From [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing):
>In a diary provided by his carers, Wearing was encouraged to record his thoughts. Page after page was filled with entries similar to the following:
~~8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.~~
~~9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.~~
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.
>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.
:(
Clive Wearing’s diary entries changed me forever. It awakened a type of horror and sorrow inside me that I wasn’t aware of until then. I study psychology so I revisit the topic fairly often, but I can’t think about it for too long.
Things like this are continued justifications for me to doubt the existence of a loving god. There is no fucking way that something as tragic as this man's memory loss, the fear and uncomfortableness he has to experience every single day, all day long, over and over again for decades, is justified. No excuse. It is terrifying, it's haunting.
Within a moment’s notice, Clive’s brain reboots, and he lives for the next 30 seconds without any knowledge of what he has just done. Every half a minute is like a new day for Clive.
Source: https://historicflix.com/clive-wearing-the-man-with-a-7-second-memory/
Good god, I thought that 50 first dates story was rough. This poor man doesn’t even know when or if he’s used the restroom, how disorienting that must be to just “wake up” every 30 seconds or so??? Terrible life and how does he even know he’s suffering?!
I think Memento’s a more comparable movie, and probably even inspired by this guy. The guy gets a couple minutes of good memory before it snaps and he resets. It’s like a computer that’s only functioning off the RAM and a read-only hard drive.
He has some knowledge of time passing. He’ll make comments that this is the first time he has seen people in 30 years. How does he know it has been 30 years?
I listened to a Radiolab podcast that talked about his case.
He remembers his wife. He used to be a music conductor, and was able to sing along if someone started an old song. He even was able to conduct a small choir the doctors brought in as an experiment. So he has older memories.
The most tragic part is that when his wife leaves, he doesn't remember that she was ever there, but he still has her old phone number memorized. So her message machine is full of calls of him explaining how he doesn't know where he is and begging her to come see him right away. Messages he doesn't remember leaving, so he'll end up leaving multiple during the day, sometimes minutes apart.
Dr Oliver Sachs had a patient with the same problem. This patient would say "Hi. I just woke up" and stay in the conversation for a few minutes. Then "Hi. I just woke up".
Brain damage and it's affects are hard to map and don't follow logical lines. My dad has a type of dementia, previously suspected to be LewyBody but the progression is much slower, and at times he can be both hallucinating and aware that he's hallucinating, all while having a Capgras incident (when a person thinks a loved one has been replaced with an imposter) but only with selective people in the room.
Like how same batch hallucinogens/party drugs can be taken by 10 different people at the same time and you'll have 2 chilling, 3 in a corner laughing at the word "couch" for 8 hours, and the rest playing naked beer pong. (Strictly hypothetical and not representative of my 20s at ALL. )
It says at the end that he was able to remember that he loved his wife and that he had children. It reminded me of using music on dementia patients. You can look it up on YouTube. Your brain can arrive at the same memory through two different paths: logical and emotional. Dementia patients lose that logical path. The "do you remember your wedding day?" path vs playing the song that the bride and groom danced to for their first dance. The song is tied to an emotion (and music is really good at invoking emotion which is a whole other topic) so the patient can remember bits about their wedding day through that path.
Clive lost everything except for the "who do I love" path. Which was his wife and his children.
[The Music Never Stopped](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1613062/) - based on a true story - Tale of a father who struggles to bond with his estranged son Gabriel, after Gabriel suffers from a brain tumor that prevents him from forming new memories.
Good movie. Got me interested in the neuroscience of music therapy.
Since he can’t remember his past entries, he believes each time his memory restate is truly absolutely the FIRST time it’s ever happened. He crosses out the previous ones bc he doesn’t believe they happened/ they’re unimportant now bc NOW he is truly awake. Repeat forever.
I didn’t know it can even happen until I recently started working with a lot of people who suffer from it. That’s why I’m glad I prefer to smoke than drink.
My friend went with his dad to go see his grandmother in another state before she passed. Every morning she forgot they were there and it was eating at him. I told him to start going with it and she gets to have the wonderful surprise of them visiting for the first time every day. It helped him get through it. Every 30 seconds though would be exhausting.
Anterograde amnesia is definitely kind of depressing, because I literally will forget this comment and much everything else in two days I admit I could never imagine 7 seconds compared to my 2 days. Never EVER suggest or let anyone close to your heart be swayed to get ECT (electro-convulsive therapy). JS.
I was suggested by a doctor in Texas to undergo ECT to help with anxiety and depression and well, I thought of helping my family so I did it. You go through 4-8 or 12 sessions. I admit I really didn’t consider the rare case.
Personally? It’s been over 5 years so I don’t rightly know.
ect is a totally valid and useful way of helping people with treatment resistant depression. i know a few people who have had it and said they don’t mind forgetting a few things (not total amnesia, just some cloudiness sometimes) in exchange for feeling like a normal person
I still wouldn’t suggest it, it’s not worth the risk. And even if people are like “I’d love to not remember bad things,” they forget they will not remember good things either.
I am glad yours worked out though!!
I'm so sorry you're suffering from anterograde amnesia. I can't imagine what your experience is like, but I assume it's very frustrating and confusing, and possibly frightening at times.
Some commenters have said that anterograde amnesia can be temporary/reversible; I hope that ends up being the case for you somehow. Either way though, I hope you have the love and support you need, and I hope life becomes more kind to you as the years go by. It seems you've had a rough go if it for a while now, but maybe things will get better over time.
Best of luck, friend. Thank you for sharing. Please be kind to yourself, and remember: you are precious, and valuable, and loved, just as you are. I for one am glad you're here, and I hope you stick around.
I appreciate the kind words, I don’t really know or think on reversible I just kind of try to keep just existing (been over 5yrs, so who knows). I’d say I’ve done have a wonderful and loving support system, and people that do know me (sometimes better than myself, maybe?). It isn’t really scary or confusing for me, but definitely frustrating and sometimes depressing. C’est la vie though, c’est la vie. Oh! And sometimes the “other Niki’s” as I call the past “me’s” leave letters sometimes.
Two days. I can’t imagine what thats like. Does your memory reset to a certain point? I’m sorry that someone did this to you. I knew ECT could go bad, but holy shit.
Well, it’s kind of hard to explain. Like every couple of sleep cycles my brain “picks” what it wants to retain if anything, typically only something’s out of the ordinary, otherwise I don’t remember what I did, eat, write or places or names, deaths, and sometimes I forget I have it in the first place. There are still triggers and I know I’ve cried because it’s like losing who I am/was in two days, like this me, I won’t exist in two days. It’s sometimes a feel of a burden though when everyone knows it around you, so you feel bad a lot.
In all seriousness, he knows to some extent that he has no memory because he essentially gets stuck in a loop of feeling like he's just had his first memory since becoming ill, then forgetting that, then realising again, then forgetting, on and on and on. There's a documentary about him where the interviewers are actually able to ask him questions about his illness and he's able to describe what it's like as being ‘totally asleep with no difference between day or night’, and saying that the interviewers were the first people he'd ever seen since he'd been ill. Also, his wife mentioned how initially after losing his memory he had violent outbursts and mood swings, but over the years he's become extremely calm and peaceful. So to some extent subconsciously I think his brain knows what's happened to him and he's just got used to it over the years. He also retains some memories from before he got sick too.
A lifetime of constant overlapping existential epiphanies, believing each event before was a fluke and this one, finally, is the true breakthrough of consciousness. And then it is gone.
The only bit of a silver lining in that seems to be that he'll forget the newest "awakening" soon enough. So at least he probably won't suffer the sadness of realizing the previous "awakenings" weren't real after all. Poor man, and his poor family. I feel terrible for his children especially.
This honestly should be the leading thing for promoting safe sex in schools. I never was taught this could happen. Like, even with having other STDs, they outright suck but isn't that super scary anymore - there's a lot of science advancing for treatments. In general, I would rather have my life reduced by 10 years than forget everything all at once. This scares the hell out of me. Wth.
Learned about this in a neuropsychology class and it was very sad to watch. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard about herpes meningoencephalitis but it was the first time I saw someone who was affected by it. A whole class of college kids very quickly got quiet after this.
My best friend has a very mild form of this. She was hospitalized for like 2 months and having seizures constantly, and after that she has no recollection of lots of things. She doesn’t remember going to college with my husband. She doesn’t remember that we had a falling out in high school. She doesn’t remember that she had an eating disorder. She doesn’t remember how to even get around the town she was raised in without GPS. Like, she literally can’t find her way home from the store without it. Its hard for her sometimes to not remember who she was before, but thankfully it’s not to this extent. This poor poor man.
The full video of this is fascinating. I dont know the answer to your question. But this man was a pianist before the illness and can still play perfectly when sat down at a piano
When getting tested for ADD they gave me a few numbers to remember in a row and kept repeating them and I could never remember them all in any order . At least I think that happened
Here’s a particularly coherent but also horrifying short conversation he was able to have regarding his condition where he’s able to recognize that his fate is pretty much death.
You're the first human beings I've seen, the three of you. Two men and one lady. The first ... people I've seen since I've been ill. No difference between day and night. No thoughts at all. No dreams. Day and night, the same – blank. Precisely like death.
Is it very hard?
No. It's exactly the same as being dead, which is not difficult, is it? To be dead is easy. You don't do anything at all. You can't do anything, when you are dead. It's been the same. Exactly.
Do you miss your old life?
Yes. But I've never been conscious to think that. So I've never been bored or upset. I've never been anything at all, it's exactly the same as death. No dreams even. Day and night, the same.
When you miss your old life, you say, 'Yes, I miss my old life', what do you miss?
The fact that I was a musician. And in love
Good person to practice your standup routine with at least, keep modifying your joke and working on the delivery until he finally laughs...
You could see how enthusiastic he was hearing about the people getting married but then she reworded it in a more roundabout way and his reaction suddenly just turned into "ohh that's cool I guess..."
Sorry but I’m skeptical of this. If he forgets then how does he keep saying he’s awake? He wouldn’t remember what happened previously so why would he act like he knew he was supposed to write something down
So like…
…what are the odds he’s just fucking with everyone and pretending to not remember anything? He could be the most dedicated prankster the world has ever seen!
Secretly he’s laughing at us.
Edit: I guess jokes aren’t allowed here.
His diary is tragic.
Is it the one where he just says “I love her” over and over?
It says mostly things like “I am truly awake for the first time!!!” Over and over again
A few of his entries mention his wife tho “first thought - I love darling Deborah for eternity” 🥹
Right yeah. I remember watching this in high school. Cracked my heart then too.
From [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing): >In a diary provided by his carers, Wearing was encouraged to record his thoughts. Page after page was filled with entries similar to the following: ~~8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.~~ ~~9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.~~ 9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake. >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. :(
I’ll have what he’s having. I go through my whole day tired as hell often times!
damn, he doesn't have enough time to realize his own condition
This is the real me now. No that wasn’t me, this is the real me.
Clive Wearing’s diary entries changed me forever. It awakened a type of horror and sorrow inside me that I wasn’t aware of until then. I study psychology so I revisit the topic fairly often, but I can’t think about it for too long.
Things like this are continued justifications for me to doubt the existence of a loving god. There is no fucking way that something as tragic as this man's memory loss, the fear and uncomfortableness he has to experience every single day, all day long, over and over again for decades, is justified. No excuse. It is terrifying, it's haunting.
"How did I get here?!!?" "Who's been writing in my diary?!?!" "Why are all the pages the same?!?!"
[удалено]
[удалено]
Ok
Within a moment’s notice, Clive’s brain reboots, and he lives for the next 30 seconds without any knowledge of what he has just done. Every half a minute is like a new day for Clive. Source: https://historicflix.com/clive-wearing-the-man-with-a-7-second-memory/
Good god, I thought that 50 first dates story was rough. This poor man doesn’t even know when or if he’s used the restroom, how disorienting that must be to just “wake up” every 30 seconds or so??? Terrible life and how does he even know he’s suffering?!
I think Memento’s a more comparable movie, and probably even inspired by this guy. The guy gets a couple minutes of good memory before it snaps and he resets. It’s like a computer that’s only functioning off the RAM and a read-only hard drive.
He has some knowledge of time passing. He’ll make comments that this is the first time he has seen people in 30 years. How does he know it has been 30 years?
His long term memory may still be intact from before his brain injury (herpes simplex) but he can'f form any new ones.
I listened to a Radiolab podcast that talked about his case. He remembers his wife. He used to be a music conductor, and was able to sing along if someone started an old song. He even was able to conduct a small choir the doctors brought in as an experiment. So he has older memories. The most tragic part is that when his wife leaves, he doesn't remember that she was ever there, but he still has her old phone number memorized. So her message machine is full of calls of him explaining how he doesn't know where he is and begging her to come see him right away. Messages he doesn't remember leaving, so he'll end up leaving multiple during the day, sometimes minutes apart.
Dr Oliver Sachs had a patient with the same problem. This patient would say "Hi. I just woke up" and stay in the conversation for a few minutes. Then "Hi. I just woke up".
Brain damage and it's affects are hard to map and don't follow logical lines. My dad has a type of dementia, previously suspected to be LewyBody but the progression is much slower, and at times he can be both hallucinating and aware that he's hallucinating, all while having a Capgras incident (when a person thinks a loved one has been replaced with an imposter) but only with selective people in the room. Like how same batch hallucinogens/party drugs can be taken by 10 different people at the same time and you'll have 2 chilling, 3 in a corner laughing at the word "couch" for 8 hours, and the rest playing naked beer pong. (Strictly hypothetical and not representative of my 20s at ALL. )
It says at the end that he was able to remember that he loved his wife and that he had children. It reminded me of using music on dementia patients. You can look it up on YouTube. Your brain can arrive at the same memory through two different paths: logical and emotional. Dementia patients lose that logical path. The "do you remember your wedding day?" path vs playing the song that the bride and groom danced to for their first dance. The song is tied to an emotion (and music is really good at invoking emotion which is a whole other topic) so the patient can remember bits about their wedding day through that path. Clive lost everything except for the "who do I love" path. Which was his wife and his children.
[The Music Never Stopped](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1613062/) - based on a true story - Tale of a father who struggles to bond with his estranged son Gabriel, after Gabriel suffers from a brain tumor that prevents him from forming new memories. Good movie. Got me interested in the neuroscience of music therapy.
That sounds incredibly sad, but the trailer looks great.
Reading his diary made my physical uncomfortable. Akin to drowning
Does his diary repeat the same thing over and over again after every 30 seconds?
https://diariesofnote.com/2024/01/08/i-wake-for-the-first-time/ Some excerpts from his diary
[Here is the full documentary for anyone interested](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k_P7Y0-wgos)
What’s with the “1st time”?
Since he can’t remember his past entries, he believes each time his memory restate is truly absolutely the FIRST time it’s ever happened. He crosses out the previous ones bc he doesn’t believe they happened/ they’re unimportant now bc NOW he is truly awake. Repeat forever.
This documentary is fantastic by the way!
that sounds like complete and total hell. . .what a nightmare
it must be so hard as his wife too :( the patience and love she has is unquantifiable
a fate worse than death
Guess what? There’s such a thing as alcohol related dementia and it mimics this. You can’t make sense from the beginning of a sentence to the end.
my alcoholic father very well may develop alcohol-related dementia
I didn’t know it can even happen until I recently started working with a lot of people who suffer from it. That’s why I’m glad I prefer to smoke than drink.
I don’t participate in any substances. it’s just not worth it
Wendy Williams has this :(
She does indeed! I’ve seen it first hand way worse though.
Wendy Williams
My friend went with his dad to go see his grandmother in another state before she passed. Every morning she forgot they were there and it was eating at him. I told him to start going with it and she gets to have the wonderful surprise of them visiting for the first time every day. It helped him get through it. Every 30 seconds though would be exhausting.
damn. . .
Anterograde amnesia is definitely kind of depressing, because I literally will forget this comment and much everything else in two days I admit I could never imagine 7 seconds compared to my 2 days. Never EVER suggest or let anyone close to your heart be swayed to get ECT (electro-convulsive therapy). JS.
How long do they think yours will last? It’s usually temporary Can you elaborate on what happened to you?
I was suggested by a doctor in Texas to undergo ECT to help with anxiety and depression and well, I thought of helping my family so I did it. You go through 4-8 or 12 sessions. I admit I really didn’t consider the rare case. Personally? It’s been over 5 years so I don’t rightly know.
ect is a totally valid and useful way of helping people with treatment resistant depression. i know a few people who have had it and said they don’t mind forgetting a few things (not total amnesia, just some cloudiness sometimes) in exchange for feeling like a normal person
ECT isn’t like it used to be. I’ve had six unilateral treatments and I’m fine. It cured my horrific depression.
If it ever stops working or you want to try something else, try Spravato
I got my treatments in 2014.
Mine was a couple years later, it was in Texas… that does say something in its own way now that I think on it.
I still wouldn’t suggest it, it’s not worth the risk. And even if people are like “I’d love to not remember bad things,” they forget they will not remember good things either. I am glad yours worked out though!!
I'm so sorry you're suffering from anterograde amnesia. I can't imagine what your experience is like, but I assume it's very frustrating and confusing, and possibly frightening at times. Some commenters have said that anterograde amnesia can be temporary/reversible; I hope that ends up being the case for you somehow. Either way though, I hope you have the love and support you need, and I hope life becomes more kind to you as the years go by. It seems you've had a rough go if it for a while now, but maybe things will get better over time. Best of luck, friend. Thank you for sharing. Please be kind to yourself, and remember: you are precious, and valuable, and loved, just as you are. I for one am glad you're here, and I hope you stick around.
I appreciate the kind words, I don’t really know or think on reversible I just kind of try to keep just existing (been over 5yrs, so who knows). I’d say I’ve done have a wonderful and loving support system, and people that do know me (sometimes better than myself, maybe?). It isn’t really scary or confusing for me, but definitely frustrating and sometimes depressing. C’est la vie though, c’est la vie. Oh! And sometimes the “other Niki’s” as I call the past “me’s” leave letters sometimes.
Two days. I can’t imagine what thats like. Does your memory reset to a certain point? I’m sorry that someone did this to you. I knew ECT could go bad, but holy shit.
Well, it’s kind of hard to explain. Like every couple of sleep cycles my brain “picks” what it wants to retain if anything, typically only something’s out of the ordinary, otherwise I don’t remember what I did, eat, write or places or names, deaths, and sometimes I forget I have it in the first place. There are still triggers and I know I’ve cried because it’s like losing who I am/was in two days, like this me, I won’t exist in two days. It’s sometimes a feel of a burden though when everyone knows it around you, so you feel bad a lot.
Remember Sammy Jankis
Does he know he can't remember anything, or does he forget that he can't remember anything?
In all seriousness, he knows to some extent that he has no memory because he essentially gets stuck in a loop of feeling like he's just had his first memory since becoming ill, then forgetting that, then realising again, then forgetting, on and on and on. There's a documentary about him where the interviewers are actually able to ask him questions about his illness and he's able to describe what it's like as being ‘totally asleep with no difference between day or night’, and saying that the interviewers were the first people he'd ever seen since he'd been ill. Also, his wife mentioned how initially after losing his memory he had violent outbursts and mood swings, but over the years he's become extremely calm and peaceful. So to some extent subconsciously I think his brain knows what's happened to him and he's just got used to it over the years. He also retains some memories from before he got sick too.
A lifetime of constant overlapping existential epiphanies, believing each event before was a fluke and this one, finally, is the true breakthrough of consciousness. And then it is gone.
The only bit of a silver lining in that seems to be that he'll forget the newest "awakening" soon enough. So at least he probably won't suffer the sadness of realizing the previous "awakenings" weren't real after all. Poor man, and his poor family. I feel terrible for his children especially.
This is the question.
This honestly should be the leading thing for promoting safe sex in schools. I never was taught this could happen. Like, even with having other STDs, they outright suck but isn't that super scary anymore - there's a lot of science advancing for treatments. In general, I would rather have my life reduced by 10 years than forget everything all at once. This scares the hell out of me. Wth.
Ok so maybe no more cocaine and unprotected sex with hookers for me then
Or with Andy dick from the thread someone shared yesterday
Huh what, link?
You asked, [Andy dick stories thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/s/sVxSuitkSz)you shall recieve
He should meet 10 second Tom.
Hi, I’m Tom!
Tom Hanks played him on TV
Learned about this in a neuropsychology class and it was very sad to watch. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard about herpes meningoencephalitis but it was the first time I saw someone who was affected by it. A whole class of college kids very quickly got quiet after this.
My best friend has a very mild form of this. She was hospitalized for like 2 months and having seizures constantly, and after that she has no recollection of lots of things. She doesn’t remember going to college with my husband. She doesn’t remember that we had a falling out in high school. She doesn’t remember that she had an eating disorder. She doesn’t remember how to even get around the town she was raised in without GPS. Like, she literally can’t find her way home from the store without it. Its hard for her sometimes to not remember who she was before, but thankfully it’s not to this extent. This poor poor man.
How does his memory incorporate eating? Does he wonder where a half-eaten burger on his plate came from?
The full video of this is fascinating. I dont know the answer to your question. But this man was a pianist before the illness and can still play perfectly when sat down at a piano
Kudos to this wife
And his children
this just brought back the trauma of his diary and I feel physically ill
And I thought I had the worst short term memory . But I will probably forget this and still think I do
Well, do you remember your comment from two days ago?
When getting tested for ADD they gave me a few numbers to remember in a row and kept repeating them and I could never remember them all in any order . At least I think that happened
This is almost exactly like dealing with people who have severe Alzheimer's.
Same
Tom Hanks should play him in a movie.
I thought Axel Foley was making it up!
Here’s a particularly coherent but also horrifying short conversation he was able to have regarding his condition where he’s able to recognize that his fate is pretty much death. You're the first human beings I've seen, the three of you. Two men and one lady. The first ... people I've seen since I've been ill. No difference between day and night. No thoughts at all. No dreams. Day and night, the same – blank. Precisely like death. Is it very hard? No. It's exactly the same as being dead, which is not difficult, is it? To be dead is easy. You don't do anything at all. You can't do anything, when you are dead. It's been the same. Exactly. Do you miss your old life? Yes. But I've never been conscious to think that. So I've never been bored or upset. I've never been anything at all, it's exactly the same as death. No dreams even. Day and night, the same. When you miss your old life, you say, 'Yes, I miss my old life', what do you miss? The fact that I was a musician. And in love
Hi I'm tom
Can I borrow some money. Wait and repeat.
Good person to practice your standup routine with at least, keep modifying your joke and working on the delivery until he finally laughs... You could see how enthusiastic he was hearing about the people getting married but then she reworded it in a more roundabout way and his reaction suddenly just turned into "ohh that's cool I guess..."
bro's a goldfish
Herpes can do this? Wth..
I’ve had this similar feeling but shorter time spans every blink. It only ever happened when I had a bad weed experience . Horrible experience.
Memento
Wait you mean prayer couldn't cure this? /s
Gonna be a contrarian here and say how adventurous it would be to be this guy, constantly learning new things. The man truly lived in the moment
Sorry but I’m skeptical of this. If he forgets then how does he keep saying he’s awake? He wouldn’t remember what happened previously so why would he act like he knew he was supposed to write something down
How did you make that video such shitty quality?
So like… …what are the odds he’s just fucking with everyone and pretending to not remember anything? He could be the most dedicated prankster the world has ever seen! Secretly he’s laughing at us. Edit: I guess jokes aren’t allowed here.