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so that does the inside of the winter soldier's head look like
So here's the follow-up to yesterday's post about memory and amnesia. This one assumes you've read that one, but it's mostly about how I choose to apply that one to MCU Bucky Barnes. (Also it was mostly written a year ago, so in some ways the fandom has moved on from where it was when I started this.)
So let's try to link that last post to the memory loss experienced by the MCU Winter Soldier. I'll start by outlining what I know, or can fairly simply deduce, from viewings of the movie:
1. His memory has been intentionally limited by the people controlling him.
2. He undergoes periodic "wipes" that affect his memories.
3. These "wipes" need to be quite frequent, as his handlers got very nervous that he would go more than a few days without a wipe.
4. Between wipes, he's put into some sort of suspended animation.
5. His handlers don't find it unusual that he would maintain limited memories from one mission to another - hence Pierce's reassurance that he recognized Steve from a previous mission - but these memories are expected to be disorganized.
6. He knows Russian.
7. He has extremely advanced physical skills, including use of a prosthetic hand that's about the same age as his memory issues.
8. He is capable of leading a tactical team in a fairly complex situation. He is also capable of operating alone without direct supervision for missions of at least a few hours' duration.
9. He recognizes Steve immediately, although not with any clarity or context.
10. His handlers don't seem to be unduly concerned at this recognition, as if it wasn't a brand-new behavior (however, this may just be because they don't really understand how to take care of their tool.)
11. The "wipes" seem to have something in common with electroconvulsive therapy.
12. He has little to no episodic memory of his past, but he does experience episodic memories as sudden flashbacks, especially when due for a wipe (??)
13. He had some level of treatment with the supersoldier serum, which we know from Steve's map of Hydra bases has some memory-enhancing effects, and also greatly increases healing ability.
14. He has a concept of selfhood at least sufficient to refer to himself as "I".
So, based on that, the below are my guesses about Bucky's memory issues - partly my headcanon, but also an attempt to make a sensible extrapolation from how memory works and what we're shown in the movie.
First, my guess would be that the "wipes" affect primarily episodic memory, both because of the resemblance to ECT and the way we see him react in the movie. Also because if you wanted a functional elite agent, he would need to be able to learn things - skills and facts - and retain them between missions. Basically, he experiences frequent losses of accumulated long-term episodic memory, with normal memory function in between.
Therefore, his implicit memory - such as his muscle memory of how to fight and how to use his arm - would be unaffected. His semantic memory would also be unaffected, although it would be somewhat scrambled by his inability to access it via episodic memory. Therefore, any skills he was trained in, or any knowledge he learned, would be maintained between wipes; he could be taught a new martial arts style, a new language, how to assemble a weapon or navigate through a facility or fly an airplane, and use it just fine on the next mission if prompted, without having any memory of having learned it.
That means he might also have a fair amount of knowledge of events of the time that passed, though it would depend heavily on how often he was actually awake, and what kinds of missions he did. We know of twenty-some assassinations attributed to him; if we assume that's about half of the total, and he had only about a week per mission before he needed a new wipe, that's only a year or so awake. On the other hand, he could have been awakened way more often than that, for training or undetected missions, and the time-between-wipes could also have been decreasing if the procedures became less effective. The fact that he's got some Russian implies that he was awake at least long enough to learn a language, at some point, and he's had long enough to become very fluent in the use of his arm, although as supersoldier he might have picked those up relatively quickly (or even picked up the Russian during the war). The amount of context he has for this new knowledge would depend on how often he was awake vs. out, and what he was allowed to learn or experience.
Also, a lot of conditioning techniques will heavily rely on implicit memory, so if he's gone through intensive conditioning - which seems very likely - his emotional associations - such as "if I don't do this, there will be pain" and "I'm really damn good at this, I need to swagger" and "this is safe, I can relax" - would be maintained between wipes, though he'd have no conscious knowledge of why he felt that way. He would experience them, especially the fear, as very much irrational or even mystical, an overwhelming feeling with no cause he can understand, but which he has also been conditioned to trust. This would also probably make any future conditioning be more effective. Given his role as a physically elite soldier/assassin/agent, it seems likely to me that his trainers emphasized a reliance on "instinct" rather than planning, since that's how he would access a lot of the knowledge and conditioning he might not be consciously aware of.
His reaction to Steve is likely at least as much about a retained emotional response as any explicit memory, as well - "I have no idea who you are, but I still want to wrap you up in a blanket and feed you soup." If he'd become (implicitly) accustomed to relying on implicit emotional memories to guide his actions - his handlers might even have encouraged that, if that was the basis of his conditioning - that might have backfired when he had a sudden emotional reaction unrelated to his conditioning; if he's been taught to trust his sudden, sourceless fear of punishment, he'd be inclined to also trust his sudden desire to cuddle. (And to rely heavily on his emotional insights in general.) Basically: Bucky looking as Steve would have experienced something like how fandom uses soulbonds: I love this person and every part of me is telling me to trust that feeling and it makes no sense but I want to trust it.
So if the wipes are mostly about erasing episodic memories while leaving semantic and implicit memory largely intact, and then his mind rewires his brain to be as functional as possible under those constraints, I'm left with two main questions: a) does the memory-erasing actually work, and b) is that the only neurological alteration he's been subjected to.
I think the answers to both those questions are linked, and they come back to the super-soldier serum. While Bucky's isn't as strong as Steve's, we know he has some effect from the serum, and this leads me to the belief that even if there were other procedures attempted, they probably aren't in play at the time of the movie. A super-soldier metabolizes most drugs so quickly that they have no time to act, so going for the simplest solution, it's unlikely there's a heavy reliance on long-term drug use. There may have been surgical procedures done at some point, but super-soldiers can heal pretty much any bodily damage eventually, so I suspect that unless the surgical procedures are being periodically re-done (with most of the original scientists long dead) any gross brain damage has been healed by the time of the movie.
That leaves the "wipes" and the cryofreeze. In real humans in non-comic-book worlds, electroshock to the brain can cause short-term anterograde amnesia, and partial retrograde amnesia that may take months to years before the memories return. We see in the movie that the Soldier's handlers are really hesitant to give him more than a week between wipes - which implies to me that he begins to recover some of his episodic memories shortly after that, sudden exposure to Steve or not; and that he may be having flashbacks of episodic memory by the end of almost every mission, which are then taken away again by the next wipe. It also implies to me that the healing abilities are speeding up the recovery of the memories, so that without wipes, he might recover nearly all of his memory relatively rapidly, even without treatment. It's also possible that the memory wipes are getting even less effective, if his serum-altered brain is adapting to the repeated trauma/healing, or if there was surgical or chemical alteration that has since healed without anyone thinking to check. Or if procedures in general have gotten shoddier over time.
Cryofreeze - the method of suspended animation that was likely used for the Winter Soldier - at the current level of our technology, causes massive brain damage. IIRC, the movie implied that the Winter Soldier is usually put directly back into the freezer after a mission, and then wiped when he's thawed out. It's entirely possible, then, that some of his memory issues are caused by the interaction of the cryofreeze and the serum's healing as much as by deliberate actions of his handlers. Possibly his brain is often still healing cryofreeze damage by the time he's put back in for another freeze. In the original Winter Soldier comic, nearly all of the memory loss was the result of physical damage at the time of his fall plus repeated cryofreeze, rather than a deliberate effort.
So, if I'm right about how this is working, then cryo damage aside, his brain is functioning perfectly normally between wipes - he remembers everything from the point he woke up, and he has access to a fairly large store of knowledge/factual memories that give him context for the world around him. He also has a full complement of emotional/implicit cues that he uses to make judgements and evaluate situations, and probably has come to rely on these "emotional" and "instinctual" cues more heavily than most people. He processes information and perceives time normally. He may also have some scattered episodic memory to call on, either from previous missions or from before he was captured.
What does this say about his sense of self and his inner narrative? Well, that's tricky. I'm dealing here strictly with loss of memory as a result of physical trauma to the brain; I'm not even touching on the effects of his conditioning or torture or missions on this, and thinking about how that might interact gets really complicated, really fast - depending on how that plays out, you could have all sorts of answers here.
But, sticking solely to the memory wipes and physical damage, and how the brain adapts to that: I would say that, first, his sense of self is intact - even people with total anterograde and retrograde amnesia keep their sense of self, though it's often a much more visceral and immediate sense without a personal narrative to ground it - Waring kept a journal that consisted of the statement "I just woke up for the first time" over and over again, and yet that "I" and "awake" were insistent. (There are other kinds of trauma or damage that can cause loss of a sense of self - and it's possible the Winter Soldier had them - but we have no evidence of that - and we know he considers himself an "I" - and I feel like most of them would be somewhat complicated by the periodic wipes.)
Electroshock can sometimes cause temporary anterograde amnesia, but we see no sign of that in the film - if he had substantial anterograde amnesia, to start with, he wouldn't be able to fight like that; he'd keep getting distracted by shiny things. And nobody would trust him to lead a tac team. So we can assume that his amnesia is mostly retrograde, and therefore, between wipes, he also has a fairly normal sense of the passage of time - he knows what he did yesterday, and that it was a day ago, and he has an awareness that there was a time before he woke up, which he cannot remember experiencing. (Some forms of brain damage and psychological trauma can cause partial interference with saving short-term memory to episodic memory, or preserving long-term memory in the actual long term, without total anterograde amnesia; that seems counterproductive to me, though, if what you want is an agent who can operate semi-independently, and there's no evidence of it in the movie.)
The tricky part comes with the time he cannot consciously remember experiencing. As soon as he "wakes up" from a memory loss episode, he will start trying to construct a narrative of where he came from and what identity he can link to that insistent "I", and he'll do this with a combination of information he gets from the world around him, and what he can work out from the semantic and implicit memory he retains. My guess is that his handlers have a set narrative that they give him as soon as he is capable of processing it - judging by what we saw in the movie, and what happened in the comics, probably something like 'you are a hero who was badly injured, which is why your memory is gone, but we need you to perform just one more mission for us, in order to save the world; you are the only one who can do it.' And that will match sufficiently well with what he's able to reconstuct internally that it will hold up for awhile. Until accumulated evidence leads to it not holding up quite so well anymore.
And then he does something to give away the fact that he's no longer entirely buying the narrative they fed him, and they have to wipe him again.
However, if the wipes are only mostly taking out episodic memory, he'll retain some implicit memory - emotional responses and familiarity cues - of that process of remembering, killing, and then being wiped. And I'm already working on the premise that he's been trained to trust his emotional impulses, since they're what his conditioning is relying on. So then his response to the narrative he's fed when he wakes up might very slowly change, over many cycles of wipes and missions, from "This is familiar and I have good associations with it, I should trust it" to "this is familiar but also wrong and will lead to things I don't like"; and his response to starting to remember might shift from "this is distressing I should tell my handlers" to "ah yes, this always happens, keep it secret keep it safe."
Eventually he might even get to the point of "listening to what the handlers say always leads to terrible things happening, ignoring them leads to immediate pain but feeling better otherwise".
...which is probably the point at which they would attempt to re-condition him above and beyond the wipes. But we can assume than any external conditioning would be a lot less subtle and a lot less pinpoint accurate than the conditioning his mind is doing on himself, and would get less and less effective the more times they had to do it, having to overwrite stronger and stronger internal conditioning that never gets entirely erased, because it's in the deep magic that their machines can't touch. They might keep wiping more and more often him to try to destroy responses that are the result of implicit memory that the wipes aren't touching.
So I'm definitely not saying that there's only one way to write the Winter Soldier. Especially when you factor in psychological damage, because everyone reacts to that in VERY different way. And especially when you start thinking about Bucky as he's healing, because healing brains do what they want.
But my headcanon is that as time has passed, the wipes and conditioning have become less effective because he's adapting to a life with recurrent retrograde amnesia, and his brain is routing around it, to allow him to "remember" more and more things in ways his handlers are less able to control or even understand. My guess is that there was a sweet spot in the '70s or so where his conditioning hit its peak and he was at his best as an agent - more like the comics Winter Soldier - and ever since then as his mind has started outpacing the conditioning, he's been more independent and less easily controlled, and as a result he's spent more time in cryofreeze, less time on less complex missions, and been treated more harshly as he responds less cooperatively, and therefore become less functional as a person and as an agent.
That scene where he's in the chair and talking to Pierce, his responses really seemed to me to be less brokenness, more "here we go again, why do you keep doing this when I have no memory of having done it before and even I know that it's irrelevant and pointless".
So let's try to link that last post to the memory loss experienced by the MCU Winter Soldier. I'll start by outlining what I know, or can fairly simply deduce, from viewings of the movie:
1. His memory has been intentionally limited by the people controlling him.
2. He undergoes periodic "wipes" that affect his memories.
3. These "wipes" need to be quite frequent, as his handlers got very nervous that he would go more than a few days without a wipe.
4. Between wipes, he's put into some sort of suspended animation.
5. His handlers don't find it unusual that he would maintain limited memories from one mission to another - hence Pierce's reassurance that he recognized Steve from a previous mission - but these memories are expected to be disorganized.
6. He knows Russian.
7. He has extremely advanced physical skills, including use of a prosthetic hand that's about the same age as his memory issues.
8. He is capable of leading a tactical team in a fairly complex situation. He is also capable of operating alone without direct supervision for missions of at least a few hours' duration.
9. He recognizes Steve immediately, although not with any clarity or context.
10. His handlers don't seem to be unduly concerned at this recognition, as if it wasn't a brand-new behavior (however, this may just be because they don't really understand how to take care of their tool.)
11. The "wipes" seem to have something in common with electroconvulsive therapy.
12. He has little to no episodic memory of his past, but he does experience episodic memories as sudden flashbacks, especially when due for a wipe (??)
13. He had some level of treatment with the supersoldier serum, which we know from Steve's map of Hydra bases has some memory-enhancing effects, and also greatly increases healing ability.
14. He has a concept of selfhood at least sufficient to refer to himself as "I".
So, based on that, the below are my guesses about Bucky's memory issues - partly my headcanon, but also an attempt to make a sensible extrapolation from how memory works and what we're shown in the movie.
First, my guess would be that the "wipes" affect primarily episodic memory, both because of the resemblance to ECT and the way we see him react in the movie. Also because if you wanted a functional elite agent, he would need to be able to learn things - skills and facts - and retain them between missions. Basically, he experiences frequent losses of accumulated long-term episodic memory, with normal memory function in between.
Therefore, his implicit memory - such as his muscle memory of how to fight and how to use his arm - would be unaffected. His semantic memory would also be unaffected, although it would be somewhat scrambled by his inability to access it via episodic memory. Therefore, any skills he was trained in, or any knowledge he learned, would be maintained between wipes; he could be taught a new martial arts style, a new language, how to assemble a weapon or navigate through a facility or fly an airplane, and use it just fine on the next mission if prompted, without having any memory of having learned it.
That means he might also have a fair amount of knowledge of events of the time that passed, though it would depend heavily on how often he was actually awake, and what kinds of missions he did. We know of twenty-some assassinations attributed to him; if we assume that's about half of the total, and he had only about a week per mission before he needed a new wipe, that's only a year or so awake. On the other hand, he could have been awakened way more often than that, for training or undetected missions, and the time-between-wipes could also have been decreasing if the procedures became less effective. The fact that he's got some Russian implies that he was awake at least long enough to learn a language, at some point, and he's had long enough to become very fluent in the use of his arm, although as supersoldier he might have picked those up relatively quickly (or even picked up the Russian during the war). The amount of context he has for this new knowledge would depend on how often he was awake vs. out, and what he was allowed to learn or experience.
Also, a lot of conditioning techniques will heavily rely on implicit memory, so if he's gone through intensive conditioning - which seems very likely - his emotional associations - such as "if I don't do this, there will be pain" and "I'm really damn good at this, I need to swagger" and "this is safe, I can relax" - would be maintained between wipes, though he'd have no conscious knowledge of why he felt that way. He would experience them, especially the fear, as very much irrational or even mystical, an overwhelming feeling with no cause he can understand, but which he has also been conditioned to trust. This would also probably make any future conditioning be more effective. Given his role as a physically elite soldier/assassin/agent, it seems likely to me that his trainers emphasized a reliance on "instinct" rather than planning, since that's how he would access a lot of the knowledge and conditioning he might not be consciously aware of.
His reaction to Steve is likely at least as much about a retained emotional response as any explicit memory, as well - "I have no idea who you are, but I still want to wrap you up in a blanket and feed you soup." If he'd become (implicitly) accustomed to relying on implicit emotional memories to guide his actions - his handlers might even have encouraged that, if that was the basis of his conditioning - that might have backfired when he had a sudden emotional reaction unrelated to his conditioning; if he's been taught to trust his sudden, sourceless fear of punishment, he'd be inclined to also trust his sudden desire to cuddle. (And to rely heavily on his emotional insights in general.) Basically: Bucky looking as Steve would have experienced something like how fandom uses soulbonds: I love this person and every part of me is telling me to trust that feeling and it makes no sense but I want to trust it.
So if the wipes are mostly about erasing episodic memories while leaving semantic and implicit memory largely intact, and then his mind rewires his brain to be as functional as possible under those constraints, I'm left with two main questions: a) does the memory-erasing actually work, and b) is that the only neurological alteration he's been subjected to.
I think the answers to both those questions are linked, and they come back to the super-soldier serum. While Bucky's isn't as strong as Steve's, we know he has some effect from the serum, and this leads me to the belief that even if there were other procedures attempted, they probably aren't in play at the time of the movie. A super-soldier metabolizes most drugs so quickly that they have no time to act, so going for the simplest solution, it's unlikely there's a heavy reliance on long-term drug use. There may have been surgical procedures done at some point, but super-soldiers can heal pretty much any bodily damage eventually, so I suspect that unless the surgical procedures are being periodically re-done (with most of the original scientists long dead) any gross brain damage has been healed by the time of the movie.
That leaves the "wipes" and the cryofreeze. In real humans in non-comic-book worlds, electroshock to the brain can cause short-term anterograde amnesia, and partial retrograde amnesia that may take months to years before the memories return. We see in the movie that the Soldier's handlers are really hesitant to give him more than a week between wipes - which implies to me that he begins to recover some of his episodic memories shortly after that, sudden exposure to Steve or not; and that he may be having flashbacks of episodic memory by the end of almost every mission, which are then taken away again by the next wipe. It also implies to me that the healing abilities are speeding up the recovery of the memories, so that without wipes, he might recover nearly all of his memory relatively rapidly, even without treatment. It's also possible that the memory wipes are getting even less effective, if his serum-altered brain is adapting to the repeated trauma/healing, or if there was surgical or chemical alteration that has since healed without anyone thinking to check. Or if procedures in general have gotten shoddier over time.
Cryofreeze - the method of suspended animation that was likely used for the Winter Soldier - at the current level of our technology, causes massive brain damage. IIRC, the movie implied that the Winter Soldier is usually put directly back into the freezer after a mission, and then wiped when he's thawed out. It's entirely possible, then, that some of his memory issues are caused by the interaction of the cryofreeze and the serum's healing as much as by deliberate actions of his handlers. Possibly his brain is often still healing cryofreeze damage by the time he's put back in for another freeze. In the original Winter Soldier comic, nearly all of the memory loss was the result of physical damage at the time of his fall plus repeated cryofreeze, rather than a deliberate effort.
So, if I'm right about how this is working, then cryo damage aside, his brain is functioning perfectly normally between wipes - he remembers everything from the point he woke up, and he has access to a fairly large store of knowledge/factual memories that give him context for the world around him. He also has a full complement of emotional/implicit cues that he uses to make judgements and evaluate situations, and probably has come to rely on these "emotional" and "instinctual" cues more heavily than most people. He processes information and perceives time normally. He may also have some scattered episodic memory to call on, either from previous missions or from before he was captured.
What does this say about his sense of self and his inner narrative? Well, that's tricky. I'm dealing here strictly with loss of memory as a result of physical trauma to the brain; I'm not even touching on the effects of his conditioning or torture or missions on this, and thinking about how that might interact gets really complicated, really fast - depending on how that plays out, you could have all sorts of answers here.
But, sticking solely to the memory wipes and physical damage, and how the brain adapts to that: I would say that, first, his sense of self is intact - even people with total anterograde and retrograde amnesia keep their sense of self, though it's often a much more visceral and immediate sense without a personal narrative to ground it - Waring kept a journal that consisted of the statement "I just woke up for the first time" over and over again, and yet that "I" and "awake" were insistent. (There are other kinds of trauma or damage that can cause loss of a sense of self - and it's possible the Winter Soldier had them - but we have no evidence of that - and we know he considers himself an "I" - and I feel like most of them would be somewhat complicated by the periodic wipes.)
Electroshock can sometimes cause temporary anterograde amnesia, but we see no sign of that in the film - if he had substantial anterograde amnesia, to start with, he wouldn't be able to fight like that; he'd keep getting distracted by shiny things. And nobody would trust him to lead a tac team. So we can assume that his amnesia is mostly retrograde, and therefore, between wipes, he also has a fairly normal sense of the passage of time - he knows what he did yesterday, and that it was a day ago, and he has an awareness that there was a time before he woke up, which he cannot remember experiencing. (Some forms of brain damage and psychological trauma can cause partial interference with saving short-term memory to episodic memory, or preserving long-term memory in the actual long term, without total anterograde amnesia; that seems counterproductive to me, though, if what you want is an agent who can operate semi-independently, and there's no evidence of it in the movie.)
The tricky part comes with the time he cannot consciously remember experiencing. As soon as he "wakes up" from a memory loss episode, he will start trying to construct a narrative of where he came from and what identity he can link to that insistent "I", and he'll do this with a combination of information he gets from the world around him, and what he can work out from the semantic and implicit memory he retains. My guess is that his handlers have a set narrative that they give him as soon as he is capable of processing it - judging by what we saw in the movie, and what happened in the comics, probably something like 'you are a hero who was badly injured, which is why your memory is gone, but we need you to perform just one more mission for us, in order to save the world; you are the only one who can do it.' And that will match sufficiently well with what he's able to reconstuct internally that it will hold up for awhile. Until accumulated evidence leads to it not holding up quite so well anymore.
And then he does something to give away the fact that he's no longer entirely buying the narrative they fed him, and they have to wipe him again.
However, if the wipes are only mostly taking out episodic memory, he'll retain some implicit memory - emotional responses and familiarity cues - of that process of remembering, killing, and then being wiped. And I'm already working on the premise that he's been trained to trust his emotional impulses, since they're what his conditioning is relying on. So then his response to the narrative he's fed when he wakes up might very slowly change, over many cycles of wipes and missions, from "This is familiar and I have good associations with it, I should trust it" to "this is familiar but also wrong and will lead to things I don't like"; and his response to starting to remember might shift from "this is distressing I should tell my handlers" to "ah yes, this always happens, keep it secret keep it safe."
Eventually he might even get to the point of "listening to what the handlers say always leads to terrible things happening, ignoring them leads to immediate pain but feeling better otherwise".
...which is probably the point at which they would attempt to re-condition him above and beyond the wipes. But we can assume than any external conditioning would be a lot less subtle and a lot less pinpoint accurate than the conditioning his mind is doing on himself, and would get less and less effective the more times they had to do it, having to overwrite stronger and stronger internal conditioning that never gets entirely erased, because it's in the deep magic that their machines can't touch. They might keep wiping more and more often him to try to destroy responses that are the result of implicit memory that the wipes aren't touching.
So I'm definitely not saying that there's only one way to write the Winter Soldier. Especially when you factor in psychological damage, because everyone reacts to that in VERY different way. And especially when you start thinking about Bucky as he's healing, because healing brains do what they want.
But my headcanon is that as time has passed, the wipes and conditioning have become less effective because he's adapting to a life with recurrent retrograde amnesia, and his brain is routing around it, to allow him to "remember" more and more things in ways his handlers are less able to control or even understand. My guess is that there was a sweet spot in the '70s or so where his conditioning hit its peak and he was at his best as an agent - more like the comics Winter Soldier - and ever since then as his mind has started outpacing the conditioning, he's been more independent and less easily controlled, and as a result he's spent more time in cryofreeze, less time on less complex missions, and been treated more harshly as he responds less cooperatively, and therefore become less functional as a person and as an agent.
That scene where he's in the chair and talking to Pierce, his responses really seemed to me to be less brokenness, more "here we go again, why do you keep doing this when I have no memory of having done it before and even I know that it's irrelevant and pointless".