Clive Wearing

Sam Kean also discussed Wearing's life in the twelfth chapter of his 2014 book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons.

Earlier entries were usually crossed out, since he forgot having made an entry within minutes and dismissed the writings. He did not know how the entries were made or by whom, although he did recognise his own handwriting. Wishing to record 'waking up for the first time', he still wrote diary entries in 2007, more than 20 years after he started them.

Sacks wrote about Wearing himself in a chapter in his 2007 book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and an article in The New Yorker titled "The Abyss".

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

In a documentary broadcast in 2005, Wearing was interviewed about the experience of his condition:

He was also featured in the 1988 PBS series, The Mind, in Episode 1, In Search of the Mind. A follow-up episode was aired in 1998 on the second edition of The Mind as Life Without Memory: The Case of Clive Wearing.

His story was told in a 1986 documentary entitled Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness, in which he was interviewed by Jonathan Miller. Neurologist Oliver Sacks mentions the documentary in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. An updated story was told in the 2005 ITV documentary The Man with the 7 Second Memory (although Wearing's short-term memory span can be up to 30 seconds).

On 27 March 1985, 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. Since then, he has been unable to store new memories. He has also been unable to associate memories effectively or to control his emotions, exhibiting unstable moods.

Wearing remembers little of his life before 1985. He knows, for example, that he has children from an earlier marriage, but he cannot remember their names. His love for his second wife, Deborah, whom he married the year before his illness began, is undiminished. He greets her joyously every time they meet, believing either that he has not seen her in years or that they have never met before, even though she may have just left the room momentarily. When he goes out dining with his wife, he can remember the names of food, but he cannot link them with taste, as he forgets what food he is eating by the time it has reached his mouth.

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

While he was working at the BBC, Wearing was made responsible for the musical content of BBC Radio 3 for much of 29 July 1981, the day of the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. For that occasion, he chose to recreate, with authentic instruments and meticulously researched scores, the Bavarian royal wedding that took place in Munich on 22 February 1568. The music by Lassus, Padovano, de'Bardi, Palestrina, Gabrieli, Tallis and others was performed by the Taverner Consort, Choir and Players and the Natural Trumpet Ensemble of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, conducted by Andrew Parrott.

In 1968, he founded the Europa Singers of London, an amateur choir specialising in music of the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries. It won critical approval, especially for performances of the Monteverdi Vespers. In 1977, it gave the first performance in the Russian Cathedral of Sir John Tavener's setting of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom with Roderick Earle as bass soloist and subsequently made a recording (Ikon Records No. 9007). The Europa Singers also competed in the XXXII Concorso Polifonico Internazionale in Arezzo in 1984 and provided choruses for operas staged by the London Opera Centre, including Lully's Alceste and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, which was performed at Sadler's Wells.

Clive Wearing (born 11 May 1938) is a British former musicologist, conductor, tenor and keyboardist who has chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia. He lacks the ability to form new memories and cannot recall aspects of his memories, frequently believing that he has only recently awoken from a comatose state. In educational psychology contexts, Wearing's dual retrograde-anterograde amnesia phenomenon is often referred to as '30-second Clive' in reference to his 30-second episodic memory capacity.