In the year 1985, Clive Wearing lost his mind, but not his music.154 Wearing was a musicologist and accomplished musician, but the same virus that causes cold sores, Herpes simplex, snuck into his brain and ate his hippocampus. The result was chronic anterograde amnesia—he cannot form new long-term memories. He remembers how to play the piano, though he cannot remember that he played it 5 minutes ago. Wearing now lives moment to moment, unaware of anything more than a few minutes into the past. Every cup of coffee is the first he has ever had.
Many statistical models also have anterograde amnesia. As the models move from one cluster—individual, group, location—in the data to another, estimating parameters for each cluster, ...
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