Every few seconds, Clive Wearing wakes up for the first time.

He opens his eyes. He looks around. And he experiences what he believes is his first moment of consciousness after years of being unconscious.

He writes in his journal: “8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.”

A few minutes later, he crosses it out and writes: “9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.”

Then he crosses that out too and writes: “9:34 AM: NOW I am awake.”

His journal is filled with these entries. Hundreds of them. Each one claiming to be the first moment of true consciousness, each one crossed out and replaced when the next moment feels like another awakening.

Because Clive Wearing’s memory resets every 7 to 30 seconds.

He cannot form new memories. The present moment exists. The previous moment is gone, completely erased, as if it never happened.

He has lived this way since 1985.

The Virus

In March 1985, Clive Wearing was one of the world’s leading experts on Renaissance music.

He was a conductor, a musicologist, a producer for the BBC. He’d conducted the first authentic performance of the 1610 Monteverdi Vespers in modern times. He was respected, accomplished, at the peak of his career.

He was 47 years old.

Then he got a headache.

At first, it seemed like the flu. Fever, fatigue, confusion.

But it progressed rapidly. Within days, he was hallucinating, disoriented, unable to recognize his wife Deborah.

He was rushed to the hospital. The diagnosis: herpes simplex encephalitis—a viral infection that attacks the brain.

It’s rare. It’s devastating. And if not treated immediately, it destroys brain tissue.

In Clive’s case, despite treatment, the virus destroyed his hippocampus bilaterally—both the left and right sides.

The hippocampus is the brain’s memory-forming center. It takes experiences from the present moment and converts them into long-term memories.

Without it, the present moment exists. But it cannot become the past.

The moment you’re experiencing right now will never become a memory. It will simply… cease to exist.

The Awakening That Never Ends

When Clive emerged from the acute phase of the illness, he appeared to recover.

He could speak. He could walk. His intelligence was intact. His personality was recognizable.

But something was catastrophically wrong.

He couldn’t remember anything that had happened since the illness.

Every time Deborah left the room and came back—even if she was gone for just a minute—Clive greeted her as if he hadn’t seen her in years.

“Deborah! Oh my darling, you’re here! I haven’t seen you in so long! Where have you been?”

She’d say, “I was just in the hallway. I’ve been here all day.”

He’d have no memory of it. To him, each reunion with his wife was the first time he’d seen her since before the illness.

Doctors would examine him. He’d answer questions, cooperate with tests. They’d leave the room.

Two minutes later, they’d return.

Clive would greet them as if they were complete strangers meeting for the first time.

“Hello! Are you a doctor? Can you tell me what’s happened to me? I just woke up. I haven’t been conscious until this very moment.”

The Journal

Early on, Clive started keeping a journal.

The idea was that if he couldn’t remember, he could at least write things down and read them later.

But the journal became a record of his confusion and despair.

“8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.”

He’d write this, convinced it was true. Then a few minutes would pass. The previous moment would cease to exist in his memory.

He’d read what he’d written: “8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.”

And he’d think: “That can’t be true. I wasn’t awake then. I’m only awake NOW.”

So he’d cross it out and write a new entry: “9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.”

The cycle repeated endlessly.

His journal isn’t a record of his days. It’s a record of continuous awakening, each entry contradicting the last, each one claiming to be the first true moment of consciousness.

Reading it is heartbreaking. Page after page of a man trapped in an eternal present, unable to believe that any previous moment existed.

What Remains

But here’s where Clive’s case becomes even stranger:

Not all memory was destroyed.

His memories from before the illness—his childhood, his education, his career, his love for Deborah—remain intact.

He knows who he is. He knows he’s a musician. He can tell you about his work, his life, his accomplishments.

He just can’t remember anything from the last 40 years.

And more remarkably: his procedural memory works perfectly.

Procedural memory is the type of memory that governs skills and automatic actions—how to ride a bike, how to tie your shoes, how to play an instrument.

It doesn’t require the hippocampus. It’s stored in different brain regions: the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, motor cortex.

And in Clive, those regions were undamaged.

So if you sit Clive down at a piano, something extraordinary happens:

He can play. Beautifully. Flawlessly. Complex pieces from memory, conducted with the skill and artistry of the expert musician he was.

While he’s playing, he seems whole. The music flows. He’s in the moment, completely present, not confused or distressed.

But the moment he stops, the confusion returns.

He has no memory of having just played. If you ask him, “Can you play the piano?” he might say, “I don’t know. I haven’t tried since I’ve been unconscious.”

Then he sits down and plays a flawless concerto.

The Eternal Now

Imagine living Clive’s experience:

You open your eyes. You are conscious for what feels like the first time in years.

You have no memory of anything that happened in the last 40 years. The last thing you remember is conducting rehearsals in 1985.

You’re confused, disoriented. You don’t understand where you are or what’s happened.

Someone explains: “You had encephalitis. It damaged your brain. You’ve been in this condition for decades.”

You hear this. You process it. You understand.

Then 30 seconds pass.

The person who just explained this is gone. The explanation is gone. The understanding is gone.

You open your eyes. You are conscious for what feels like the first time in years.

This is Clive’s life. Every moment is a fresh awakening. Every moment is tinged with confusion and distress because he cannot understand why he doesn’t remember anything.

Except when Deborah is there.

The Love That Persists

The one consistent element in Clive’s existence is his wife, Deborah.

Every time she enters the room, he greets her with overwhelming joy and relief.

“Deborah! Oh my darling! I haven’t seen you! I’m awake now! I’m conscious for the first time!”

He embraces her with the intensity of someone who’s been separated from their spouse for years.

This happens every time. Dozens of times a day. Every single day.

And Deborah endures it.

For years after the illness, she visited him daily in the care facility where he lives. Each visit is, for him, a reunion after a vast absence.

What’s remarkable is that even though he can’t form new memories, his love for Deborah persists. It’s immediate, overwhelming, visceral.

Some researchers suggest this shows that emotional memory can exist independently of conscious memory. The feeling of love doesn’t require remembering why you love someone.

Others suggest it’s simply that his memories of loving her from before the illness are so strong that they persist in the present.

Either way, it’s the one thing that seems to anchor Clive. Deborah is his connection to continuity, even if he can’t consciously remember it.

The Questions It Raises

Clive Wearing’s case forces us to confront profound questions about consciousness and identity:

Can you exist without memory?

Clive exists. He’s conscious. He experiences the present moment.

But without the ability to connect one moment to the next, is there a coherent “self”?

What is consciousness without continuity?

You feel like a continuous being because your memory creates the illusion of continuity. You remember who you were yesterday, so you feel like the same person today.

Clive doesn’t have that. Each moment is isolated, disconnected from what came before.

Yet he’s conscious in each moment. Is that enough to constitute a person?

Where does identity live?

Clive knows who he is—Clive Wearing, musician, husband of Deborah.

But that knowledge is frozen in time before 1985. He doesn’t know who he’s been for the last 40 years because he can’t remember any of it.

Is identity what you remember being? Or what you are in this moment?

The Medical Mystery

From a neuroscience perspective, Clive’s case demonstrates the critical role of the hippocampus in memory formation.

We’ve known since the famous case of H.M. in the 1950s that the hippocampus is essential for forming new long-term memories.

But Clive’s case is more extreme than H.M.’s. H.M. could form memories that lasted several minutes before fading. Clive’s last seconds at most.

The virus destroyed his hippocampus so completely that there’s virtually no buffer between experience and forgetting.

What’s preserved—his procedural memory, his old memories, his emotional responses—shows that memory isn’t a single system. It’s multiple systems, distributed across different brain regions.

Destroy one system (hippocampus = new conscious memories), and the others (cerebellum = skills, amygdala = emotions, cortex = old memories) continue functioning.

Clive can’t remember learning to play piano. But he can play.

He can’t remember Deborah visiting yesterday. But he loves her immediately upon seeing her.

Memory is fragmented, specialized, distributed. We only realize this when brain damage selectively destroys one fragment while leaving others intact.

Life in the Eternal Present

Clive is now in his 80s. He’s lived with this condition for nearly 40 years—longer than he lived without it.

He lives in a care facility with 24-hour support.

His days have routine: meals, walks, music, visits from Deborah (now less frequent as she’s aged and lives farther away).

But he doesn’t experience routine. He doesn’t experience days. He experiences moments.

Each moment is novel. Each moment is confusing. Each moment is all there is.

The staff report that he’s generally pleasant, though often anxious and confused. He asks the same questions repeatedly, not remembering that he just asked them.

When he plays music—singing in the choir, conducting, playing piano—he seems at peace. The music exists in the present moment, and in that moment, he’s whole.

Outside of music, he lives in constant bewilderment, trapped in a present that cannot connect to a past or extend into a future.

The Unbearable Nature of Time

For most of us, time is continuous. The present moment slides into the past and is replaced by a new present, but we experience it as a flow.

We remember what we did this morning, yesterday, last year. Those memories create a sense of self extending through time.

For Clive, time doesn’t flow. It jumps. Each moment is discrete, disconnected, alone.

There is no yesterday. There is no this morning. There is only now.

And “now” lasts about 30 seconds before it vanishes completely, as if it never existed.

This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of his condition: the past doesn’t fade or become fuzzy. It simply ceases to exist entirely.

You and I might forget details of what happened yesterday. Clive doesn’t forget yesterday—he has no “yesterday” at all.

The Persistence of Music

The one exception, the one place where continuity seems to exist, is in music.

When Clive sings or plays or conducts, the music unfolds over time. He follows the score. He maintains tempo. He executes phrasing that spans minutes.

This requires some form of short-term memory—at minimum, remembering the beginning of a phrase while you’re playing the end.

Yet he has that, but only within the context of music.

Outside of music, he can’t remember what you said 10 seconds ago.

Inside music, he can perform a five-minute piece from memory.

The implication: memory isn’t one thing. It’s specialized. Musical memory, procedural memory, semantic memory, episodic memory—all separate systems.

Destroy episodic memory (the hippocampus), and Clive loses his life story, his continuous autobiography.

But musical memory, stored elsewhere, remains intact.

He can’t tell you what he played. But he can play it.

The Tragedy

Deborah Wearing wrote a memoir about her life with Clive: “Forever Today.”

In it, she describes the impossible sadness of loving someone who cannot hold on to any moment you share.

Every goodbye is permanent to him. Every reunion is a miracle.

You cannot build new memories together. You cannot reference shared experiences. You cannot have a conversation that builds on what you discussed yesterday.

Every interaction exists in isolation, disconnected from all others.

And yet, the love persists. He knows he loves her, even if he can’t remember why or when or what they’ve shared.

That might be the most profound mystery of all:

Love that exists without memory. Connection that persists when continuity is impossible.

What We Take For Granted

Clive Wearing shows us what we lose if we lose the ability to form memories:

Not just the past. Not just knowledge of what happened.

But the sense of existing as a continuous being moving through time.

The ability to learn from experience. To build relationships. To grow and change.

The feeling that your life is a story with coherence and meaning.

All of that requires memory. And memory requires a functioning hippocampus.

Lose it, and you lose time itself.

You’re trapped in an eternal present, each moment appearing and vanishing, leaving no trace.

Forever today. Never tomorrow. No yesterday.

Just now. And now. And now. And now.

With no connection between them.

Sources:

  • Wearing, D. (2005). Forever Today: A Memoir of Love and Amnesia. Doubleday.
  • Wilson, B. A., Baddeley, A. D., & Kapur, N. (1995). “Dense amnesia in a professional musician following herpes simplex virus encephalitis.” Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 17(5), 668-681.
  • Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Knopf.
  • Squire, L. R., & Wixted, J. T. (2011). “The cognitive neuroscience of human memory since H.M.” Annual Review of Neuroscience, 34, 259-288.

Next in the series: The Sleeping Beauties of Kazakhstan - An entire village where people fell into mysterious sleep for days, with no clear medical explanation.