Clive Wearing is a 78-year-old English musician and musicologist who contracted herpes simplex encephalitis in 1985. The virus destroyed his hippocampus bilaterally and also some frontal regions of the brain. He suffered from both anterograde and retrograde amnesia, sometimes called as total or global amnesia. Anterograde amnesia is where the ability to memorize new things is impaired or lost because data does not successfully transfer from the conscious short-term memory into permanent long-term memory. Retrograde amnesia is where a person's pre-existing memories are lost to conscious recollection, beyond an ordinary degree of forgetfulness, even though they may be able to memorize new things that occur after the onset of amnesia. Clive has damage to the hippocampus and related areas of the brain which are used to the encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories. Since there is a blockage in the pathways along which the information travels during the processes of memory encoding or retrieval, his brain is not able to form new memories or retrieve some old ones. …show more content…
His diary containing entries of how he feels and what he is thinking helps to give a heartbreaking insight into what it is like to lose one's memory. He understands it is his handwriting but says he didn't write it consciously or was not fully awake at that time. Because the damage was to an area of his brain required to transfer memories from working memory to long-term memory, he is completely unable to form lasting new long-term memories, and his memory is therefore limited to a short-term memory of between 7 and 30 seconds, to the extent that he greets his wife like a long lost friend even if she only left to go into the kitchen 30 seconds