Eugene Kyere, Wyatt Andresen, Sarah Kerman, Elijah Davila

The Curious Case of Clive Wearing

On March 26, 1985 Clive Wearing went to bed and awoke the next morning unable to recall his wife’s name or answer simple questions.

Originally diagnosed with influenza and sleep deprivation, he was prescribed sleeping medication and left in a pill induced slumber while his wife left for work

The Case

After being found wandering the streets he was taken to a hospital were he was finally diagnosed with Herpes Encephalitis, a disease that began eating holes into his brain and causing it to swell against his skull, resulting in severe memory loss as well as retrograde and anterograde amnesia

The diagnosis

DIAGNOSIS

Herpes Encephalitis- inflammation of the brain due to a herpes simplex virus. Basically a cold sore in the brain

retrograde amnesia- a memory disorder that cause the inability to remember events or experiences that happen before an important time.

Anterograde amnesia- Events after amnesia cannot be remembered and new memories cannot form

What Does it Mean?

Besides the swelling and holes in his brain in damaged parts like the occipito-parietal, frontal lobes, thalamus, hypothalamus and amygdale. The part that is completely gone is is the hippocampus(Greek for seahorse). This is what we use for recalling and remembering as well as laying down new thoughts.

What else happened to the brain

Clive has a short term memory of about 7 to 30 seconds

He forgets things easily and has no recollection of what just happened to him

Basically…

But oddly Enough…•Musician- retained ability to read and play music- showed short term memory impacted but long term memory largely intact b/c temporal lobe not impacted •Sensory perception of stimuli not impacted

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwigmktix2Y

Video

Stark, C.E. (2003) Hippocampal damage equally impairs memory for single items and memory for conjunctions. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12699335

Casler, Leah (2013) Anterograde Amnesia: The Problem that is Forgotten. Mercer University http://faculty.mercer.edu/spears_a/studentpages/anterograde/image6.jpg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/3313452/The-man-who-keeps-falling-in-love-with-his-wife.html

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_sacks

http://dictionary.reference.com/