The premise of Dan Erickson’s “Severance” Dan Erickson’s Science Fiction series is new and intriguing. The main characters in the show work for a mysterious company called Lumon who has perfected a new type of cerebral implant which offers its employees the perfect work / life balance. When Lumon employees set up an elevator to their office, a computer chip in their active brain and erases all their memories of the outside world. When they are at the office, they only know the office. Then, at 5 p.m. when they leave the building, the chip returns, restoring their memories of the outside world, but repressing all the memories of their working day.
Another wrinkle: Lumon is so enigmatic and secret that they do not only make their office employees know nothing about their outside me, or their “outings”. In order to maintain loyalty, the “innies” have told themselves fantastic stories about their “outings” which are certainly not true. What is LUMON doing? Why do they play these strange memory games with their employees? The mysteries of the “dryer” are vast and deep, and were explored through the two existing seasons of the show.
The questions are instantly enticing, and the “Séèvée” has become the most watched show in the story of Apple TV + because of its premise and its surreal mysteries (why does Lumon raise goats?). Another question also arises: is it even possible? Is there a way to “deactivate” memories in a human brain that does not imply trauma of blunt force? Is there a way to subsume a person’s personality and replace them with a tabula rasa, only to restore this personality later?
The people of the conversation examined it a little.
Can two signs of memories exist in the same brain?
The article of conversation stressed that a certain type of epilepsy surgery, launched in the 1940s, had literally cut literally the left and right brain of a patient in small ties. After surgery, the halves of the separate brain from the patients were then able to process information regardless of each other. This did not mean that patients necessarily developed two distinct personalities with two distinct memory sets, but that implied that such a thing could be possible. Indeed, certain studies on the phenomenon of the “divided brain” began to occur in the 1970s on people who returned between two sets of memories. Of course, these studies examined what happened when the two contradictory halves of a divided brain patient were active at the same time. A “half” would respond with the speech, while the other would respond in writing, and the answers were different.
The article of the conversation goes deep in specific case studies, and the details are fascinating, but this is not quite what we are witnessing “repair”. In real life, patients in the split brain can remember certain things when they read and write, but other things when they speak. The left brain does not know what the right hand does, so to speak.
Instead, the “Severance” procedure could exploit the hippocampus of the brain to artificially cause a split brain effect, but this time with all the reading and writing skills left intact in the two halves of the brain. As we all remember of secondary biology, the hippocampus is part of the brain that divides its memories of the day into easily included “episodes”. Quibis, if you want. We can forget about Quibi’s small details in Quibi, but you always remember the whole arc of your day.
The principle of the Quibi brain
When you enter a new room, a new quibi begins and your brain “forgets” what happened in the previous episode because it records a new one. The rooted brain of “Severance” can very well prolong this oblivion, allowing an employee of Lumon to forget everything about what preceded the moment when they entered the elevator. The fantastic element of “Severance” tokens is that they also seem to work in the other direction, erasing the working day when you leave the office … then restaurant the first set of memories. The interaction in the hippocampus does not work this way, and the “cut” part of the brain could not be “cut back”, so to speak. Once you look at a quibi, it’s permanent.
In addition, on the “dismissal”, the “innies” have new sets of memories and have acquired their own skills. The main characters (played by Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry and John Turturro) work in the “Macrodata refinement” department, a skill that they do not know in their outside life. They know everything about the rituals and the story of Lumon inside. The hippocampus can reset each time you enter a room, but the skills acquired and the longer term memories would remain. The “Sevence” brain shavings clearly do something much more than dividing the two halves of the brain.
Furthermore, it is established throughout the “semets” that the brain shavings do not undergo walking in the doors or being in the offices of Lumon. Lumon managers actually have the capacity to turn the tokens over a whim, allowing the “innies” to walk outside and vice versa. So it has a lot more than quibi-ingi the brain. The chips turn between two sets of memories which are alternately repressed. Because the “innies” and the “outings” have different memories and skills, they have different personalities. And this, we must admit it, it is the fabric of science fiction.
But very good science fiction. Season 3 arrives. Get media threshing.
