Some of you may recall a post I wrote in 2005 about Clive Wearing, the man with such profound memory loss that he lived in a single repeating and ever-changing present moment disconnected from those that had gone before.

To refresh your memory (or if you’ve never heard of Wearing in the first place) I strongly urge you to read it. Wearing’s story is both fascinating and profound—in human, spiritual, emotional, and scientific terms. You may also want to view some YouTube videos based on a documentary about Wearing and his devoted wife.

I have recently been reading the book Musicophilia by neurologist/author Oliver Sacks, in the expanded 2008 edition, which offers an update on Clive’s plight. It shows that, even over twenty years after the brain insult that in 1985 robbed him of so much of what we consider ordinary human life and thought, things can still change (at least slightly) for the better.

One of the aspects of Wearing’s story I did not emphasize much in my earlier post was the fact that his condition changed over time. Initially very frightened—in fact, terrified—because he realized something was deeply amiss but could not understand what it was, he later became profoundly depressed. These states lasted for months and even years, but ultimately, new learning on an emotional level (or some sort of global cognitive level) seemed to kick in, and he achieved a certain equanimity and even joie de vivre (many of the YouTube tapes from the original documentary come from a time before this happier period).

Wearing was able to draw on several strengths: the stability of a newer and more home-like residence; the love he felt towards and received from his wife; the continuing place of music in his life; and his formidable intellect and sense of humor, which gave him increasing ability to converse and interact, albeit in limited and somewhat repetitive ways.

Recently, however, he seems to have actually regained a small ability to put down new memories. This is astounding after all these years. Sacks reports that in the spring of 2008 he received a note from Wearing’s wife Deborah that stated:

Clive continues to surprise us. Recently he looked at my mobile phone and asked, “Does it take pictures?”…Earlier this month I’d been with Clive, then went outside for about ten minutes. I rang the doorbell to get back in and Clive opened the door with the care assistant who had been with him the whole time. Clive said, “Welcome back!,” perfectly aware that I’d been there previously. His care assistant commented on this change. The staff also told me how one day a care assistant had lost her lighter. Ten or fifteen minutes after hearing this, Clive came up to the same lady and gave her the lost lighter, saying, “Is this your lighter?” The staff could find no explanation for his remembering who had lost the lighter or that she had lost the lighter…

It may not seem like much. But for a man who initially was reduced to saying over and over things such as this—“I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything. It’s like being dead”—or crying inconsolably for months on end, or greeting his wife each time he saw her as though they had been separated for a lengthy and almost unendurable period, it is quite an achievement; a testament to the plasticity of the human brain, the mystery of healing, and the power of love.