切割记忆、分离人格：神经科学家表示《人生切割术》正在变成现实｜科学60秒

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Today we’re talking about the science of Severance.

What if instead of struggling to find work-life balance, you could completely separate your professional identity from your personal one? That question kicks off the Apple TV+ show Severance, which just wrapped up its second season.

In the world of the show, a company called Lumon Industries requires certain employees to undergo its “severance” procedure, which its spokespeople say means you’ll never have to take work home with you again. It also means you have to get a microchip implanted into your brain.

To help make the procedure and its effects as realistic as possible, the folks behind Severance brought on a real-life neurosurgeon to consult on the show. Vijay Agarwal is chief of the [Division] Skull-Base [and Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery] [and Director of Brain] Tumor Center at Montefiore Einstein [Medical Center]. We sat down with him to get the inside scoop on the science of severance.

Before we get into that chat, just a brief spoiler warning: we did our best to avoid any super-specific spoilers for recent episodes, but we’d recommend waiting until you’ve watched at least episode seven of season two before listening.

Agarwal: Than we live in now. And it was just as simple as that. It was just a thought at that stage—you know, “We wanna develop a procedure that implants a chip that separates your work life from your social life, from your everyday life.” And we were off to the races.

Feltman: Yeah. What were your initial thoughts and reactions when you first heard that premise?

Agarwal: I thought it was a very cool concept, and I think I just directly went into how that could be a reality. You know, one of the things that Ben Stiller was really strict on was that he wanted this to be as believable as possible ...

Feltman: Mm.

Agarwal: As real as possible. There are some sort of creative allowances that happen as part of this process, but he really wanted the science to be real and to be believable, and I think that’s part of the reason that people have really bonded with the show and in particular the science.

Feltman: Yeah, well, that’s a great segue to my next question, which is: What are some of the, the real science concepts and, you know, factual medical procedures that you’ve baked into the concept of the severance procedure?

Agarwal: I made a statement a while ago that I don’t think we’re far off from things like this happening, and I really firmly believe that. And we’re actually much closer than when I made that statement.

Feltman: Mm.

Agarwal: So 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, but those things are actually happening currently in science. And almost every major academic center around the world is doing these sorts of procedures every day, in particular to help people with diseases like Parkinson’s disease. And so it seems like a very science fiction-type concept, but it’s part of our everyday life as neurosurgeons and neuroscientists.

Feltman: Well, and can you walk me through, you know, in creating the concept for the severance procedure, where did you sort of pepper in factual details, you know, for example, the placement of the chip?

Agarwal: I actually think that that scene is very, very realistic.

Feltman: Mm.

Agarwal: And so we—I borrowed from the science and the surgeries that we do today, even. So some of the navigation equipment that we use, I had that equipment shipped in. And so when I started, it really was just a concept: “How do we develop the severance procedure? How do we ‘sever’ people?” Then we sort of developed the science, and I remember very—in the early days of the show sitting at a, you know, a big conference table with Ben and Dan [Erickson] and a lot of the producers, and we just had a whiteboard in it, and we would just spitball concepts ...

Feltman: Mm.

Agarwal: Until we found one that was, you know, really believable and the one that people liked and the one that Ben thought would fit with his vision.

And so we really implant in an area that is able to process memories but, interestingly, associates those memories with emotion. It’s the amygdala and hippocampus, so those sort of middle part of the structures, on the left side of the brain, which is the dominant side of the brain for most people. So what a great area to stimulate to really facilitate this ability to separate our “innies” from our “outies”: number one, the ability to process memories, but then, number two, the ability to, to associate those memories with emotion. So that was a perfect place to do it. And then, actually, the procedure was very realistic. So how we put the hole in the skull, the needle with which we use to implant the chip, those are things that we use every day in neurosurgery and neuroscience currently.

Feltman: And you actually appear on camera to do the procedure, is that right?

Agarwal: Season one, episode two—so when we implant the chip in Helly. So we really designed that set. So, you know, Ben had a very specific vision in mind, and then our goal was really to try to make that vision become a reality. And so everything was important on that set, from the scientific accuracy to the lighting to the cinematography. And so it was all specifically laid out to capture a purpose. And so that’s the episode that I appeared in and very proud with the, the way it came out.

Feltman: Yeah. So just to really spell out the actual neuroscience here, which I think is so cool, in your mind—pardon the pun—what is that chip doing in there, in that part of the brain?

Agarwal: As I mentioned before there are se—multiple companies trying to do something on a different scale, which is trying to stimulate the brain to alter the way that it functions: so Elon Musk’s Neuralink; a lot of my friends are working on this technology at different centers around the country; Synchron is another company based out of New York that’s trying to do something similar in terms of being able to modify the function of the brain by inputting electrical stimulation.

And Elon, he gave a talk at one of our recent neurosurgery meetings, and he...[full transcript]