ABSTRACT
The place – and importance – of memory in making sense of, and learning from, experience is often overlooked or taken for granted. Yet without it any learning would be, literally, useless.
The truth of this was illustrated by the extremely sad case of Clive Wearing, a classical musician by profession, who had suffered a viral illness which had attacked his brain and left him with no short-term memory. Living in a very sheltered environment, when his wife visited him he would be delighted to see her, but if she left him for a few moments he would be equally delighted to see her on her return, because he had no recollection of her earlier arrival. She said of him that his world ‘now consists of a moment, with no past to anchor it and no future to look ahead to’.1
