Clive Wearing’s Rare Predicament of Having an Extremely Limited Memory

Photo of Clive Wearing from The New Yorker

   

Clive Wearing is a man whose extensive brain damage inhibits his memory. He has only a small and vague recall of his past and isn’t able to form new memories.  His wife Deborah’s nonfiction case study Forever Today: A Memoir of Love and Amnesia was published in 2005 and documentaries about Clive are well-known to many brain researchers.

Clive was a conductor and a BBC early music producer for Radio 3 while Deborah was working in public relations for a major UK retailer in 1985 when a virus destroyed large parts of Clive’s brain.  Deborah wrote, “Clive had damage in many areas of the cortex or outer mantle.  He had lesions on either side (temporal lobes), back (occipital), upper back (occipital parietal) and in the frontal lobes.”  The hippocampus and other structures deeper inside the brain were also damaged.

There were different phases to the aftermath of the virus.  Talking developed gradually and there was an interim when he talked backwards: “The fact that Clive could spell and speak back to front with such facility and wit showed there was some real intelligence alive in there.”  It was also surprising when Clive first exhibited the continuation of his musical abilities.  He demonstrated that he could still read music and sing. 

Deborah described various aspects of Clive’s inhibited mentality in Forever Today — 

As it seemed impossible to fix anything in his mind, it was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment.  Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness . . .  


Clive no longer had any episodic memory, that is, memory for events . . . But, as is the case with amnesia, he could remember general things . . . It would gradually become apparent that everything and every place was perpetually unfamiliar and every person he did not know of old was forever a stranger.


. . . one thing he did know for sure — he knew he loved me, he knew I loved him, he knew we were one, and he knew that came before everything.


. . . he was living evidence that you could lose almost everything you ever knew about yourself and still be yourself.

The nonfiction book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks offered a biographical profile of Clive.  Sacks commented about Clive’s unique journals — 

. . . Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook.  But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes.  He would write: “2.10 pm: this time properly awake. . . . 2.14 pm: this time finally awake. . . . 2.35 pm: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.”  This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 pm, and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.”  This in turn was canceled out by the next entry.

A spring 2008 update letter about Clive written by Deborah is included in the expanded edition of Musicophilia.  She noted some incidents where Clive was “showing new semantic memory,” such as being able to retrieve a care assistant's lighter ten or fifteen minutes after hearing that she lost it.

Below are links to YouTube videos about Clive. The first six with footage of Clive and Deborah from 1985 and 1998 are from the BBC's “The Mind — Second Edition.”  The seventh video is a segment about Clive from a 2007 BBC documentary about time featuring Michio Kaku.  

Part 1a    Part 1b     Part 2a      Part 2b     Part 2c     Part 2d

From 2007 BBC documentary about time


Here are links to previous blog posts about the brain and unusual human mentalities.

The Unusual Mentality of Jill Price

Pictures of the Mind by Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald

The Brain and Psychic Phenomena

Channeled Perspectives of the Brain