‘Memory is the mother of all wisdom”,
A saying made famous by the Greek icon Aeschylus. But what happens when one’s memory is severely impaired?
That was the case of Clive Wearing, a former British symphony composer, and orchestrator who got severe amnesia from a herpes simplex encephalitis infection.
Clive was an accomplished musician, having founded Europa Singers of London, an amateur choir specialising in music of the 17th — 20th centuries. He also worked at the BBC, and was responsible for the musical content of BBC Radio 3 on the wedding day of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.
Unfortunately, in 1985, the virus infection destroyed parts of his brain, leading to one of the most severe cases of anterograde and retrograde amnesia ever witnessed in modern medical history.
Anterograde amnesia patients are unable to form new memories, while retrograde amnesia patients are unable to remember their past. In Clive’s case, he can’t remember both— who he was, and who he is.
Anterograde amnesia patients like Clive experience a loss in their explicit memory, which is the memory of personal experiences that can be ‘expressed’ with words.
However, their implicit memory is unaffected, which is the memory that does not require any conscious thought. An example is procedural memory like riding a bicycle or tying shoelaces.
Clive is still able to play the piano after contracting amnesia. Even though he has no conscious memory of ever having played before!
Despite all this, he has the ability to recall his love for his wife, Deborah Wearing. He greets her joyously every time they meet, believing that they have not seen each other in years, even though she has only left the room momentarily.
In a memoir written by his wife, she described his state as;
“He existed in a blinkered moment with no past to anchor it, and not enough present to be able to breathe”.
Clive lives in a perpetual state of confusion and disorientation because his memory, a tool that one usually relies on for coherent narratives, has not given him any clues or history of how he came to be in his current situation.
Clive’s brain has been extensively studied as it provided scientists clues on how memory works. The MRI scan indicated severe damage in his frontal lobe, with marked abnormalities in his hippocampus and amygdala (McComas, 2022).
It was estimated that Clive only had 5% of his hippocampi left. Compared to the brain of Henry Molaison (HM), another amnesiac that had 50% of his hippocampi left.
The marked difference between parts of hippocampi remaining could explain the difference in the symptoms. HM was said to have a 30-second memory while Clive only had a 7-second memory. HM still had short-term memory, while Clive only had a morsel of it, enough to make an entry in his diary, like “I wake for the first time”, before losing that memory again.
Clive’s journals are filled with entries like the following;
8:31AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
9:06AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
9:34am: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.
Earlier entries are striked out, as he forgot having made an entry within seconds of writing it.
Despite that, Clive has managed to survive all these years. At the time of writing, he is still alive, and about to turn 85 years old. He has survived without memories for the past four decades!
Clive has also inspired Christopher Nolan’s 2000 movie, Memento. The protagonist Leonard, who has anterograde amnesia, can no longer form new memories, yet he attempts to find the murderer of his wife.
Even if Clive cannot remember his own life, he has definitely left a legacy — in modern medical science and pop-culture.
McComas, A. J. (2022). Clive Wearing and Henry Molaison Reconsidered [Bookitem]. In Aranzio’s Seahorse and the Search for Memory and Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
