What if we had the ultimate work-life balance? This fundamental question underlies the hit Apple TV+ show Severance – now in its second season. Ahead of the season 2 finale this Friday, producer Rachel Carlson sat down with the science consultant for the series, Dr. Vijay Agarwal. Vijay says the concept is "resoundingly" possible – and that scientists are closer than we might think. More questions about the intersections of pop culture and science? Email us at [email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the premise of 'Severance'?
These fundamental questions are at the root of the hit Apple TV Plus show, Severance, now in its second season. And I love TV and I love neuroscience, so I had to hear from Dr. Vijay Agarwal. He's a neurosurgeon and Severance's science consultant. In the show, some employees at a company called Lumen Industries undergo a surgical procedure that alters their brain.
Chapter 2: Can the concept of 'Severance' be realized scientifically?
Their memories are divided between work experiences, where they're known as their innies, and their personal lives where they're known as their outies. The protagonist, Mark Scout, and many of the other characters in the show choose to get the procedure after personal trauma. It's a way of escaping their everyday lives.
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.
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.
Vijay says the show's creator, Dan Erickson, and the executive producers, including Ben Stiller, were set on making the show as realistic as possible when it came down to the science.
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.
So today on the show, the neuroscience of severance, the connection between trauma and memory, the ethics of neurotechnology, and why one neuroscientist says the show, it's not too far off from reality. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Chapter 3: What are the ethical implications of neurotechnology?
Chapter 4: How does trauma affect memory in 'Severance'?
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All right. So Vijay, we're talking about the neuroscience of the Apple TV show Severance. And some companies are developing neurotechnology now that would go into our brains in real life. How far off is reality from what's happening in the show?
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.
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.
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.
And now we're getting ready to take our first commercial flight.
Wow. Okay, so then you were kind of talking about this before, but what areas of the brain – are we targeting or what areas of the brain would we target?
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Chapter 5: What areas of the brain are involved in memory and emotions?
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.
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.
So to be able to transfer that to somebody else in somebody else's brain, I think is a very difficult thing to do.
Right now, so many researchers are interested in studying altered states of consciousness. things like psychedelics, even anesthetics as potential treatments for things like PTSD.
And since we've been talking about trauma and grief and escape as big themes of the show, was that consciousness research something that you were thinking about at all when you were helping to craft some of the more scientific parts of the narrative?
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.
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: What are the potential abuses of neurotechnology?
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.
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.
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.
Does this show make you appreciate anything about how the world works, about how the brain works in a way that you hadn't thought about before working on it?
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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
All right. Well, Vijay, thank you so much for talking to me. I am so excited to hopefully have some of the puzzle pieces fit together.
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