Could Severance become reality? Brain docs reveal the truth

Instead of trying to juggle work-life balance, why not just split the two entirely? If Apple TV’s Severance taught us anything, it’s that it’s not that simple. While the surgical procedure that Lumon Industries employees undergo to sever their work and home memories is pure science fiction, experts in the field say it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility.“I don’t think we’re far off from things like this happening,” Dr.Vijay Agarwal, a neurosurgeon who has served as a consultant for Severance, told Science American. In case you’ve somehow avoided the craze, Severance follows a group of workers who have experimental chips implanted in their brains to split their consciousness into two separate states.This creates a scenario where each character has a work-focused “innie” and a home-oriented “outie,” with each side unaware of the other’s experiences.

The show just wrapped up its second season, and was renewed on Friday for a third.“As compelling as the show is, it’s worth noting that severing memories in this way wouldn’t be possible with our current understanding of the brain,” Dr.

Bing, a Mayo-clinic trailed neurologist and content creator, said in a recent TikTok video.“Our memories are distributed across networks of neurons and you can’t simply just turn off part of your life without affecting others,” he added. You could, for instance, knock out short-term memory if you severed both hippocampi and the fornices, Dr.Daniel Orringer, an associate professor of neurosurgery at NYU Langone Health, told Time Magazine.That said, some versions of the Severance memory split are already happening in real life.

Take our wakeful and dreaming selves, for example.In much the same way the character’s decisions outside of work impact their experiences inside work, our actions during the day influence our dreams at night, Dr.Steve Ramirez, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, t...