Clive Wearing

Clive Wearing, the man who no longer remembers anything but who plays the piano perfectly

Clive Wearing on piano. Credit: Jiri Rezac

Clive Wearing is one of the best known neurological cases in the world: British pianist and conductor, in 1985 (at the age of 46) he was struck by aherpetic encephalitiscaused by the common herpes simplex virus, which attacked his hippocampus (the “central station” for sorting his memory), making him unable to create new memories for more than a few seconds. Furthermore, Wearing is incapable of remembering anything else from his past: this is a very rare case of a combination of anterograde amnesia (inability to form new memories) e retrograde amnesia (loss of memory of the past). In fact, Wearing’s memory is very short: 7 to 30 seconds!

The man lives in a constant present, with the sensation of a perpetual awakening from a coma, but what makes his case even more astonishing is the fact that Wearing manages the musician he can play the piano as if nothing had happened, and to conduct the orchestra with the same mastery as before the accident. His motor and musical memory remained intact because of the encephalitis he left it intact structure of implicit memory of Wearing.

Why Clive Wearing didn’t lose his musical memory: the difference between explicit and implicit memory

Play the piano and conduct an orchestra with great precision; Clive Wearing has always managed to do this very well, and he continued even after the devastating encephalitis. This strange phenomenon of maintenance of implicit procedural memory relating to the motor combinations necessary to perform pieces on the piano or to effectively conduct an orchestra can be explained precisely by relying on the distinction between explicit memory and implicit memory.

  • There explicit memory it is that type of memory that we can recall, which has to do with the memory of the episodes of our life, of what happened to us, as well as the information we receive, the stories read in books or the most important telephone numbers .
  • There implicit memoryoften also called procedural memory, is instead that embodied and “subterranean” memory, which is formed with continuous practice, and concerns the use of objects, riding a bicycle, driving a car or, indeed, playing the piano . Implicit memory is therefore a large set of everything that we cannot recall to the conscious mind, but which we can still perform.

Playing the piano it’s a similar activity to riding a bicycle: it’s about implementation refined and mostly unconscious movementshoned by years of experience and practice that are hardwired into the brain between the basal ganglia, motor and premotor cortex. The extraordinary permanence of Wearing’s implicit memory is due precisely to different wiring in the brain that have implicit memory and explicit memory.

Clive Wearing
Clive Wearing.

The neural pathways of explicit and implicit memory

The brain pathways that the two memories pass through are therefore different. There explicit memorythat of the memory of events and general concepts, mainly involves thehippocampuswhich is central in the consolidation of memories from short term to long term, the prefrontal cortexwhich maintains the temporal context of memories and contributes to their recall, and the medial temporal cortexcrucial for the integration of the various information that constitutes a memory.

The memory that concerns instead motor skills and the learned behaviors that can be performed unconsciously and effortlessly relies on deep structures like i basal gangliaportions of the brain that lie beneath the cortex and that have a central role in the formation of habits, in the progressive automatization of the various motor sequences of a complex movement and in the transformation of initially controlled movements into automatic and fluid actions. Together with the ganglia they collaborate premotor and motor cortexin the organization and execution of movement, with the cerebellum monitoring the regulation of complex motor skills, making them fluid and dynamic.

THE’Clive Wearing encephalitis It aggressively attacked both the hippocampi and the amygdalae, with medium-intensity damage also affecting the prefrontal cortex and temporal cortex. The structures of implicit memorymiraculously, they almost remained unharmed. Over time, Clive has managed to recover only a very small part of his explicit memory capacity and, convinced that he is working in the hospital where he is being treated, he has achieved a relative state of tranquility which, until the 1990s, was impossible for him. experience due to significant emotional disturbances due to encephalitis and the appearance, a few years after the illness, of auditory hallucinations.