Short Wave - Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

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 [e-mail]. 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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, shortwavers, producer Rachel Carlson here. Before we start, you should know this episode contains Severn Season 2 spoilers. All right, we warned you. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. So every morning, I try to wake up around 5.45 a.m. ish. I almost always hit the snooze once. Okay, fine. Twice.

and an hour later I'm walking into the office. I say hi to our editor Rebecca. Hello. But what if that me walking into NPR wasn't really me. She was me. I was her. But these two versions of myself were completely separate. What if we had the ultimate work-life balance?

Number one, can you do this scientifically? I think resoundingly, the answer is yes. And then number two, I think is a bigger question is, should we be doing these things? 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 Agarwalm. 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. Their memories are divided between work experiences where they're known as their inies 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. Vajay says the show's creator, Dan Erickson, and the executive producers, including

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. 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? 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 is.

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, 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. Right. What are some of the ethical considerations of things like neurotechnology. 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 just 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? Yeah, I mean, I feel like the episode focused on Mark's wife, Gemma, this season, and episode seven really gets into the potential for abuse. So maybe we can talk a little bit more about that and how you think the show deals with it.

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. 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? Yeah. 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 an sort of abnormal functioning of the release of these neurotransmitters. And your brain is not firing appropriately.

So if we just forget the memory, do we forget sort of the emotions that came from that memory? Yeah, I mean, Vijay, let's talk. about that more. I feel like throughout the show, characters have these moments where fragments of trauma break across the severed barrier of their brains, if you want to call it that. You can see it through Gemma's experiences in all those different rooms or even with Irving's drawings. Yeah, I think that's a perfect way to summarize it. So you can forget a memory, but it's a much bigger task to forget the trauma. Wow. Yeah. So one of the big fan theories right now is about transferring consciousness, specifically that Keir and maybe other Egan's could be brought back

somehow by transferring his consciousness into a new body. And maybe that's what all the tests are for. So I know you can't give us any spoilers, but how would you go about advising a show on consciousness? 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 are the season goes is is pretty unbelievable. It's going to it's going to blow your mind, no pun intended. 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. So you're born a certain way, but the majority of the majority of it's, 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 Audi to an any, the majority of the characters in the show, their personalities are maintained from their Audi to an Idy. 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

of Gemma dying. And it goes into this very charming, charismatic sort of guy. You see a lot of those personalities maintained in the iny 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. to medicine journeys, I think to confront, directly confront the trauma. Yeah.

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. 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 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 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, um, 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. I cannot wait to talk to you after the last episode. I produced this episode, and it was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones, check the facts. The audio engineers were Quasi Lee, Gilly Moon, and Harrison Paul. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is the senior vice president of podcasting strategy.

I'm Rachel Carlson. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. You even have a cameo in the show, right? Is it in season one? Yeah. 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. I mean, I've been really training for that role in my whole life. Method acting.