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Basic Amnesia for Writers
I'm trying to clean out my main USB stick and I found this, which I started writing right after Winter Soldier first came out (you can probably tell.) I kept not posting it because I kept thinking I needed to do a better literature review & add some recommended reading, and then falling into a research hole. But re-reading it from this distance I still think it's pretty good? So here is the general section, for anyone who is still interested in learning about how amnesia works. (I will post the "how does this apply to Bucky specifically" section separately if anyone cares, since it's at least 40% headcanon by volume.)
***
So, with the continuing popularity of a Certain Pairing in a Certain Fandom, there have been a lot of people writing about induced amnesia. As usual, a lot of people are getting it wrong.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in amnesia or even a neurologist, but I've had a lifelong fascination with Weird Stuff Brains Do - compounded by watching two grandmothers fall apart with dementia before I hit middle school - so I've read a lot of pop-sci about it. So here, for your delectation, is a very short and completely un-cited Amnesia for Writers primer.
To start with, let's talk about memory, because you can't understand amnesia without understanding memory, and since the best way to figure out memory is to see what happens when it stops working, much of our understanding of memory comes from amnesia.
Neurologists and psychologists divide memory up into several different types of memory. Now, it's probably not that simple in real life, and all of the different types of memory interact with each other constantly and sometimes blur into each other - but there are also very real differences in the ways our brains process and store different types of memory, as evidenced by the fact that certain kinds of damage to the brain will knock out parts of memory while keeping other parts completely intact.
The first division is between long-term and short-term memory. I tend to think of this as like the difference between RAM and the hard drive on a computer. Short-term memory is dynamic storage of events that are happening right now - what you're thinking and experiencing at any given moment. It's written to short-term storage to help us handle the here-and-now, and then it's either erased, or saved to long-term memory - like saving a file to disk. Short-term memory is measured in the seconds to minutes. Long-term memory is the stuff that's been saved to disk: it lasts basically forever, as long as you can figure out where you saved it.
The two types of amnesia that are most often discussed are based on long-term and short-term memory. Anterograde amnesia is an inability to form new long-term memories: you may still have a perfect memory of what happened in your childhood, or up to a certain point in your life, and your short-term memory is fine, so you can still remember what happened five seconds ago, enough to do things like complete a task, but you can't remember what happened ten minutes ago - new memory isn't being saved to the hard drive, so as soon as it's overwritten from short-term-memory, it's gone. Retrograde amnesia is the loss of old long-term memories - your hard drive is wiped, or at least muddled and corrupted.
Retrograde amenesia is what we usually see in fiction - the person who wakes up and doesn't know their name or how they got where they are and comically assumes the person in bed with them is their boyfriend. Someone with simple retrograde amnesia can no longer recall certain events of their past, but beyond that is functioning normally, and still remembers things that have happened since the amnesia event occured. Usually, with retrograde amnesia, the memories are still there, it's just the person's ability to access them that has been lost.
To extend the computer analogy, there are problems with the pointers, but most people don't know about pointers in computers, so that's not very helpful. It's like if someone took all the files on your computer, randomized the folder structure, and gave every file the same name. And encrypted or corrupted some of them too. You could still get most of the data back eventually, it would just take time and a lot of careful work and creativity, and you'd probably build a whole new file structure before you got that far. That's why a lot of people with minor retrograde amnesia start remembering a lot of it again, eventually. In some cases, though, it's more like the entire hard drive is corrupted: there might be some bits and pieces left that can be read, but it's not going to be anything obviously useful.
Other than not being able to access old save files, the brain still operates as normal, and everything after the amnesia is remembered the way it usually would be. Which is why this is the most common in fiction: it's the simplest scenario to explore.
Anterograde amnesia is altogether weirder; people with total anterograde amnesia may have memories of their distant past, up to the point when the amnesia began, but they live in a perpetual present, five minutes past when their last remaining long-term memories were made. They often have an amazing ability to "go with the flow" - so they can carry on a conversation, like a chatbot does, simply by responding to the most recent comment without actually being aware of the previous ones, or they can navigate to a location by following a continuous sound - but they can't function in any way that involves long-term planning or complex cause and effect, even if "long-term" is half an hour, or "complex" is three steps.
If you've ever been in that state where you're half-awake and trying to remember a dream but it's slipping through your fingers like flowing water, you've experienced temporary anterograde amnesia. That's your short-term memory holding the dream, and your long-term memory not catching it. Generally, dreams operate in short-term memory only, and to keep them longer, you have to wake up enough to activate long-term memory before they slip away. Imagine if you spent your whole life just on the cusp of waking up from a half-lost dream: that's total anterograde amnesia.
Actual real-life amnesia is often more complicated than this: for example, after a concussion, someone might forget events for several minutes before and after the injury; they'd experience this as loss of long-term memory, when it was actually that they had a temporary inability to write short-term memory to long-term storage (like a computer crashing without saving your changes.) And in complicated neurological disorders like Alzheimer's, or complex traumas, many different kinds of memory disorder can interact, so someone might show progressive loss of long-term memory and partial dysfunction of short-term memory at the same time. Often with the kinds of memory loss that aren't total amnesia, the memory still mostly works, it just sometimes doesn't, and snatches or stretches of time pass where new long-term memories aren't created, or random long-term memories become temporarily hard to access.
Both total retrograde and total anterograde amnesia at the same time is very rare - the most famous case is Clive Wearing, and there's a fair amount of information about his life on the internet, if you're interested in finding out more.
But wait! There's a lot more to memory than just long-term and short-term. For example, even someone with severe anterograde and retrograde amnesia usually hasn't forgotten everything - they may not know what they had for lunch yesterday, but they know what a chicken is, and that it's both a bird and a food, and KFC is a restaurant that sells it fried.
The kinds of amnesia described above under antergrade and retrograde often effect primarily what is called episodic memory. This is personal memory - the memory of one's own life and self; what you did, how you felt, where you were; the memory that you can replay back and recall as lived experience, like eating chicken for dinner, rich with context and connections and sensation. There's another kind of memory called semantic memory, and that's where we remember things like a chicken being a bird, and 2+2=4. You can sort of think of episodic memory as lived experience, and semantic memory as abstract knowledge, although it's more complicated than that in reality, and they're intertwined with each other in practice.
It's possible to lose access to much, or all, of one's episodic memory, yet have semantic memory mostly untouched - in maybe the most common case, many people have very little episodic memory of their early childhood, but could still remember facts they learned in kindergarten or first grade, just without any personal context for them. It's quite common for people with large amounts of retrograde amnesia to still have almost all of their semantic memory, even for things learned during the period when they've lost their lived experience.
Now, semantic memory is actually very complex - as best we know, semantic memory is actually stored in a bunch of different ways all over the brain, unlike episodic memory, which is centralized in certain places. So I don't know of any cases where someone has totally lost all semantic memory - if they did, they would likely lose most of their ability to communicate, and to comprehend experience, as well, and we would interpret that as a much more profound kind of damage than just memory loss. But a person can lose their semantic memory of certain things - and sometimes certain very specific things- their knowledge of language; of plants and animals; of the concept of "sight" and "seeing things"; or of just the names of their loved ones, and nothing else. Screwing with semantic memory gives weird results, and results we aren't very good at understanding yet.
Semantic and episodic memory also depend on each other a lot. We often use episodic memory as the map to find semantic memories - so my knowledge of the states of the US is inextricably linked to my lived experience of learning them with my father on long waits in restaurants; my knowledge of where I left my sock is inextricably linked to my lived experience of having an itchy mosquito bite on my ankle. This is also how memory aids such as retracing one's steps or building a memory palace work, by linking abstract facts with a personal narrative of experience. Someone who has major amnesia of episodic memory - someone who has no memory at all of lived experience - might still maintain large amounts of semantic memory, even of things that are linked to their personal history, but be unable to access it unless they can find a way to it that doesn't require linking through lived experience. They are also unlikely to be able easily recall what they know or don't know, since the memory of learning or having known is more episodic than semantic. There are plenty of other ways to access that stuff, though, especially with external cuing.
So somebody with complete retrograde amnesia might have no idea where they grew up, but if asked to list all the streets in a certain town, could reel them off easily, and then list all the houses in a certain street, and the floor plan of a certain house, and what kind of windows it has, and so on. And from that they could conclude "that is the house I grew up in", and from that point on, would remember that they grew up there - but still would have no lived experience of what it was like to be a child in that house, and would never have thought about it if someone hadn't prompted them in just the right way. If they'd lived in a foreign country, they might remember the language perfectly, and if prompted remember all sorts of current events that happened in that country while they were there, and what the TV schedule was, and so on - but have no memory of having lived there. They couldn't tell you that they graduated high school in 1969, but they could tell you who the president was, and maybe even their high school's football record for that year, or who was chair of the yearbook committee.
Some scientists believe this kind of memory is stored first as short-term memory, and then transferred into long-term episodic memory, and then some parts of episodic memory get stripped of context and copied to semantic memory, where it is stored differently and in ways which are less prone to damage, but still linked back to the original episodic memories. So episodic memory can be a way in for semantic memory and vice versa, but as we forget or lose track of some of the items in the links, what we can access and how we can access it can become idiosyncratic. That could all be wrong, though.
So that's episodic and semantic memory.
But wait! Episodic and semantic memory are both explicit memory - that is to say, conscious memory; for lack of a better phrase, memory that we can more or less remember remembering, at least once we've remembered it - memory linked to the conscious mind and sense of internal narrative or knowledge. There's also implicit memory, and that's the deep magic.
Implicit memory seems to be almost completely separate from the systems of long-term and short-term, episodic and semantic memory. People can have completely screwed-up long-term and short-term memory, near-total amnesia, even very little ability to access most semantic memory, but still have implicit memory that functions exactly like a healthy person's. And while explicit memory improves as we grow up and then deteriorates with age, implicit memory seems to stay about the same at all ages. There's some hint that this is an older system of memory that pre-dates what we think of as consciousness.
Implicit memory is perhaps best known as muscle memory - how to ride a bike is implicit memory; so is how to knit, or how to play the piano, or how to walk or dance or catch a ball. When you get halfway to work and realize you have no conscious knowledge of getting there, that's implicit memory acting. When we learn a series of movements or a simple process so thoroughly that we no longer have to think about it when doing it, that's implicit memory. When Alzheimer's patients have lost even language but can still sing the words to a favorite old tune, that's implicit memory. (Music is also the deep magic, in a way that language by itself isn't.)
There's more to implicit memory than movement, though. Implicit memory is related to the phenomenon of priming - the fact that if we've seen or done something before, there's a sense of familiarity that makes it feel easier the second time, even if we have no conscious memory of it. Blips in that sense of familiarity are what causes the experiences of deja vu and presque vu. It's why we can say "I have no idea what the title of that book is or what was on its cover, but I'll know it if I see it again". A person with total anterograde amnesia may consciously feel, every day, as if they have never seen their room before, because they have no long-term explicit memory; and yet they still feel uncomfortable, lost and bereft if moved to a new one, because the implicit memory is telling them the new one is not familiar. On the opposite end, there can be really weird damage to the brain where the explicit memory is fine but the implicit memory is damaged: this leads to things like Capgras syndrome, where a person is convinced their home and loved ones have been taken away and replaced by exact duplicates, because they know they're the same, but they don't feel familiar anymore. This can also be experienced in a shock reaction, if it temporarily feels like all the "familiarity" has been drained out of the world, and objects and people are just ghosts of their "real" selves.
Implicit memory also has emotional components; Waring, in the accounts mentioned above, has little or no conscious memory of his wife - his old memories of her were all wiped out, and he can't make new ones. And yet he's head-over-heels in love with her - when she comes to visit, he says things like "Even though I've never met you before, I know you're the woman I'll marry." And on the less fluffy end, someone may have no conscious memory of, say, eating a certain foodstuff as a young child and then getting sick every time, but will still feel disgust when presented with it. Someone may have total explicit amnesia of a traumatic event, but feel "sourceless" fear and distress when placed in similar circumstances, as a result of implicit memory. Or someone with amnesia might have no conscious memory of being really good at a certain skill (or even having learned it), but still feel a sense of confidence and pride when given a chance to use it, like Waring, who had been a music professor and didn't remember he could play piano but was always delighted when given the chance to.
We know a lot less about implicit than the other kinds of memory (and in many cases are only just starting to class it as a type of memory rather than a type of perception) but it seems to be much harder to damage or lose, and even more closely linked to specific sensory experiences and to emotions than the other kinds of memory.
So to summarize, then: There are many different types of memory. Implicit memory is muscle memory and emotional memory and 'familiarity', the stuff that happens at a level below conscious recall. Explicit memory consists of semantic memory - abstract knowledge; and episodic memory - lived experience. Episodic memory is stored first as short-term memory, and then copied to long-term memory as the short-term memory is overwritten, and then possibly some of the long-term memory is copied over in a new shape as semantic memory. Different types of amnesia can affect part or all of any of these types of memory, but they usually show different effects on different types of memory, and total loss of one type of memory can leave another type entirely intact, even if they are memories of the "same" thing.
Most case studies in the neurology literature involve people with damage in very specific areas of the brain, or damage to very specific types of functioning, because that's how we learn what these points are. Most real-world cases of damage to memory are more complicated than that, though: many different parts of the brain will be malfunctioning to different extents all together, some of them connected to memory, some of them to other parts of brain function.
And there will also be psychological effects, which I've barely touched on here. Neurologists mostly talk about physical damage to the brain, like getting hit in the head, electroshock, strokes, tumours, and infections. When you start talking about psychological effects - the ways our minds can affect our memories, not just the physical structure of the brain - things get more complicated. More complicated, and very individual, and with less scientific consensus so I'm not going to get into it here, but the underlying structures that are being messed with are the same, and so the general categories of ways in which things get remembered or forgotten are still discernible even if most of what's going on is psychological rather than gross physical damage.
***
So, with the continuing popularity of a Certain Pairing in a Certain Fandom, there have been a lot of people writing about induced amnesia. As usual, a lot of people are getting it wrong.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in amnesia or even a neurologist, but I've had a lifelong fascination with Weird Stuff Brains Do - compounded by watching two grandmothers fall apart with dementia before I hit middle school - so I've read a lot of pop-sci about it. So here, for your delectation, is a very short and completely un-cited Amnesia for Writers primer.
To start with, let's talk about memory, because you can't understand amnesia without understanding memory, and since the best way to figure out memory is to see what happens when it stops working, much of our understanding of memory comes from amnesia.
Neurologists and psychologists divide memory up into several different types of memory. Now, it's probably not that simple in real life, and all of the different types of memory interact with each other constantly and sometimes blur into each other - but there are also very real differences in the ways our brains process and store different types of memory, as evidenced by the fact that certain kinds of damage to the brain will knock out parts of memory while keeping other parts completely intact.
The first division is between long-term and short-term memory. I tend to think of this as like the difference between RAM and the hard drive on a computer. Short-term memory is dynamic storage of events that are happening right now - what you're thinking and experiencing at any given moment. It's written to short-term storage to help us handle the here-and-now, and then it's either erased, or saved to long-term memory - like saving a file to disk. Short-term memory is measured in the seconds to minutes. Long-term memory is the stuff that's been saved to disk: it lasts basically forever, as long as you can figure out where you saved it.
The two types of amnesia that are most often discussed are based on long-term and short-term memory. Anterograde amnesia is an inability to form new long-term memories: you may still have a perfect memory of what happened in your childhood, or up to a certain point in your life, and your short-term memory is fine, so you can still remember what happened five seconds ago, enough to do things like complete a task, but you can't remember what happened ten minutes ago - new memory isn't being saved to the hard drive, so as soon as it's overwritten from short-term-memory, it's gone. Retrograde amnesia is the loss of old long-term memories - your hard drive is wiped, or at least muddled and corrupted.
Retrograde amenesia is what we usually see in fiction - the person who wakes up and doesn't know their name or how they got where they are and comically assumes the person in bed with them is their boyfriend. Someone with simple retrograde amnesia can no longer recall certain events of their past, but beyond that is functioning normally, and still remembers things that have happened since the amnesia event occured. Usually, with retrograde amnesia, the memories are still there, it's just the person's ability to access them that has been lost.
To extend the computer analogy, there are problems with the pointers, but most people don't know about pointers in computers, so that's not very helpful. It's like if someone took all the files on your computer, randomized the folder structure, and gave every file the same name. And encrypted or corrupted some of them too. You could still get most of the data back eventually, it would just take time and a lot of careful work and creativity, and you'd probably build a whole new file structure before you got that far. That's why a lot of people with minor retrograde amnesia start remembering a lot of it again, eventually. In some cases, though, it's more like the entire hard drive is corrupted: there might be some bits and pieces left that can be read, but it's not going to be anything obviously useful.
Other than not being able to access old save files, the brain still operates as normal, and everything after the amnesia is remembered the way it usually would be. Which is why this is the most common in fiction: it's the simplest scenario to explore.
Anterograde amnesia is altogether weirder; people with total anterograde amnesia may have memories of their distant past, up to the point when the amnesia began, but they live in a perpetual present, five minutes past when their last remaining long-term memories were made. They often have an amazing ability to "go with the flow" - so they can carry on a conversation, like a chatbot does, simply by responding to the most recent comment without actually being aware of the previous ones, or they can navigate to a location by following a continuous sound - but they can't function in any way that involves long-term planning or complex cause and effect, even if "long-term" is half an hour, or "complex" is three steps.
If you've ever been in that state where you're half-awake and trying to remember a dream but it's slipping through your fingers like flowing water, you've experienced temporary anterograde amnesia. That's your short-term memory holding the dream, and your long-term memory not catching it. Generally, dreams operate in short-term memory only, and to keep them longer, you have to wake up enough to activate long-term memory before they slip away. Imagine if you spent your whole life just on the cusp of waking up from a half-lost dream: that's total anterograde amnesia.
Actual real-life amnesia is often more complicated than this: for example, after a concussion, someone might forget events for several minutes before and after the injury; they'd experience this as loss of long-term memory, when it was actually that they had a temporary inability to write short-term memory to long-term storage (like a computer crashing without saving your changes.) And in complicated neurological disorders like Alzheimer's, or complex traumas, many different kinds of memory disorder can interact, so someone might show progressive loss of long-term memory and partial dysfunction of short-term memory at the same time. Often with the kinds of memory loss that aren't total amnesia, the memory still mostly works, it just sometimes doesn't, and snatches or stretches of time pass where new long-term memories aren't created, or random long-term memories become temporarily hard to access.
Both total retrograde and total anterograde amnesia at the same time is very rare - the most famous case is Clive Wearing, and there's a fair amount of information about his life on the internet, if you're interested in finding out more.
But wait! There's a lot more to memory than just long-term and short-term. For example, even someone with severe anterograde and retrograde amnesia usually hasn't forgotten everything - they may not know what they had for lunch yesterday, but they know what a chicken is, and that it's both a bird and a food, and KFC is a restaurant that sells it fried.
The kinds of amnesia described above under antergrade and retrograde often effect primarily what is called episodic memory. This is personal memory - the memory of one's own life and self; what you did, how you felt, where you were; the memory that you can replay back and recall as lived experience, like eating chicken for dinner, rich with context and connections and sensation. There's another kind of memory called semantic memory, and that's where we remember things like a chicken being a bird, and 2+2=4. You can sort of think of episodic memory as lived experience, and semantic memory as abstract knowledge, although it's more complicated than that in reality, and they're intertwined with each other in practice.
It's possible to lose access to much, or all, of one's episodic memory, yet have semantic memory mostly untouched - in maybe the most common case, many people have very little episodic memory of their early childhood, but could still remember facts they learned in kindergarten or first grade, just without any personal context for them. It's quite common for people with large amounts of retrograde amnesia to still have almost all of their semantic memory, even for things learned during the period when they've lost their lived experience.
Now, semantic memory is actually very complex - as best we know, semantic memory is actually stored in a bunch of different ways all over the brain, unlike episodic memory, which is centralized in certain places. So I don't know of any cases where someone has totally lost all semantic memory - if they did, they would likely lose most of their ability to communicate, and to comprehend experience, as well, and we would interpret that as a much more profound kind of damage than just memory loss. But a person can lose their semantic memory of certain things - and sometimes certain very specific things- their knowledge of language; of plants and animals; of the concept of "sight" and "seeing things"; or of just the names of their loved ones, and nothing else. Screwing with semantic memory gives weird results, and results we aren't very good at understanding yet.
Semantic and episodic memory also depend on each other a lot. We often use episodic memory as the map to find semantic memories - so my knowledge of the states of the US is inextricably linked to my lived experience of learning them with my father on long waits in restaurants; my knowledge of where I left my sock is inextricably linked to my lived experience of having an itchy mosquito bite on my ankle. This is also how memory aids such as retracing one's steps or building a memory palace work, by linking abstract facts with a personal narrative of experience. Someone who has major amnesia of episodic memory - someone who has no memory at all of lived experience - might still maintain large amounts of semantic memory, even of things that are linked to their personal history, but be unable to access it unless they can find a way to it that doesn't require linking through lived experience. They are also unlikely to be able easily recall what they know or don't know, since the memory of learning or having known is more episodic than semantic. There are plenty of other ways to access that stuff, though, especially with external cuing.
So somebody with complete retrograde amnesia might have no idea where they grew up, but if asked to list all the streets in a certain town, could reel them off easily, and then list all the houses in a certain street, and the floor plan of a certain house, and what kind of windows it has, and so on. And from that they could conclude "that is the house I grew up in", and from that point on, would remember that they grew up there - but still would have no lived experience of what it was like to be a child in that house, and would never have thought about it if someone hadn't prompted them in just the right way. If they'd lived in a foreign country, they might remember the language perfectly, and if prompted remember all sorts of current events that happened in that country while they were there, and what the TV schedule was, and so on - but have no memory of having lived there. They couldn't tell you that they graduated high school in 1969, but they could tell you who the president was, and maybe even their high school's football record for that year, or who was chair of the yearbook committee.
Some scientists believe this kind of memory is stored first as short-term memory, and then transferred into long-term episodic memory, and then some parts of episodic memory get stripped of context and copied to semantic memory, where it is stored differently and in ways which are less prone to damage, but still linked back to the original episodic memories. So episodic memory can be a way in for semantic memory and vice versa, but as we forget or lose track of some of the items in the links, what we can access and how we can access it can become idiosyncratic. That could all be wrong, though.
So that's episodic and semantic memory.
But wait! Episodic and semantic memory are both explicit memory - that is to say, conscious memory; for lack of a better phrase, memory that we can more or less remember remembering, at least once we've remembered it - memory linked to the conscious mind and sense of internal narrative or knowledge. There's also implicit memory, and that's the deep magic.
Implicit memory seems to be almost completely separate from the systems of long-term and short-term, episodic and semantic memory. People can have completely screwed-up long-term and short-term memory, near-total amnesia, even very little ability to access most semantic memory, but still have implicit memory that functions exactly like a healthy person's. And while explicit memory improves as we grow up and then deteriorates with age, implicit memory seems to stay about the same at all ages. There's some hint that this is an older system of memory that pre-dates what we think of as consciousness.
Implicit memory is perhaps best known as muscle memory - how to ride a bike is implicit memory; so is how to knit, or how to play the piano, or how to walk or dance or catch a ball. When you get halfway to work and realize you have no conscious knowledge of getting there, that's implicit memory acting. When we learn a series of movements or a simple process so thoroughly that we no longer have to think about it when doing it, that's implicit memory. When Alzheimer's patients have lost even language but can still sing the words to a favorite old tune, that's implicit memory. (Music is also the deep magic, in a way that language by itself isn't.)
There's more to implicit memory than movement, though. Implicit memory is related to the phenomenon of priming - the fact that if we've seen or done something before, there's a sense of familiarity that makes it feel easier the second time, even if we have no conscious memory of it. Blips in that sense of familiarity are what causes the experiences of deja vu and presque vu. It's why we can say "I have no idea what the title of that book is or what was on its cover, but I'll know it if I see it again". A person with total anterograde amnesia may consciously feel, every day, as if they have never seen their room before, because they have no long-term explicit memory; and yet they still feel uncomfortable, lost and bereft if moved to a new one, because the implicit memory is telling them the new one is not familiar. On the opposite end, there can be really weird damage to the brain where the explicit memory is fine but the implicit memory is damaged: this leads to things like Capgras syndrome, where a person is convinced their home and loved ones have been taken away and replaced by exact duplicates, because they know they're the same, but they don't feel familiar anymore. This can also be experienced in a shock reaction, if it temporarily feels like all the "familiarity" has been drained out of the world, and objects and people are just ghosts of their "real" selves.
Implicit memory also has emotional components; Waring, in the accounts mentioned above, has little or no conscious memory of his wife - his old memories of her were all wiped out, and he can't make new ones. And yet he's head-over-heels in love with her - when she comes to visit, he says things like "Even though I've never met you before, I know you're the woman I'll marry." And on the less fluffy end, someone may have no conscious memory of, say, eating a certain foodstuff as a young child and then getting sick every time, but will still feel disgust when presented with it. Someone may have total explicit amnesia of a traumatic event, but feel "sourceless" fear and distress when placed in similar circumstances, as a result of implicit memory. Or someone with amnesia might have no conscious memory of being really good at a certain skill (or even having learned it), but still feel a sense of confidence and pride when given a chance to use it, like Waring, who had been a music professor and didn't remember he could play piano but was always delighted when given the chance to.
We know a lot less about implicit than the other kinds of memory (and in many cases are only just starting to class it as a type of memory rather than a type of perception) but it seems to be much harder to damage or lose, and even more closely linked to specific sensory experiences and to emotions than the other kinds of memory.
So to summarize, then: There are many different types of memory. Implicit memory is muscle memory and emotional memory and 'familiarity', the stuff that happens at a level below conscious recall. Explicit memory consists of semantic memory - abstract knowledge; and episodic memory - lived experience. Episodic memory is stored first as short-term memory, and then copied to long-term memory as the short-term memory is overwritten, and then possibly some of the long-term memory is copied over in a new shape as semantic memory. Different types of amnesia can affect part or all of any of these types of memory, but they usually show different effects on different types of memory, and total loss of one type of memory can leave another type entirely intact, even if they are memories of the "same" thing.
Most case studies in the neurology literature involve people with damage in very specific areas of the brain, or damage to very specific types of functioning, because that's how we learn what these points are. Most real-world cases of damage to memory are more complicated than that, though: many different parts of the brain will be malfunctioning to different extents all together, some of them connected to memory, some of them to other parts of brain function.
And there will also be psychological effects, which I've barely touched on here. Neurologists mostly talk about physical damage to the brain, like getting hit in the head, electroshock, strokes, tumours, and infections. When you start talking about psychological effects - the ways our minds can affect our memories, not just the physical structure of the brain - things get more complicated. More complicated, and very individual, and with less scientific consensus so I'm not going to get into it here, but the underlying structures that are being messed with are the same, and so the general categories of ways in which things get remembered or forgotten are still discernible even if most of what's going on is psychological rather than gross physical damage.
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is so much more painfulmakes so much sense if you assume he has implicit memory, with zero context but ALL the FEELINGS, trying to tell him that he loves Steve more than anything.no subject
It actually helps explain for me why the guy whose violence is so directed, controlled and brutal in the causeway fight is such an untidy MESS on Insight C, and why his focus is so clearly stopping Steve rather than killing him. I mean seriously: the killer we met blowing up Fury's car would have shot Steve in the head as he came up to the catwalk.
And why the you're my mission stuff and that fight at the end is also such a mess, why it's so clearly focused on basically a screaming tantrum of HIT THE THING THAT IS MAKING ME CRAZY - that's the actions and behaviour of a human whose internal mental chaos has thrown him totally out of control and into pure instinct territory, you know?
Which makes sense if you've got actual episodic-memory flashes plus implicit memory SCREAMING at him and all crashing into both intense conditioning and the fact that, let's be real, Captain America has meant nothing but Badness for the Winter Soldier so far.
(It's also why I assume/write that the whole "end of the line" thing actually predates that memory flashback - in that moment past!Bucky was ALREADY invoking the key phrase of something they'd been telling each other forever, so that as a trigger phrase it basically smashed all that implicit memory stuff hard. You don't really get that from one incident, but you can if it's been dug in, you know?)
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I would still like to read the Bucky-specific part, though. :D
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(I was reading up on linguistics for something related, and need to delve back in on the neurology side.)
So much implicit, and he's been laying down more of it for that portion of the seventy years he's not been stored.
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It's not that I don't remember stuff, but if you asked me to describe really vivid memories, I'd have trouble to pick anything specific from a specific day, and I don't recall them with much sensory detail. Like, I still "remember" the day my mother died in that I know the date (not least because it was Christmas), and that my sister called me in the morning to tell me she had died earlier that morning, and that I went to my parents place, but couldn't tell you details, like when exactly my sister called, how I traveled back, what was said, except for stuff that I retold several times because it makes for good anecdotes (like that the people who picked up the body dropped the transport coffin on the way down the stairs...), or that I recalled as fact frequently (like that this was the first time I touched a dead body).
And that is even though I wrote diary entry the day she died and re-read that at least once or twice on an anniversary of her death. In general I only recall specific events when they remained relevant because I recalled them often, or because I have written them down in one of my diary keeping phases, and actually looked at that diary again.
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I can tell you exactly where i was when I found out my father had died, and what I'd been doing that morning, but I have no clue how I got from there to my parents' house, or what the weather was, or anything, and after that my memory of that week just a lot of disconnected scenes. I could probably connect a lot of them if I thought about logically what must have happened and put a lot of work into finding connecting memories, but I usually don't.
Definitely how well we remember something is related to how often we've recalled it since. And the full-sensory like "memories" we get, especially in movies, aren't very realistic.
But what we remember in episodic memory, and how, and how we retrieve it, and why some things are read as episodic rather than semantic when it's exactly the same kind of knowledge, is super messy and not understood very well. Certainly not by me!
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