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, told BU Today.
There are also memories that slip out of our immediate recall. “We all have memories that probably aren’t going to come back to us for years, if not decades, because they’re dormant somewhere in the brain, but presumably they’re still shaping our behavior and shaping our identities,” he said.
Agarwal and other experts believe it’s only a matter of time before we develop technology that lets us control which memories we can switch on or off.
The mystery of “infantile amnesia” — our inability to recall specific events from the first few years of life — could offer some clues. In fact, scientists have already made breakthroughs with mice, successfully unlocking memories once thought to be erased by this phenomenon.
“That, to me, says there’s at least two versions of ourselves in existence within the same brain — one to which we have direct conscious access and one to which we do not,” Ramirez said.
“So for severance to happen in real life, you’re taking that idea, but rather than starting with infantile amnesia and going to adulthood, it’s just happening during two different parts of the day. Same idea, just different timing,” he added.
To create a memory-altering chip like the one in the show, it would need to target crucial areas of the brain, such as the hippocampi, which is responsible for memory formation, and the amygdala, which controls emotions, Dr. Jordina Rincon-Torroella, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University, told Time.
“Memory and emotions are so attached to each other,” she said. “These would be the areas that I would attempt to approach if we would consider the idea of whether we could split an identity.”
The idea of creating a such a chip might sound like something straight out of a movie, but doctors are already implanting cutting-edge technology into people’s brains to treat various medical conditions.
“If we had told somebody a few years ago that we would be implanting electrodes in the brain to stimulate the brain to treat people who are paralyzed and allow them to be able to walk again or treat their obsessive-compulsive disorder, their addiction, their severe suicidal depression, obesity, things like that, we would think people are crazy,” Agarwal said.
“But those things are actually happening currently in science,” he noted. “Almost every major academic center around the world is doing these sorts of procedures every day.”
Several companies are working on innovations that could modify brain function through electrical stimulation.
Take Elon Musk’s Neuralink, for example. The company is developing brain chips that aim to help quadriplegics control computers and other devices simply by thinking.
Manipulating memory and consciousness would be a much larger challenge — and one fraught with serious ethical concerns.
“Memory isn’t just about storing information, it’s deeply tied to our sense of self,” said Bing, whose real name is Baibing Chen, said. “In Severance, separating work and personal memories raises the question that if you don’t remember who you are outside of work, do you even have a complete identity?”
Real-world neurological conditions offer insight into how such changes might affect a person’s sense of self.
For example, brain injuries affecting the hippocampus can prevent someone from being able to form new memories, effectively trapping them in the present, much like the “innies” in Severance, Bing said.
“On the other hand, Alzheimer’s disease shows how memory loss can fundamentally change someone’s personality and [how] severing ties to the past can reshape someone’s behavior and relationships,” he added.
