How can a brain tumor and surgery cause someone to confuse past and future events?

A narrower interpretation emphasizes a specific failure of temporal consciousness rather than ordinary forgetfulness. In this view, the person may know facts and generate coherent material but lose the internal tags that distinguish personal past, present, and anticipated future. Related cases involving fornix or limbic circuitry suggest that disrupted connections—not only damage to a single named lobe—may be decisive.

• Confabulation may reflect distorted temporal consciousness: experiences or imagined events are assigned incorrectly to personal past, present, or future.
• Fornix and related memory pathways may be important for temporal ordering, even when conventional memory-content deficits do not fully explain the error.
• Memory disturbance can follow surgery affecting structures not traditionally treated as the main amnesia network, such as the septum pellucidum region.
• A pattern of impaired future thinking alongside altered past recall may reveal partly distinct contributions from prefrontal and memory systems.

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