15 Facts About Clive Wearing

Clive Wearing was born on 11 May 1938 and is a British former musicologist, conductor, tenor and keyboardist who developed chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia in 1985.

Clive Wearing is an accomplished musician and is known for editing the works of Orlande de Lassus.

Clive Wearing organised The London Lassus Ensemble, designing and staging the 1982 London Lassus Festival to commemorate the composer's 450th Anniversary.

On 27 March 1985, Clive Wearing, then an acknowledged expert in early music at the height of his career with BBC Radio 3, contracted herpesviral encephalitis, a herpes simplex virus that attacked his central nervous system.

Clive Wearing has been unable to associate memories effectively or to control his emotions, exhibiting unstable moods.

Clive Wearing developed a profound case of total amnesia as a result of his illness.

Clive Wearing spends every day 'waking up' every 20 seconds or so, 'restarting' his consciousness once the timespan of his short-term memory has elapsed.

Clive Wearing knows, for example, that he has children from an earlier marriage, but he cannot remember their names.

Clive Wearing did not know how the entries were made or by whom, although he did recognise his own handwriting.

Clive Wearing can learn new procedures and even a very few facts, not from episodic memory or encoding, but by acquiring new procedural memories through repetition.

Clive Wearing's story was told in a 1986 documentary entitled Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness, in which he was interviewed by Jonathan Miller.

Clive Wearing was featured in the 1988 PBS series, The Mind, in Episode 1, In Search of the Mind.

Clive Wearing appears in the 2006 documentary series Time, where his case is used to illustrate the effect of losing one's perception of time.

Clive Wearing appears in Eric Kandel's holiday lectures on the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Clive Wearing's story was featured on an episode of the TLC series Medical Incredible.