Dr. Vijay Agarwal
Appearances
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
You're really escaping to the place that we traditionally in society really consider escaping from to escape some of these more traumatic memories. So the amygdala and hippocampus helps us process memories, but also associates very, very strong emotions, fear and hate and love with very specific memories.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
And so what better part of the brain to target than the area that allows us to, number one, process memories, and number two, associate those with some of the strongest emotions that we feel that make us human.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
I remember taking a marker and writing on the whiteboard and printing out articles and printing out pictures and then really discussing it as a group about how we wanted to do that. It is very much scientifically, surgically, medically accurate.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Yeah, you know, I actually think we're not that far off. So in medicine, in neurosurgery, we are currently putting in electrodes to stimulate the brain. Because if you look at the brain, it's really, at a basic level, one giant computer. And if you're able to change sort of the electrical input to the computer, you could change the way that your computer functions. You could turn it on and off.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
You could open up different programs. You could change the way those programs function. That's exactly what we're actually doing with the brain. And there are current companies right now that are doing that. And I like to use this example about how really a lot of the entropy that goes into scientific advancement is in really establishing the technology.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Then once you have the technology, then you're able to make that technology grow very, very quick. And I like to use the example of flight. You know, the Wright brothers really did the first flight in 1903. It was only 11 years later where we started flying people commercially. And I think we have now, in this field, we've taken our first flight.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
And now we're getting ready to take our first commercial flight.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Yeah, I love talking about that. And the area that I targeted or we targeted in the show was the amygdala and hippocampus. And that is such a perfect area for I think what Ben's vision was, which was, you know, how do we separate memories and the emotions that are associated with memory? So that's a perfect area. But in broader strokes, And the brain is really an unbelievable organ.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
The areas that we stimulate will be the areas that cause the effects that we want. So if we want people to be able to walk, we would stimulate the motor cortex, which is the area of the brain that controls our movement.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Should we be doing it? So imagine being able to turn people's memories on and off and being able to enhance or decrease the sort of functional level of certain areas. Who do we decide has the power to make those changes? So we are not far off from being able to control those things, but then it begs the question, who's the one holding the remote?
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Yeah, so this episode seven was brilliant. There are a lot of different threads you can pull for abuse. There's that one facility where... women go to have children and they can sort of separate sort of themselves from the care of the children with their regular lives. And so there was a lot of different ethical questions that came from there.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
And I think one of the biggest ethical questions of the show is almost like an existential question, is that if we're turning off our ability to remember, are we not confronting the memories that bring us trauma? Are we just forgetting the memories? but still holding on to these very painful, traumatic emotions. So are we not actually healing?
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Because what happens is these emotions that come, a lot of times depression and severe depression actually changes the way that your brain is firing. It's actually your neurotransmitters that are released It's a sort of abnormal functioning of the release of these neurotransmitters. And your brain is not firing appropriately.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
So if we just forget the memory, do we forget sort of the emotions that came from that memory?
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Yeah, I think it's it's that's a perfect way to summarize it. So you can forget a memory, but it's it's a much bigger task to forget the trauma.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Yeah. So it's interesting. And the only thing I would say to that is that, you know, I would just watch through the rest of the season. Okay. Where the season goes is interesting. is pretty unbelievable. It's going to blow your mind, no pun intended.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
And then you specifically asked sort of this theory of if you're able to bring somebody else's consciousness into somebody else's body, you know, and that's a very different sort of concept because everybody's brain is different and everybody's brain functions differently. Number one, nature and nurture.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
So you're born a certain way, but the majority of who you are, I think, is really developed by the external world. And it takes years to develop that type of person that you are. And I think it's very exemplified in the show because although you go from an outie to an innie, The majority of the characters in the show, their personalities are maintained from their outie to an innie.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Jess, who's the cinematographer, she actually directed this brilliant episode, episode seven. You could actually see Mark, played by Adam Scott, before all the trauma of Gemma dying. And it goes into this very charming, charismatic sort of guy. You see a lot of those personalities maintained in the innie, where he doesn't have the memory of Gemma dying.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
So to be able to transfer that to somebody else in somebody else's brain, I think is a very difficult thing to do.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Yeah, so that's a great question. So I looked into things like ayahuasca journeys and things like that. I looked into anything that people did to process their trauma. And the thing about sort of medicine journeys is that people go to medicine journeys, I think, to confront, directly confront the trauma.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
And I think that was the biggest difference that I found in those sorts of activities is that medicine journeys are to, you know, when you do an ayahuasca journey, you are like, you know, a lot of people get very, very sick. You know, they're throwing up and because it's almost like they're expelling these things from their body. They're confronting them and it's very, very painful. Yeah.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
But I think that's the biggest difference. Because Mark doesn't really confront the fact that Gemma died. He escaped, tried to escape that reality. Where in a medicine journey, you are confronting that head on. Right. And then sort of deciding how to work through those emotions. So I think it's almost like a different tactic.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
And that's the reason why I kind of steered away from those sorts of things. And that's the big question is, is Mark really... Working through his pain? I don't think so. I think Mark severed to try to escape his pain.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Yeah, I think it does. You know, I've spent my whole life, my whole adult life doing nothing but trying to understand the brain.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
And the more I got into, you know, they say the further you go in the ocean, the deeper it gets. That's a perfect metaphor for where the show is and sort of where this technology is. And so I think we're on the cusp. of really delving into some very huge discoveries in terms of the brain and neuroscience.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
But that's the one thing that struck me is the more you really got into it, the more you understand that we just don't understand very much.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
I cannot wait to talk to you after the last episode.
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Number one, can you do this scientifically? And I think resoundingly, the answer is yes. And then number two, I think is a bigger question, is should we be doing these things?
Short Wave
Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Is it in season one? Season one, episode two, about minute three, but who's counting? I tell people this all the time that, you know, it's the role of a neurosurgeon. And I've been really training for that role my whole life.