Clive Wearing: 7 seconds of memory

Clive Wearing is a prodigious conductor who, following a brain injury, has had his memory “reduced” to seven seconds. Imagine, for a moment, that everything you experience is forgotten in seven seconds. And so on and so forth for the rest of your life. Would we still be ourselves?

Wearing was born in 1938 in the UK and was a great, renowned and famous conductor until March 1985, when herpes simplex type I caused an encephalitis that irreversibly damaged his hippocampus .

He plays the piano, but does not know how. He can’t watch television or read a book…. Well, he can, although he can’t remember anything he’s seen or read after seven seconds. But soon after, he doesn’t remember touching him.

He writes a diary of “awakenings” in which he records every time he is aware of the present, which he calls an awakening. However, each time he has a new awakening, he labels the previous one, claiming that he does not remember it.

The only person he remembers is his wife, and that is striking, because Wearing knows he loves his wife. When asked what it means when his wife comes to visit him, he replies:“Paradise fills the earth“. It is worth noting that every time he goes to see someone, he claims that he has not seen anyone for years, although he does remember his wife’s existence. However, when she returns home, he calls him and asks when she will come to see him: he does not remember his wife ever visiting him.

Every moment is the first moment, because amnesia erases everything immediately after it happens.

The documentary does not provide us with data on which we can estimate the possible affectation of the systems related to sensory memories (iconic and echoic memory), whose function is none other than to allow the complete processing of visual and auditory stimuli when these are very brief. In other words, they create literal copies of stimuli that last for a very short time, fractions of a second beyond when the stimulus disappears. Therefore, it does not seem that these systems may be affected and the traits would be more towards the processing of semantic issues.

If we look at the slave systems of working memory (WM), what do we see? The phonological loop (BF) does not seem to be affected, because it understands verbal messages perfectly well, understands what is explained to it and therefore clearly performs a complete processing of the semantics of words and a handling of grammatical structures. It assists the central executive (CE) in processing verbal messages, but there is a problem, and that is that it cannot transfer new information to long-term memory (LTM). He notes that he cannot read because he cannot remember the last sentence (the information is not transferred to the LTM) but he could certainly repeat the last sentence he has read or heard.

The visuospatial (VA) supports the EC in tasks related to mental or spatial imagery, but we do not have much information: he does not recognise his house or room in which he has lived for many years, but we do not know if he could close his eyes and manipulate visual information for a few seconds.

The episodic buffer (EB) contributes to EC processing by holding multimodal information from the ME for a few seconds, and it is clear that Wearing has this capacity impaired: he cannot retrieve traces of past episodes and therefore cannot store them temporarily in the EB.

Whether it is a problem of EM retrieval or a problem of the BE itself, its functionality is totally affected by the disease.

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The retrieval of semantic information acquired before the disease is fairly well preserved, which is why he is able to speak and dialogue. He knows what things are and that means that he retrieves them from his semantic LTM to interpret reality, just like playing the piano. Other CD functions such as selecting relevant information from what is presented to him, storing information for a few seconds, inhibitory processes or the distribution of resources between different simultaneous activities are also preserved, but the fact that he cannot encode information in the LTM from CD processing means that any activity involving bidirectional traffic of episodic information between MT and LTM (such as reading, watching a film, etc.) is not possible.

Finally, if we look at the functions developed by the different systems and subsystems of the LTM, we see that there are significant problems in declarative memory and, specifically, with episodic memory, which I mentioned earlier, of a general nature and some related to his own life (he knows his wife Deborah and his son, the number plate of his father’s car, the old telephone number, he knows that he is a musician…).

Note that the non-declarative long-term memory is preserved, hence he has intact motor skills (playing the piano, walking, etc.) or the emotional and affective component associated with various information.

Wearing would have no problem performing a verbal fluency test, because the CE must maintain the retrieval key (the category) for the indicated time (one minute) and from there develop search mechanisms in the LTM (in this case semantic) that make it possible to retrieve the examples (the words). Since the information is simple and the examples they generate would help them to maintain it, they would have no problems.

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This is a trick question: yes, for learning that does not need the control of the CE or what there is awareness of learning about. For example, if Wearing did not know how to ride a bicycle, he could learn. He would also be capable of associative learning of the conditioning type, although he would not remember “learning” it.

What is your feeling about this case?

📎 Alcaine, A. [Albert]. (2024, 25 July). Clive Wearing: 7 seconds of memory. PsicoPop. https://www.psicopop.top/en/clive-wearing-7-seconds-of-memory/

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