If you somehow haven’t got around to watching it yet, you may not know that Severance, an Apple TV+ original is a dystopian TV series which imagines a world where a person’s work and personal lives are surgically separated.
While this premise may seem a little far-fetched, on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the first season of Severance has an approval rating of 97% and the second season sits at a very impressive 96% approval rating.
Perhaps the reason that it is resonating with audiences and critics alike is that actually, it’s not as far-fetched as you may think...
“Split-brain” surgery has been around since the 1940s
This surgery, also known as ‘Corpus callosotomy’ was initially introduced in the 1940s to treat people with epilepsy and try to minimise the impact of seizures on patients.
Great Ormond Street Hospital explains the procedure, saying: “A corpus callosotomy is an operation which divides the corpus callosum. This is the main fibre bundle that connects the right and left sides of the brain to each other.
“In the normal brain, electrical activity flows from one side to the other. In children with epilepsy, abnormal electrical activity can also travel across this connection.
“Dividing all or part of the corpus callosum reduces this abnormal flow from one side of the brain to the other, and so can help children with certain kinds of epilepsy.”
Later, research conducted over a 50 year period found that the separated hemispheres of split-brain patients could process information independently.
Writing for The Conversation, a lecturer and PHD candidate from London South Bank University say: “This raises the uncomfortable possibility that the procedure creates two separate minds living in one brain.”
In Severance, the characters have ‘innie’ and ‘outie’ brains. The innie is dedicated to their consciousness during work while the outie is their life outside of work.
There is evidence that there is a similar conflict in patients that have undergone Corpus callosotomy surgery, too.
The London South Bank University experts went on to say: “When speaking with split-brain patients, you are usually communicating with the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls speech. However, some patients can communicate from their right hemisphere by writing, for example, or arranging Scrabble letters.”
In one example, a patient was asked what he would like to do for a career in the future. His left hemisphere chose an office job making technical drawings. His right hemisphere, however, arranged letters to spell “automobile racer”.
Of course, the show takes a little creative license and the characters aren’t neatly “split”, but it is an interesting exploration of how complex our brains are.
Severance season two is on Apple TV+ now.