Clive Wearing. The Man with the 7-Second Memory.
You may remember an astounding C4 documentary from 1986 recording the plight of former renowned conductor and musician Clive Wearing, who has one of the most extreme cases of amnesia in the world. Since 1985 when a virus attacked his brain, destroying the part that controls learning and memory, he’s been unable to remember anything that happened more than seven seconds earlier. Time means nothing to him. His children, now grown up, rarely visit because it causes them so much pain. He doesn’t recognise them and forgets they’ve been as soon as they’ve left. Jane Treays’s masterful documentary is a harrowing portrait of this man’s personal hell and the effect it has had on those who love him.
To be honest, I have not seen this particular documentary. I am still in the process of securing it. The premise of the subject matter presented is pretty disturbing to say the least. Having read reviews on it as well as a bit of research on wikipedia, I find it hard to imagine living a life like that.
This disease in question is a form of amnesia, which is scientifically termed as anterograde amnesia that has been popularized by films such as ‘Memento‘ and ‘50 First Dates‘. His case on the other hand is so extreme that it is horrific to think that any person could be subjected to such sufferring.
His attempts in trying to remember events, as seen in his diary.
Imagine having a short-term memory span of 7 seconds and having none of it written into one’s long term memory…Heck, even Koi fishes have a greater short-term memory span than that! Can you imagine having to wake up everyday having no approximitation of time and space? It is as if every time you woke up or begin a new memory cycle, it feels as if you were suddenly placed there without having any prior knowledge as to how you got there to start with.
Compounded with the fact that you’ve aged but do not know, it must be terrifying to see one’s own face in the mirror every morning. The last thing you would remember was being at an age of 30 or so but in the next moment realizing that you’ve aged 20 years in an instant!
Clive Wearing with his children.
The only thing he remembers now is just music and his wife. He doesnt remember his children at all. It was so depressing up to a point that his children decided to stop visiting him completely. This was because whenever he would say goodbye to them, within a time span of a few seconds, he would completely forget about them, as if he had never met them nor had any prior knowledge to their existance.
I seriously dont know how his wife finds the strength to deal with all of this. I am at a loss for words as to how does one deal with such a dibiliating disease. It just destroys the soul to see one’s loved one being slowly eaten away by a disease that you know that there’s no cure for.
Clive Wearing’s life.
Yet I guess in the end, truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The many possible occurrances that can happen to one’s life continues to astound me in terms of their impossibility of occurrence.
Now where can I secure a copy of this documentary? This subject matter is too intriguing to be ignored.
Further Reading
Clive Wearing (Wikipedia)
Anterograde Amnesia (Wikipedia)
Watch ‘The Man with the 7-Second Memory’ online (ObsuredTv)
