The Man with no Memory

On the 26th of March 1985 a renowned British musicologist, producer at the BBC and choir music conductor Clive Wearing experienced a strong headache. He took a couple of painkillers, but they did not help much. At first, doctors were certain that it was just a bad case of flu so they sent him home. He rested for the next couple of days, but the pain in his head did not subside. At the time he was not aware that these were the last days he would be able to remember in the evening what he had been doing in the morning.

When his wife returned from work on the fourth day of his illness, their apartment was a mess and her husband was nowhere to be found. Naturally, she immediately became worried because she remembered he still had a high fever in the morning. In the meanwhile, Clive was aimlessly wandering the streets when he was noticed by a cab driver who informed the police who then contacted his wife. She and Clive spent the rest of the day in the hospital where he underwent a series of examinations and was diagnosed with a severe case of a viral brain disease called herpes encephalitis.

They started treating him with antiviral drugs, but the virus had already severely damaged his brain. Because of the infection a great part of his brain had already been destroyed, so that on the image his head appeared as if entire pieces of brain were missing. The most damage was inflicted on the very part where memories are formed and stored. Even though Clive survived the viral infection and later completely recovered physically as well as mentally, he never got his memory back. Today, more than twenty years after the infection, he is believed to be the man with the worst memory to have ever been thoroughly medically examined.


A Prisoner of the Present

Since 1985 Clive has been “waking up” from a long sleep every few minutes, not knowing where he is. Most of you have probably experienced the unpleasant feeling of waking up and, at first, not knowing where you were or what was happening to you. After a few moments, though, you were able to bring back to your consciousness the events of the night before and recall how you ended up in this seemingly unknown bed. Unfortunately, Clive has no memory to help him and finds himself completely lost in time again and again when after a few minutes – at times no more than seven – his short term memory is erased.

Of course his mental capacities have remained almost the same as they were before the illness occurred. He can still be a very intelligent and witty conversational partner. Unfortunately, everything that happened after 1985 is completely new to him and he would forget who you were after only a few minutes unless he knew you from before. He usually spontaneously understands this absence of memories to be the result of a coma from which he had woken after a very long time. He feels as if he had only been awake for two minutes. Day after day, he poses the same first question to people he finds in his company: “How long have I been unconscious?”

For a while, he used to keep a diary which contained almost nothing but an exact record of the time and the note: “Now I am awake.” The fact that he was awake, that he was conscious of his existence, was what he thought to be the most important piece of information that he had to store each time he “woke up” again. Of course, he could never understand exactly why the previous record in his diary which was also written in his handwriting said: “Now, I am really awake.” That is because the record also contains the time shown on the clock only some ten minutes earlier. As he can not remember writing the previous records he is repeatedly convinced that they are incorrect, so most of the entries in his notebook are crossed out. Sometimes he only corrects the time because the record stating that he is awake seems to be completely correct, only the time written on the side does not match the one he sees on the clock at a particular moment.

Clive has been the subject of several documentaries and some clips taken from them are available on the internet. The most surprising thing one notices when watching these clips for the first time is the intensity of the feelings Clive expresses towards his wife every time he sees her. Even when his wife leaves the room only to return a couple of minutes later he is as happy to see her as if he had not seen her in ten years. In fact, his love for Deborah is the same or even stronger than it was soon after the wedding when he fell ill.


Tales of Music and the Brain

Like his intense love for his wife, his capacity for creating music is another thing from his previous life that has remained unchanged. Soon after his loss of memory, Clive’s wife noticed that he could sing or play pieces of music exceeding the span of his conversational memory. It seemed that, to him, singing was even easier than speaking. When playing the piano he is completely taken over by the music. This lasts until the end of the song when the brain mechanism enabling him to play music switches back to the mechanism that controls the process of thinking and language expression. Between these two phases healthy people would usually search through their memories and remember where they were and who they were playing the song to. Unfortunately, Clive does not possess this ability and, when the song ends, finds himself utterly confused, not knowing where he is or how he got there.

On a recording of a rehearsal with his classical choir, which he led before his illness, he can be seen completely focused on conducting the choir and instructing the singers when to join in. Once the song ends, though, he suddenly starts violently shaking and is completely confused. This is when his memory should have come to his help, but he is simply unable to activate it.

The discovery that Clive has preserved an impressive capacity for performing music despite his severely injured brain is becoming increasingly interesting to scientists researching brain activity. The renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks even gives a detailed description of the story about Clive Wearing in his new book, entitled Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, coming out in the middle of October. Sacks made a name for himself as a doctor in the seventies when he succeeded in waking up some of his patients from a state of numbness, an achievement which he describes thoroughly in one of his broadly acclaimed books. In addition to this book, on which the famous movie Awakenings (1990) – he was portrayed by Robin Williams – was based, Sacks wrote about his unusual patients in many other works which are true narrative masterpieces.

His style of writing is probably best represented by a passage from one of his books The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, published in 1985: “A smile appeared on his face. He seemed to have decided the examination was over. He started searching for his hat with his eyes. He stretched out his hand, seized his wife by her head and tried to pick her up and put her on his head. It was obvious that he had mistaken his wife for a hat! His wife looked as if she were used to this sort of an event.”

Newly in Love Every Day

Clive spent most of the six years after the virus had destroyed his memory in a psychiatric hospital. He became very depressed as, even though he was alive and, in a way, completely healthy, he was completely unable to lead an independent life. Day after day he woke up in a strange hospital room with unfamiliar doctors and hospital staff. Nearly seven years later and with the help of his wife’s persistent persuasion, he was transferred to a smaller countryside clinic for patients suffering from brain damage where he immediately started to feel much better.

In 2005 his wife Deborah wrote a book about her experience with her husband’s illness, entitled Forever Today: A True Story of Lost Memory and Never-Ending Love in which she described the good as well as the unpleasant moments of their relationship. When Clive fell ill she was 27 and the first years were extremely difficult for her, but she tried to do her best. In 1992 at 35 years of age, however, she came to realize that she could not go on living like that anymore. She decided to divorce her husband and move from London to New York. She wanted to start a new life. Of course, Clive knew nothing of the divorce and even if he did, he would have forgotten it only a few minutes later. The divorce papers were signed by Clive’s son from his first marriage who is also his father’s legal representative.

Naturally, Deborah still visits Clive who continues to be immensely happy every time he sees her. As he has no sense of time, his feelings for her are always just as strong when he sees her after a few months as when he sees her coming from the bathroom after only a couple of minutes.