The following text is reprinted with the user’s permission 
The conversationonline publication covering the latest research.
Severance, which imagines a world where a person’s work and personal life are surgically separated, will soon return to Apple TV+ for a second season. While the concept of this compelling piece of sci-fi is far-fetched, it touches on some interesting neuroscience. Can a person’s mind really be surgically split in two?
Notably, “split brain” patients have existed since the 1940s. To control the symptoms of epilepsy, these patients underwent an operation to separate the left and right hemispheres. Similar operations it still happens.
About supporting science journalism
If you like this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you’re helping to ensure a future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape our world.
Later research in this type of surgery they demonstrated that the separate hemispheres of split-brain patients could process information independently. This raises the uncomfortable possibility that the procedure could create two separate minds inhabiting one brain.
In the first season of Severance, Helly R (Britt Lower) experienced a conflict between her “innie” (the side of her mind that remembered her work life) and her “outie” (the non-work side). Also, there is proof Of a conflict between the two hemispheres of real split-brain patients.
When you talk to split brain patients, you usually communicate with the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls speech. However, some patients can communicate from the right hemisphere by writing, for example, or arranging Scrabble letters.
A young patient they asked him what job he would like in the future. His left hemisphere chose office work for technical drawings. His right hemisphere, however, arranged the letters to spell “car racer.”
It has also been reported by split brain patients “Alien hand syndrome”where one of their hands is perceived to move of its own volition. These observations suggest that two separate conscious “persons” can coexist in one brain and have conflicting goals.
In Severance, however, both the innie and the outie have access to speech. This is an indication that the fictitious “separation procedure” must be a more complex separation of brain networks.
An example of a complex separation of functions was described in Neil’s case reportin 1994 Neil was a teenager who had many difficulties due to a pineal gland tumor. One of these difficulties was a rare form of amnesia. This meant that Neil could not remember the events of his time or report what he had learned at school. He also became able to read, although he could write, and unable to name objects, although he could draw them.
Amazingly, Neil was able to continue with his education. Researchers were interested in how he was able to complete his schoolwork despite having no memory of what he was learning.
She was asked about a novel she was studying at school, Rosie with Cider by Laurie Lee. In the interview, Neil could not remember anything about the book, not even the title. But when the researcher asked Neil to write down everything he could remember about the book, he wrote “Bloodshot Geranium windows Cider with Rosie Dranium smell of weze peppar (sic) and mushroom growth”, all words related to the novel. Since Neil could not read, he had to ask the researcher: “What have I written?”
Neil was also able to write down other memories he thought were lost, including meeting a man with gangrene in hospital. In each case, he was not aware of his memory until he had written and read it. Neil’s case is a terrible example. It suggests that we have rich memories that are inaccessible to our consciousness.
In Severance, Irving’s (John Turturro) breakout can access memories of his innie’s work environment through paint. Severed paints the long corridors of the floor (where his innie works), despite having no conscious memory of them. Perhaps, in the show, the breaking procedure involves blocking conscious access to memory in the same way Neil’s access was blocked.
The role of the hippocampus
Which brain regions might underlie the segmentation procedure of the television show? The region most associated with recalling events at work is the hippocampus, and interestingly, this region of the brain also supports it. representation of space.
That the same neural structures support remembering that a new colleague has joined your team today and imagining the layout of the office suggests that the hippocampus may be a good target for this fictional procedure.
In Severance, the switch between innie and outie occurs at the office boundary, at the elevator doors. It reminds me of this “gateway effect”the phenomenon that walking through a portal makes you forget something.
hippocampus it fragments our experience to remember later in the passages. Entering a new space is an indicator that a new chapter has begun, which increases forgetting of the information covered in these passages. The effect is subtle, however. Even if you sometimes walk into the kitchen and forget why you walked in, you don’t forget that you have children, unlike the dramatic effect of the show’s break-up procedure.
Perhaps, in the show, the hippocampus’ interest in spatial boundaries drives the shift between innie and outie.
Unfortunately, there are two crucial flaws with the idea that the show’s breakout procedure might involve a simple cut of the hippocampus.
First, it is not just episodic and spatial memory that is divided in Severance. Employees have a lot of semantic knowledge (data about Lumo, the company they work for and its founder, for example) that is inaccessible outside of them. They also form emotional memories associated with the rewards they get for hard work and the punishments they receive in the break room. These forms of memory rely on much more than the hippocampus, and the hippocampus itself is a part of the entire brain. episodic memory network which is activated during episodic memory retrieval.
The second flaw is that memory itself is not an isolated process. It is closely related to perception, attention, language and many other processes. The human memory system is too complex to completely bisect, but as Severance shows, it’s fun to think about the possibilities.
This article was originally published The conversation. read it original article.
