Advertisement
The sci-fi series Severance, created by Dan Erickson, has a really unique and fascinating idea behind it. The story is set in a strange, slightly creepy world where people work for a mysterious company called Lumon. Lumon has come up with a new kind of brain chip that gives its workers the ultimate work/life balance, but in a way that’s pretty disturbing.
Here’s how it works: When Lumon employees get into the elevator at work, a chip in their brain activates. This chip wipes out all their personal memories, they forget who they are outside the office. While they’re at work, they only know their job, their co-workers, and the tasks they have to do. Then, when the workday ends and they leave the building, the chip flips again, and their normal memories return, but now they forget everything that happened at work.
So, it’s like they have two separate selves living in the same body:
-
The “innie” (work version) only knows the office.
-
The “outie” (outside version) lives their normal life but has no clue what they actually do at work.
To make things even weirder, the company doesn’t let the “innies” know anything about their real-life selves. In fact, they feed them fake stories about who they are outside. It’s all done to keep them loyal and obedient. But naturally, this raises a lot of questions: Why is Lumon doing this? What are they hiding? And why are there goats being raised in the office?!
The show dives deep into these odd mysteries over two seasons, which is probably why it’s become the most-watched series on Apple TV+. Viewers are hooked by the creepy atmosphere, surreal storytelling, and all the unanswered questions.
One of the biggest things people wonder is: Could this actually happen in real life? Is it really possible to split someone’s brain so cleanly, like flipping a switch to erase and restore entire chunks of memory, without causing damage? Could a person’s whole personality be turned off and swapped out for a blank slate, then turned back on later?
The science behind that idea is still a big mystery too.
Severance talks about the existence of two sets of memories in the same brain
An article on The Conversation explained that a type of brain surgery for epilepsy, which started back in the 1940s, involved doctors actually cutting the brain in half. Not the whole head, just the connection between the left and right sides of the brain. This surgery was done to stop serious seizures from spreading across the brain.
After the surgery, something very strange happened: the two halves of the brain could still think on their own, but now they couldn’t easily “talk” to each other anymore. It didn’t mean people suddenly had two full personalities or two completely different sets of memories, but it suggested that such a thing could be possible.
In the 1970s, scientists started doing experiments on these “split-brain” patients. They found something wild: when both brain halves were active at the same time, they could respond differently. For example, one side of the brain (usually the left) could speak and say one thing, while the other side (the right) could write down a completely different answer, as if there were two opinions inside one head.
The article goes into detail about real patients like this, and it’s really interesting. But what happens in Severance is still a bit different.
In real life, these split-brain people could remember different things depending on how they accessed the memory, like remembering one thing when reading or writing, and another when speaking. It’s like their left brain didn’t always know what their right brain was up to, literally.
Now, Severance takes that idea and imagines a future where a company (Lumon) uses a brain chip to create that kind of split on purpose, but way more precisely. The show suggests they might be messing with a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is the area that stores and organises your memories.
Think of the hippocampus as your brain’s memory editor. It breaks your day into little “episodes,” kind of like a series of short videos or chapters. You might forget what you had for lunch three days ago (one “episode”), but you still remember the bigger story of what happened that week.
The idea is that Lumon might be using this “episodic memory” system to keep work memories completely separated from personal memories, so your brain feels like it’s watching two totally different shows and can’t flip between channels.
Severance’s ‘The Quibi brain’ principle
Imagine your brain works like a streaming app that plays short videos, like little episodes of your day. Every time you enter a new room or start a new task, your brain starts recording a new “episode”. The one you were watching before fades a bit into the background, and now you’re focused on what’s happening right now. That’s kind of how the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain, works. It organizes your day into little memory chunks.
Now, in Severance, the fictional company Lumon takes this idea and turns it into something wild. They’ve created brain chips that don’t just blur the last memory, they completely erase it the second you step into the office elevator. It’s like your brain forgets everything about your personal life the moment you walk into work. And when the workday ends and you leave, it happens again, the chip erases your work memories and brings back your personal ones.
This kind of memory swapping doesn’t actually happen in real life. In reality, once your brain starts “watching” a memory episode, it’s recorded and you can’t just delete it or replace it. That’s where Severance steps fully into the sci-fi zone.
The show goes even further. The “work version” of a person (called the “innie”) develops its own memories, personality, and even job skills that the outside version (the “outie”) doesn’t know about. For example, in the show, the main characters work in a mysterious office doing something called “macrodata refinement,” a job they’re totally skilled at only inside. Outside of work, they have no idea what that job even is.
Normally, your brain keeps long-term skills like reading, typing, or riding a bike stored, even if you walk into a new room. But in Severance, the chips are doing way more than just starting a new “episode” of memory. They’re creating two completely separate identities that take turns depending on whether the chip is switched on or off.
And it gets even creepier, the chip doesn’t always need an elevator or door to switch. Managers at Lumon can manually flip the chip on or off, which means an “innie” can be suddenly activated outside the office too. So, these chips aren’t just reacting to where you are. They’re like remote controls for your personality and memories.
In the end, what Severance shows us, two people living in the same body, switching back and forth without knowing each other, goes way beyond real science. It’s pure science fiction, but it’s built on real ideas about how memory and the brain work, just taken to the extreme.