- Clive Wearing
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Clive Wearing Born May 11, 1938
United KingdomGenres Early music Occupations Musicologist, conductor and keyboardist Clive Wearing (May 11, 1938) is a British musicologist, conductor, and keyboardist suffering from an acute and long-lasting case of anterograde and retrograde amnesia, meaning that he lacks the ability to form new memories.
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Musical career
Clive Wearing is an accomplished musician, and is known for editing the works of Orlande de Lassus. Wearing sang at Westminster Cathedral as a tenor lay clerk for many years and also had a successful career as a chorus master and worked as such at Covent Garden and the London Sinfonietta Chorus.
In 1968 he founded the Europa Singers of London, an amateur choir specialising in music of the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries. It won critical approval especially for performances of the Monteverdi Vespers. In 1977 it gave the first performance in the Russian Cathedral of Sir John Tavener's setting of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom with Roderick Earle as bass soloist, and subsequently made a recording (Ikon Records No. 9007). The Europa Singers also competed in the XXXII Concorso Polifonico Internazionale in Arezzo in 1984, and provided choruses for operas staged by the London Opera Centre, including Lully's Alceste and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, which was performed at Sadler's Wells.
Wearing also ran The London Lassus Ensemble, designing and staging the 1982 London Lassus Festival to commemorate the composer's 450th Anniversary.
Whilst working at the BBC, Wearing was made responsible for the musical content of Radio 3 for the whole of 29 July 1981, the day of the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. For that occasion, he chose to recreate, with authentic instruments and meticulously researched scores, a Bavarian royal wedding which took place in 1568. This was arguably the high point of his career as a musical researcher.
Amnesia
On March 27, 1985, Wearing, then an acknowledged expert in early music at the height of his career with BBC Radio 3, contracted a virus which normally causes only cold sores, but in Wearing's case attacked the brain (Herpes simplex encephalitis).[1] Since this point, he has been unable to store new memories. He has also been unable to control emotions and associate memories well.
Wearing developed a profound case of total amnesia as a result of his illness. Because the hippocampus, an area required to transfer memories from short-term to long-term memory is damaged, he is completely unable to form lasting new memories – his memory only lasts between 7 and 30 seconds.[citation needed] He spends every day 'waking up' every 20 seconds, 'restarting' his consciousness once the time span of his short term memory elapses (about 30 seconds). He remembers little of his life before 1985; he knows, for example, that he has children from an earlier marriage, but cannot remember their names. His love for his second wife Deborah, whom he married the year prior to his illness, is undiminished. He greets her joyously every time they meet, believing he has not seen her in years, even though she may have just left the room to fetch a glass of water. When he goes out dining with his wife, he can remember the name of the food (e.g. chicken); however he cannot link it with taste, as he has forgotten.[citation needed]
Despite having retrograde as well as anterograde amnesia, and thus only a moment-to-moment consciousness, Wearing still recalls how to play the piano and conduct a choir – all this despite having no recollection of having received a musical education. This is because his procedural memory was not damaged by the virus. As soon as the music stops, however, Wearing forgets that he has just played and starts shaking spasmodically. These jerkings are physical signs of an inability to control his emotions, stemming from the damage to his inferior frontal lobe.[citation needed] His brain is still trying to fire information in the form of action potentials to neurostructures that no longer exist. The resulting encephalic electrical disturbance leads to fits.
In a diary provided by his caretakers, Clive was encouraged to record his thoughts. Page after page is filled with entries similar to the following:
8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.Earlier entries are usually crossed out, since he forgets having made an entry within minutes and dismisses the writings–he does not know how the entries were made or by whom, although he does recognize his own writing.[2] Wishing to record the important life event of "waking up for the first time", he still wrote diary entries in 2007, more than two decades after he started them.
Wearing can learn new practices and even a very few facts–not from episodic memory or encoding, but by acquiring new procedural memories through repetition. For example, having watched a certain video recording multiple times on successive days, he never had any memory of ever seeing the video or knowing the contents, but he was able to anticipate certain parts of the content without remembering how he learned them.[3]
Reports
His wife Deborah has written a book about her husband's case entitled Forever Today.[4]
His story was told in a 1986 documentary entitled Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness, in which he was interviewed by Jonathan Miller. An updated story was told in the 2005 ITV documentary The Man with the 7 Second Memory (although Wearing's short term memory can span much longer than that).
He also appears in the 2006 documentary series Time, where his case is used to illustrate the effect of losing one's perception of time.
His story was also told in episode #304 - "Memory and Forgetting" on the show Radio Lab on New York Public Radio, WNYC. The show is available on-line at WNYC - Radio Lab and via podcast through iTunes.
He appears in Dr. Eric Kandel's holiday lectures on the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which can be found here.
Oliver Sacks wrote about Wearing in a chapter in his 2007 book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and an article in The New Yorker titled "The Abyss".
His story was also featured on an episode of the TLC series Medical Incredible.
See also
Other neurological trauma/damage cases
- Henry Molaison (H.M.)
- Phineas Gage
- KC (patient)
- Scott Bolzan
Other areas
References
- ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/3313452/The-man-who-keeps-falling-in-love-with-his-wife.html
- ^ The Mind BBC series episode – Part 1
- ^ The Mind BBC series episode – Part 2
- ^ Wearing, Deborah (2005). Forever today: a memoir of love and amnesia. Corgi. ISBN 0552771694.
External links
Categories:- People with severe brain damage
- People with amnesia
- 1938 births
- Living people
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