The Man With A 7-Second Memory | Answers With Joe

[Music] or if oh do have it maybe it is extended maybe i don't have it so [Music] [Music] yeah second place [Music] [Music] hey hey are you okay are you lost what's going on [Music] [Music] in a neurological institution in the uk lives a man named clive wearing clive is 83 years old actually he'll turn 84 in two days after this video comes out the thing is he doesn't know this in fact he probably thinks he's in his mid-40s and chances are less than a minute after he blows out his candles he will have forgotten doing it completely he'll have absolutely no idea that it's his birthday or even how old he is now this might sound like the kind of dementia that one might expect unfortunately from people of that age which is sad but you know inevitable but clyde wearing's been dealing with this for over 40 years and his memory issues go far beyond what's normal and expected in fact there's nobody else in the world quite like him that's because clive has not one but two different forms of amnesia chronic anterograde and chronic retrograde amnesia anterograde amnesia means he can't create new memories and retrograde amnesia means that he's lost many of his old memories so when you combine these two this means that clive is unable to form any new memories and he can barely remember anything about his life before he developed amnesia so clive just kind of exists he lives his life on an endless loop 30 seconds at a time never knowing exactly where he's been or where he's going it's kind of impossible to even imagine what this must be like i mean our continuity of consciousness is pretty much what defines our experience of life clive describes it as feeling like he constantly just woke up in fact he keeps a journal and it's just filled from top to bottom with him proclaiming i am now awake or i live with a lot of the earlier entries crossed out because when he sees them he doesn't believe that he wrote them even though they are in his handwriting also and this is amazing but also kind of heartbreaking um clive is married and every single time he sees his wife even if she's just left the room for five minutes he rushes to hug her like he hasn't seen her in years debra wearing actually wrote a book about her experience called forever today a true story of lost memory and never-ending love where she describes his experience like this it was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before i haven't heard anything seen anything touched anything smelled anything he would say it's like being dead yeah this is where it gets kind of creepy because he often describes it as having just come back from the dead i have not seen anything not heard anything not taste anything that's not smelled anything in no sense over being conscious i thought i was dead it's creepy to think about but clyde's situation opens up a lot of questions about how memory works in the brain and what it even means for us to have a conscious experience like for example he'll claim that he has no idea what coffee tastes like even though he drinks coffee every single day and if you ask him where the coffee is in the house he can't tell you but once he's in the kitchen he's perfectly able to just make a cup for himself and he knows exactly where everything is he knows what the coffee is the cups the spoons the sugar the cream all that and he knows how to prepare it and what to do and the order of things but when he's sitting in front of the tv he'll tell you he has no idea where all that stuff is and doesn't even know what coffee tastes like today clive lives under constant care and observation because literally if he were to walk out of the house he would have no way of getting back home normal activities like reading a book or watching a movie or just totally out of the question because he would constantly be forgetting the previous scene or the page that he just read actually it seems the only entertainment that he's really capable of enjoying are sports like cricket or rugby because the action takes place in these little short segments and they're short enough that he can you know process what's happening and this can be very frustrating for clyde because obviously he wasn't always like this in fact before the amnesia he was kind of a world-renowned musician he was a highly respected guy so in general conversations he kind of just sticks to the topics that he knows he can talk intelligently on and he does talk in fact kind of chattering on endlessly is sort of a way for him to remain grounded he'll sometimes speak about world war ii and hiding in air raid shelters as a young boy or talking about the choir at cambridge that he was a part of and he can also draw in a whole slew of topics that he's interested in that he can talk intelligently about which means that when you first meet him he actually seems pretty normal but in about 15 minutes when he noticed that he said the same thing three times in a row doesn't seem so normal he also jokes a lot um kind of compulsively it's actually a condition called bitzel shoot which when you have a german sounding condition you know it's bad news compulsive joking i mean come on what would that be like but no visual shoot is actually called joking disease and it's most likely a consequence of his frontal lobe weakening as he's gotten older now clive's condition is remarkable and it's unique only to him so how did this happen the answer herpes literally just your basic run-of-the-mill herpes simplex one which is funny because herpes but also uh horrifying horrifying because a lot of people have herpes it's actually one of the most prevalent and oldest viruses on the planet in fact there is a herpes virus for every single primate there is for most people the worst symptoms are cold sores on your lips if you're really unlucky you might get sores on your nether regions but for clive somehow this virus crossed the blood-brain barrier and wound up attacking his hippocampus and even unluckier the doctors couldn't figure out what it was and were actually treating him for the flu for a long time it was only after he was completely unresponsive that they were able to figure out the actual problem and by that point the damage had been done the hippocampus as you've probably already guessed plays an important part in the memory equation it kind of transfers memories from short-term to long-term storage but of course it's more complicated than that because as i mentioned before he knows how to make coffee and where all the coffee stuff is kept but he can't explain it verbally so long-term memory is broken up into explicit and implicit memory you can describe explicit memory as declarative things that can be consciously described implicit memory are non-declarative things that are more felt and intuitive and these can be broken down further for example there are two different types of explicit memories episodic which are experienced events like recalling unique memories of your life and semantic which is sort of knowledge and concepts or like knowing state capitals and dates of things and on the other side implicit memories can be procedural which are skills and actions like remembering how to do things like playing music or shuffle cards and emotional conditioning or feelings which are memories that evoke emotion and all this gets confusing with clive's condition because some of this he has and some he doesn't like the coffee thing from earlier right that's implicit procedural memory so he understands that at a subconscious instinctual level but if he were to try to recall a specific memory of him doing that in the past which would be explicit episodic memory he can't you get what i'm saying and sometimes it's kind of hard to pin down the truth like he claims to have a vague memory of hiding in bomb shelters during world war ii which would be explicit episodic but it might just be that he knows the fact that people sheltered from bombs in world war ii which would be explicit semantic but to me the most interesting thing about him was he was able to retain the ability to play music so i mentioned that he was a respected musician earlier um that's actually quite an understatement he was considered like the world's foremost expert on this late renaissance composer named orlando lazus and yes you're right that is a very specific thing to be an expert in now meet me at camera 2 because that's what makes a person really interesting hey you want to be an interesting person or at least convince people that you're an interesting person here's what you do it's really simple become the world's foremost expert in the most specific weird obscure thing you can think of nothing is more interesting to me than meeting somebody who has spent a significant portion of their lives obsessing over the tiniest detail of something i've never heard of were you just like wow really why like it makes me wonder what it is about this thing that makes them so passionate about it like there must be something there that i just don't see and that is the definition of interest so go find your weird thing and nerd the hell out on it [Music] i'm sorry where were we orlando that's right so so clive was the world's foremost expert on his music he had an encyclopedic knowledge of his work he actually ran the london lassos ensemble and he led the 1982 london lassos festival which celebrated his 450th birthday right clive was a super nerd but today clive has no memory of any of this i remember last time we were here you were conducting the lasses requiem and it was for the the last international lassus festival that you put on and you you came in here and it was so moving that there were people here we were crying and it was broadcast live to five countries and you were directing it and it was so moving it was so moving that everyone was in tears the question is can he still play music i did a video a while back about how music kind of hacks the brain it does hold a certain strange and deep connection in our minds could his musical ability survive all this memory loss [Music] yep he can still rip up a piano just like he used to he can both read music and perform music from memory and you might think it'd be shocking to sit down in a piano thinking you don't know how to play and then suddenly this virtuoso music comes pouring out of you but for clive he just kind of slips into it as soon as he starts pressing keys he's himself again lost in the movement and everything is what it should be that sounds nice but for clive the real shock is after his brain resets in fact he would kind of convulse and burp and lose control over himself a little bit it's kind of like his body is reacting to being sucked back into the void where he thinks he's just woken up for the first time ever doctors describe these seizure-like shakes to sort of damage in his interior frontal lobe it's kind of like when his brain sends a signal to activate an emotion it creates a near-epileptic event now what's also interesting about the way he plays music is that he can also improvise so it's not like his brain is just acting like an old victrola playing the same thing over and over clive's still in there so yeah once again music is weirdly intertwined with our identity and sense of self as i said toward the beginning of this video it's really hard to imagine exactly what it's like to be clive part of it sounds hellish but i mean it's all forgotten 10 seconds later it's also hard to imagine being in a relationship with someone like that after years of caring for him on her own debra eventually had to kind of distance herself from clive just to get to where she was visiting him every week or so and she would say that she felt a lot of guilt about it for a while but he didn't he wasn't missing her when she was gone when she wasn't there he had no idea she existed i should point out another interesting thing even though he had no memory of their relationship when he saw her he knew she was his wife again he retained that implicit knowledge but he had no episodic memory of it it's super interesting so while i say that clive has a condition that's totally unique to him that is true but there are other cases of amnesia that are all just as interesting one case is henry molyson who came to be known as hm he cracked his skull in an accident when he was a young boy in 1953. this led to epileptic seizures that continued to get worse and worse throughout his life and eventually became debilitating eventually this led him to one of the top neurosurgeons in the world at the time a guy named wb scoville and his suggestion was to remove the hippocampus the hippocampus and while they were at the parahippocampal cortices the interohinal cortices the piriform cortices and the amygdala it was the world's first surgery performed with an ice cream scooper sounds pretty extreme but it worked hm seizures went away but of course as we just learned from clive a hippocampus is a terrible thing to waste this is your brain this is your brain without a hippocampus any questions so yeah from that point forward hm was unable to form new memories and he struggled to remember some things that happened in the two years or so before his surgery and he was diagnosed with having temporally graded amnesia so he went through life with a swiss cheese memory but that was preferred to the level of seizures that he was getting plus a lot was learned in his case in fact a lot of what we know about our implicit and explicit memory came from hm now one more weird thing a kind of cool thing actually is that when hm died in 2008 he donated his body to science and researchers sliced up his brain as thinly as possible and scanned it into a 3d virtual environment which you can see today at the brainobservatory.org another interesting story is kent cochrane a guy who suffered a severe motorcycle accident that caused him to have brain damage and gave him temporally graded retrograde amnesia so in this case he maintained his semantic memory uh so he could tell you like the capital of vermont or whatever but he couldn't tell you what he had for dinner the previous day and cochrane's accident happened in 1986 and at that point they had ct scans so scientists were for the first time able to get a document of a damaged brain at that level researchers working with him were able to learn some more things about how episodic and semantic memory works but also the distinction between complicit and explicit memory and how people are learning new things in amnesia so like in one experiment some newer researchers presented cochrane with a list of words and then a year later they showed him the words with letters missing and he was able to fill in the letters while not knowing what the words actually were in other words the information was getting into his mind through a different process and he found a different retrieval process as well and this challenged the previous notion that patients with anterograde amnesia are incapable of adding information to their declarative memory in short people with amnesia can indeed learn new things just through different pathways now then there's the case of scott bolson which i won't spend a lot of time on but his case is interesting he was a professional football player back in the 80s and this led to his share of concussions because there were no helmet-to-helmet rules back then but his story is that he slipped on the bathroom floor and hit his head and then he got the kind of amnesia that you always see in the movies you know he forgot his entire life up to that point uh but then he could make new memories after that but what's weird in his case is that he also lost the procedural memory and the implicit stuff like he didn't know what a job was or the ritual of halloween or what a wife is normally amnesia patients retain that procedural memory so there are some people who think that he might be faking it at least dr william barr thinks so he described his symptoms as hollywood amnesia and suggests that he's doing it to sell a book or get out of some debts he would also say not knowing what a tv is not knowing what a cell phone is this is all inconsistent with known forms of brain damage but i should emphasize this is just one expert's opinion but back to clive you know thinking about the situation really makes you consider the experience of life and how the structure of the brain contributes to that because on one level we're all going through life exactly like clive is just one moment at a time we all have these two memory systems going at the same time short term and long term and the short term immediate real time system is always running that's our present moment that's what's right in front of us that's the current block you're on as you're walking across town but that present moment is informed by our memory of the previous block that we had just passed and we know what's up ahead because we walked down the street before so these long-term memories provide the context that create this feeling of a continuation of our consciousness and when our short-term memory system resets it's supported by this long-term memory system so it doesn't feel like a reset but that system does still reset we're just riding a skateboard on a beam of light through a fabric of space and time buddy all right all right all right and if i may end on a sweet note um you know again one of the things that i was talking about earlier was that every single time he sees his wife even if she's just been out of the room for 10 minutes he runs to her and he holds her like he hasn't seen her in years he's just overcome with emotion when he sees her which is sweet but i mean i get why she had to get away from it after a while you know like i said before he doesn't remember his relationship with her all he knows is that he loves her with all of his heart which kind of says something about how deep down and important the emotion of love is actually i think that clive said it best when deborah asked him what does love mean zero in tennis and everything in life good answer and to that i say good show old chap and happy birthday if you wanted to get a present for clive or any music fan in your life or for yourself then you might want to check out raycon earbuds raycon makes high quality super comfortable earbuds at about half the price of others on the market they come in a variety of colors and deliver full rich tones that make even the biggest music snobs say grey googly moogly that's something music snobs say right they come with a variety of silicone earpieces to fit in the ear comfortably which has always been one of my biggest problems with earbuds i used to have a pair of earbuds that cost way more than this but i couldn't listen to them for more than 30 or 45 minutes before my brain was killing me that's never been a problem with these guys comfortable sure but do they fall out no they do not i messed my hair up for the sponsor read but yeah i've had these everyday earbuds for a few years now and i've just i've never had a reason to replace them i think they're pretty great they fit right here in this little compact charger which is easy to carry around uh the buds themselves last for about eight hours without charging but with the charger itself you get about 32 hours before you need to plug it in they connect effortlessly with my phone i just open the thing up and they automatically connect i wish other things worked as well and if you want celebrity endorsements they've been endorsed by snoop dogg brandy melissa etheridge and if you want regular person endorsements they've gotten over 48 000 five-star reviews online and if you want my endorsement will you have it my friend the fact is they're great ear buds at a fraction of the cost of some of the others out there so if you're in the market for some new ones give them a try you can get 15 off if you go to right by raycon dot com slash joe scott you'll get a discount on a great pair of earbuds and it helps support the channel so again buyreicon.com joe scott link's in the description big thanks to raycon for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are forming an awesome community being a just great resource for me and helping keep the lights on i can't thank you guys enough there's some new people who just joined let me murder the names real quick we've got happy kaiju blueberry hill martin leskowski saskia rosina cambrian implosion barry robinson peter moulton edney and becky mikhail i think rob bate and nick straw thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them and get early access to videos and access to exclusive live streams and whatnot you can go to patreon.com as always please do like and share this video only if you liked it though and if this is your first time here google thinks you might like this video might be up your alley you might check out any of the others down on the sidebar that have my face on them and if you enjoy them and i hope you do i invite you to subscribe i'll come back to videos every monday alright that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 514,821

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: pcPFQ-daxlQ

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2022