe their stories are accurate.

Confabulations can border on the fantastical and bizarre but are usually just distortions of actual events. It is sometimes called “honest lying” because those afflicted gain no benefit from telling false tales.

Symptoms usually surface verbally when the brain struggles to fill gaps in a story. As a means to protect itself, the brain creates false memories, experts say.

The percentage of the public dealing with confabulation is unknown, but the disorder is more common in the elderly and people suffering from post-traumatic stress, sleep deprivation, stress or brain injury.

Confabulation is common among people suffering from vascular dementia, in which impaired blood flow to the brain can impact judgment, memory and other thought processes. Mr. Biden has atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that increases the risk of a stroke fivefold and doubles the risk of dementia.
 
“We know his medical history. He’s got a history of vascular disease. We have a body of evidence over several years of Biden making cognitive errors. All of that adds up to a high likelihood that he is in the midstages of cardiovascular dementia and, as part of that, confabulation may be covering for his memory loss,” said Dr. Ahmed, who is based at The Hills Clinic in New South Wales, Australia.
 
Kimberly Dodson, a professor of criminology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, said it’s impossible to know why Mr. Biden repeats the debunked stories. Although she has not examined Mr. Biden, Ms. Dodson said some of his stories sound similar to confabulation.

In Milwaukee, Mr. Biden repeated a story about informing former Amtrak conductor Angelo Negri that he had flown 1 million miles on Air Force Two as vice president, but that was less than he had traveled on Amtrak.

“True story, I swear to God,” Mr. Biden said after telling the tale.

The story has been widely proved false because Mr. Negri retired from Amtrak in 1992 and died in 2014, two years before Mr. Biden reached 1 million miles on Air Force Two.

It was at least the 10th time Mr. Biden had told the story as president, including one week later at a campaign fundraiser.

“He’s likely repeating this story because he fully believes it,” Ms. Dodson said. “If he is confabulating, he is wholly confident in his recollection and will stick to his guns. You can’t present anyone confabulating with evidence to the contrary because they believe their own reality.”

In his version this month, Mr. Biden seemed to believe Mr. Negri was still alive. He said he wouldn’t mention his name “because we are going to get him in trouble.”
 
Dr. Lieberman said she sees signs of confabulation and possibly dementia in Mr. Biden’s tale about the kitchen fire. The president told the story while comparing his fire to the Maui wildfires, which left at least 115 people dead and hundreds more missing.

“Whether it was true or not, his internal dialogue couldn’t tell himself not to tell the story, which is a sign of dementia,” she said. “To compare your kitchen fire with the tragedy these people went through was beyond insensitive, insulting, demeaning and tone-deaf. That he couldn’t stop himself before he said it makes it worse.”

Other embellishments are less severe. Mr. Biden told the Milwaukee crowd that he witnessed a January 2022 bridge collapse in Pittsburgh, even though he arrived in the city hours after the bridge crumbled.

“Without examining him, I’d say it’s likely that he’s confabulating because he’s not telling the story for any personal gain. Confabulators don’t tell stories for personal gain,” Ms. Dodson said.
 
Confabulation also can be associated with disorders such as aneurysms or severe trauma. Mr. Biden suffered two life-threatening brain aneurysms in 1988. He lost his wife and daughter in a 1972 car crash that also severely injured his two sons. He lost his youngest son, Beau Biden, to a brain tumor in 2015.

In another instance, Mr. Biden recently told a Milwaukee crowd that his grandfather died six days after his birth. Public records show that Mr. Biden’s grandfather died more than a year after his birth.
 
He told the same crowd that his father “didn’t have a chance to go to college,” though his father attended Johns Hopkins University for one year.
 
“These stories really are confabulation because he’s not adding the main story. He is just filling space, and it’s almost meaningless to a degree. That is more evidence that this is likely to be confabulation,” Dr. Ahmed said.