THIS ARTICLE is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Severance, which envisions a world where work and personal life are surgically separated, returns on Friday for its long-awaited second season. While this terrifying science fiction concept is far-fetched, it touches on a question that neuroscience has been trying to answer for decades: Can a person’s mind be split in two? Amazingly, “split brain” patients have been around ever since. the 1940s. To control the symptoms of epilepsy, the patient underwent surgery to separate the left and right hemispheres. The same operation is still happening today. Later research on this type of surgery showed that the separate hemispheres of split-brain patients could process information independently. This raises the unpleasant possibility that the procedure creates two separate minds residing in one brain. In season one of Severance, Helly R (Britt Lower) experiences a conflict between her “innie” (the side of her mind that remembers her work life) and her “outie” (the outside of work). In addition, there is evidence of conflict between the two brain hemispheres of real split-brain patients. When talking to a split-brain patient, you are usually communicating with the left hemisphere, which controls speech. However, some patients can communicate from the right hemisphere by writing, for example, or by arranging the letters of Scrabble. A young patient in a study was asked what job he wanted in the future. His left hemisphere chose office work creating technical drawings. The right hemisphere, however, arranges the letters to spell “car driver.” Split-brain patients also report “alien hand syndrome,” in which their hands are thought to be moving of their own volition. These observations show that two separate conscious “persons” can coexist in one brain and may have conflicting goals. However, in Severance, both innie and outie have access to speech. This is one indicator that the fictional “disconnection procedure” must involve a more complex dissection of brain tissue. number of difficulties after pineal gland tumor. One such difficulty is the rare amnesia. This means that Neil cannot remember the events of his day or report what he learned at school. He also could not read, although he could write, and he could not name objects, although he could draw. The researcher became interested in how he was able to complete his schoolwork despite having no memory of what he learned. She asked about the novel she studied at school, Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee. In conversation, Neil can’t remember anything about the book – not even the title. But when researchers asked Neil to write down everything he could remember about the book, he wrote “Bloodshot Geranium windows Cider with Rosie Dranium smells of damp pepper. [sic] and mushroom growth” – all words connected with the novel. Since Neil could not read, he had to ask the researcher: “What did I write?”
