Experts explain the the real science behind Apple TV sci-fi hit Severance

Maintaining a work-life balance is something many of us struggle to do. Whether it’s corporate culture and expectations, constant work-related group chats pinging off, or job insecurity, workers are pulled between wanting a social life and making progress in their careers.

So, what would happen if you could physically separate both two worlds and their demands? The Apple TV+ drama Severance is a psychological thriller which unpacks this conundrum. Employees the show’s dystopian world work for a company called Lumon Industries where a procedure called “severance” surgically separates their memories into two distinct states — one state for their work life, and the other for their personal life.

This means that when an employee is hard at work, they have no memory of their life outside the office. Once they leave work, they have no memory of what happened during their work day. It may sound ideal on paper, but it creates a stark division between their work personas (known as ‘innies’) and the outside persona (‘outies’).

The high-concept drama also sounds quite far-fetched — surely nothing like this has ever happened in real life before? Think again, because it actually touches on an interesting realm of neuroscience.

Patients who have had their brain split have existed since the 1940s. The procedure is still done today. Patients undergo the surgical brain split procedure for cases of epilepsy. Our left and right hemispheres are connected by a thick band of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum.

Separated hemispheres of the brain were shown to be able to process information independently according to longitudinal research on this type of surgery. According to London South Bank University’s Rachael Elward, senior lecturer in neuroscience and neuropsychology, and Lauren Ford, PhD candidate in neuroscience, this raises the question of whether the procedure creates ‘two separate minds living in one brain’.

When speaking to a patient who has had this procedure, due to the left hemisphere of the brain controlling speech, you’ll be communicating with this half of the brain. However, there are patients who can communicate from their right hemisphere by writing or arranging scrabble letters.

Severance is a high-concept psychological thrillerApple TV+

In Severance, both innies and outies have access to speech which suggests the fictional procedure in the show is a more complex separation of the brain’s hemispheres, the neuroscience experts explain in their article published by The Conversation.

The region of the brain that is associated with remembering your day at work is the hippocampus and it also ‘supports the representation of space’. The hippocampus could be a "good target" for the show’s fictional procedure because it helps us remember the layout of our office, and work-related memories.

This region of the brain segments our experiences into episodes for us to remember later down the line. Entering a new space is an indicator that a new episode has begun, and Severance the switch between an innie and outie happens at the elevator doors.

However there are "two crucial flaws with the idea that the show’s severance procedure could involve a simple snip to the hippocampus". First, the workers have ‘a great deal of semantic knowledge’, such as general knowledge about the company their work for, which is "inaccessible to their outies". They also form ‘emotional memories’ linked to the rewards they received because of hard work, as well as punishments, the experts state.

“These forms of memory rely on far more than the hippocampus, and the hippocampus itself is part of a brain-wide episodic memory network that is activated during episodic memory retrieval,” the experts explain.

The second flaw is that memory "is closely connected to perception, attention, language and many other processes". The experts add that "the human memory system is far too complex to be entirely split in two."

Still, it’s a gripping concept to think about. Season two of Severance is out now on Apple TV+.

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