Imagine waking up, and for a few seconds believing you have just come back to life. Then imagine that feeling returning again and again, every few seconds, for the rest of your life.
That is roughly what happened to Clive Wearing, a British musicologist and conductor who was born in 1938. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant musician: he conducted choirs, worked with the London Sinfonietta, and had a career at the BBC. In 1985, at about the age of forty-seven, he contracted herpes simplex encephalitis, a viral infection that attacked his brain. The damage was concentrated in regions that matter enormously for memory, particularly the hippocampus and surrounding tissue, and it left him with one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever documented.
The result is a memory that lasts somewhere between seven and thirty seconds. Ask him what he did this morning and he cannot tell you. He keeps a diary, and the entries record a strange and painful loop: he writes that he is awake, conscious, and alert for the first time; then, minutes later, he crosses that out and writes, again, that he is awake for the first time. Over years, the pages fill with "first" after "first," each one sincere, each one erased by the next.
A handful of things survive this fog. He still recognizes his wife, Deborah, though he cannot recall that he has been married to her for decades; each reunion is, to him, both a joyful recognition and a fresh grief. And remarkably, he can still play the piano and conduct music with real skill. Procedural memory, the memory of how to do a thing, is stored differently from the memory of events, and it was less damaged. He can perform a piece he has no conscious memory of ever learning.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about him in a piece often titled "The Abyss," published in The New Yorker in 2007, describing a man "trapped" in a perpetual present. Deborah Wearing wrote a memoir about their life together, "Forever Today," published in 2005. Two documentaries followed his case: "Prisoner of Consciousness" in 1986, and "The Man With 7 Seconds Memory" in 2005.
What makes the case more than a curiosity is what it reveals about being a self. We tend to assume that identity is like a river, a continuous thing that flows from one moment to the next. Clive Wearing suggests otherwise. If "you" are assembled fresh from moment to moment, then without the machinery of memory there is no thread, only a series of first times. And yet he remains, unmistakably, a person: he has a temperament, a sense of humor, a love of music, a bond with his wife. The self was not stored in the part of the brain that was destroyed.
To understand why the memory broke while the music survived, it helps to know that memory is not one thing. Declarative memory, the memory of facts and events, depends heavily on the hippocampus, which was precisely the region the infection destroyed. Procedural memory, the memory of skills, is laid down elsewhere and is retrieved by doing rather than by recalling. That is why Clive Wearing can sit at a piano and play with the fluency of a lifetime, then turn around and not know he has played at all. His hands remember what his mind cannot.
There is a further cruelty in the case that is easy to miss. Because his short-term memory is so brief, he cannot form new long-term memories, and he also cannot fully recall the life that came before. He knows he is a musician the way one knows a fact, but he does not carry the memories of the concerts themselves. He lives in a present tense that keeps resetting, and the suffering in that is real, even if he cannot hold onto it long enough to dwell on it.
And yet those around him describe a man who is still warm, still witty, still capable of delight. The person did not disappear. What disappeared was the narrative, the story we tell ourselves that links who we were to who we are. Clive Wearing lost the story but kept the character.
It is a strange and humbling thought. The continuity we take for granted, the feeling that we are the same person we were yesterday, may be less like a solid object and more like a magazine that must be reprinted constantly. Most of us never notice the printing press. Clive Wearing is one of the few people who shows us it is running.
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