Below are two 60-minute documentaries, made twenty years apart, about Clive Wearing, a Brit with the worst-ever recorded case of amnesia. Clive's memories only last between seven and thirty seconds.
I first read about Wearing in the 90s in Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks later spoke about him on an episode of Radio Lab, and wrote about him again in The New Yorker in 2007.
Prisoner of Consciousness, 1985:
The Man With the Seven Second Memory, 2005
Oliver Sacks: Music and Amnesia
From 2007: Oliver Sacks on Clive Wearing, an English musician struck by a devastating brain infection that left him with retrograde amnesia and a memory span of only seconds.
Wearing is still alive as I write this. He's 86 and has been living with "the illness" for almost 40 years.
Clive Wearing - Wikipedia
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