Discover Top Posts Tagged with #clive wearing

diary entry by clive wearing

Gin and tonic and a cigarette, then of course, waiting for time to elude and disappear. And her arrival.

Clive Wearing, known medically as the worst case of amnesia ever diagnosed, answering the following question: if you could do anything now, if you had free choice, what would you do next?

Wearing's dual retrograde-anterograde amnesia phenomenon is often referred to as "30-second Clive" in reference to his 30-second episodic memory capacity. Because of damage to the hippocampus, an area required to transfer memories from short-term to long-term memory, he is completely unable to form lasting new memories. His memory for events lasts between seven and thirty seconds. He spends every day "waking up" every 20 seconds or so, "restarting" his consciousness once the time-span of his short-term memory has elapsed. During this time he repeatedly questions why he has not seen a doctor, as he constantly believes that he has only recently awoken from a comatose state. Wearing remembers little of his life before 1985. He knows, for example, that he has children from an earlier marriage, but he cannot remember their names. His love for his second wife, Deborah, whom he married the year before his illness began, is undiminished. He greets her joyously every time they meet, believing either that he has not seen her in years or that they have never met before, even though she may have just left the room momentarily. When he goes out dining with his wife he can remember the names of food, but he cannot link them with taste, as he forgets what food he is eating by the time it has reached his mouth.

In a diary provided by his carers Wearing was encouraged to record his thoughts. Page after page was 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.

Wishing to record "waking up for the first time", he still wrote diary entries in 2007, more than 20 years after he started them. In a documentary broadcast in 2005 Wearing was interviewed about the experience of his condition:

Clive: You're the first human beings I've seen, the three of you. Two men and one lady. The first ... people I've seen since I've been ill. No difference between day and night. No thoughts at all. No dreams. Day and night, the same – blank. Precisely like death.

Interviewer: Is it very hard?

Clive: No. It's exactly the same as being dead, which is not difficult, is it? To be dead is easy. You don't do anything at all. You can't do anything, when you are dead. It's been the same. Exactly.

Interviewer: Do you miss your old life?

Clive: Yes. But I've never been conscious to think that. So I've never been bored or upset. I've never been anything at all, it's exactly the same as death. No dreams even. Day and night, the same.

Interviewer: When you miss your old life, you say "Yes, I miss my old life", what do you miss?

Clive: The fact that I was a musician. And in love.

#love #literature #music #poetry #quote #clive wearing #amnesia

Diary entries by Clive Wearing - the man with the seven second memory

Everything until now is unknown and it's void. He uses the analogy of feeling as if he has just woken up. He says it's like just waking up for the first time. It's like just becoming conscious. It's as if I had been unconscious for however many years. Because for him, it is momentous, he has to write it down and he has to write it down in any available surface. If the diary is in front of him, he will write it down there. He will record the time, 10:50 a.m. awake first time, and then he looks at the previous entry, which was 10:48 a.m. awake first time and he says, "No. I wasn’t awake then, that wasn't me. That wasn't proper awakeness. This is the first real awakeness. " So, he goes through the diary scoring out previous entries and underlining the current new entry because this now is the real awakeness, all the previous awakenesses are unknown to me.”