Exploratory Essay: Anterograde Amnesia

We often discuss Limbo as a space that lies in between one space and another -a sort of different dimension from reality. But in contrast to the fantasy or science fiction context in which this is usually described, a man named Clive Weary experiences this limbo everyday. He lives only in an instantaneous state of consciousness that lasts for only 7 seconds until his memory resets again. As he journals the time stamps and events of his days, with every entry he crosses out the last and notes that this newest entry is the true moment of consciousness and every other before was not real. This is because he suffers from both anterograde and retrograde amnesia caused by an illness that left his Hippocampus destroyed, so he is unable to remember

Essentially, he is unable to form any new memories. An example of this would be the moment in the Documentary (Treays, 2005) where his wife, Deborah, listens to all the voicemails from her husband in which he begs her to come visit him. She states afterwards that she had only left him minutes before some of the messages, but he does not remember that she had come. He believes, every time he sees his wife, that it is the first human interaction he's encountered since becoming ill. This contrasts another form of amnesia, retrograde. Retrograde amnesia affects Clive’s ability to remember life before his illness. It is described as the inability to retrieve information that is acquired before a certain date. (Schacter et al., 2017) Late in the film, Clive and his wife return to a performance hall where he conducted one of his most well known performances for BBC, but Clive was unable to remember the event because his brain is unable to retrieve the moment due to the encephalitis he suffered decades

Essentially, it is the knowledge of how to do certain things. Clive experiences this in his ability to play the piano. Even though he isn't able to remember experiences of playing music, his tactile knowledge of the keys and ability to read music remains within his memory. While the longterm and shorter memory were largely affected by the destruction of the Hippocampus the procedural memory is a type of implicit memory and the part of the brain that was destroyed by the encephalitis was not necessary for implicit memory, but more so for explicit. Abilities like playing the piano, riding a bike, and walking would not necessarily be stored in the long term memory but in the areas surrounding it, like the motor cortex. (Schacter et al.,