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LIT-1369: Dense amnesia in a professional musician following herpes simplex virus encephalitis

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StatusUnavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability. The article is closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy and no repository full text, Taylor & Francis offers it only behind a paywall, PubMed (8557808) has the abstract only, the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit bibliography lists it without a file, and a web search found no author's or institutional copy. The abstract, read from PubMed, confirms the dense amnesia but does not mention preserved musical skill, and says the patient's belief that he has just woken "appears to be the result of a delusion rather than the consequence of his amnesia". Registered from the owner's exchange of 2026-10-22, "Graph Learning Applications". No NOTE is filed.
Version2
Tagsneuroscience, self, narrative-unity
ReportsCASE-137 — Clive Wearing: a musician left by encephalitis with almost no memory of his past and none of the last minutes, who still plays, sight-reads and conducts, keeps his attachment to his wife, and writes over and over that he has just become conscious for the first time

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Wilson, B. A., Baddeley, A. D., & Kapur, N. (1995). Dense amnesia in a professional musician following herpes simplex virus encephalitis. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 17(5), 668–681. doi:10.1080/01688639508405157.

Not read: no lawful copy was reached on 2026-10-22 (see the status note). The summary is drawn from what the paper is standardly cited for and from its PubMed abstract. The abstract confirms the amnesia, semantic as well as episodic, and the persistent belief that he has just woken, which it calls a delusion. It does not mention the preserved musical skill, which a reading should check first.

Why this is here

The exchange (A26) took up the owner’s suggestion of Clive Wearing as a case for the person as an organization of partly independent processes. This is the primary case study it cited. The case is CASE-137.

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