I got to read about Clive and Deborah in a recent edition of Readers Digest [Indian edition] under the title ‘Forget me not..’. I literally wept reading their story.
I wanted to document about the Wearings in my blog. Started searching in net for more info. Good to see ur post apart from the info I got from Guardian and 60 minutes.

ed in texas

It is also a wonderful post. How often do we see the ‘power of love’, and all that implies? And how often do we clearly see how valuable real love is?

Alex: Yes, indeed, you are describing exactly what happened. I didn’t go into all the details because then this post would have been incredibly long. I’ve linked to three articles about Wearing: one from the Gurardian, one from Spiegel, and one from 60 Minutes (I saw the documentary the other night on TLC; there’s a link to that, too). If you follow the links you’ll find a great deal more information about him.

Essentially, though, he does “wake up” at frequent intervals and records the awakenings in a diary. He’s done this for almost the entire course of the illness:

Deborah Wearing gave her husband a diary. She thought it would aid him in conquering the past. And Clive diligently wrote down his day. But differently than his wife had thought he might:
11:45 — Woke up for the first time.
11:48 — Now really awake!
11:50 — Finally awake, for the FIRST time!!

For many years, there is hardly anything else written in his diaries. Thousands of crumpled pages filled with scrawling notes written in the fervor of getting everything straight.

And yes, he does seem to learn in some general and very slow way, especially things related to feeling tones. It seems to be a slightly different way to lay down memories and to learn– very inefficient and generalized, but still possible. For example:

When Deborah and the man without a memory met again after a long time, he seemed altered. Did he not seem to hesitate when she came through the door? No scene, no waltz around the hallway? It was as if he had decided: Probably she had just popped off to the bathroom for a moment. Have the years, after all, left a mark in the brain of the amnesia-patient? That the path is blocked must not mean that there is nothing going on there. “I once told him that his favorite uncle Jeffrey had died. Ever since, Clive has never again spoken of him in the present tense,” Deborah says. Wearing started to joke about himself like someone who knows about his idiosyncrasies. “I must be awful to bear,” he often said. Deborah found him more touching than ever.

In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks writes about similar phenomena with memory-impaired individuals. Over time, they seem to be able to learn certain things not as facts or memories per se, but as emotional states.