Severance versus Science: The Neuroscience of Split-Brain Syndrome

Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:

If the world of Severance was real, your “innie” would be reading this article at work, oblivious to the fact that your “outie” intends to spend the evening scouring the internet for these very answers. While the Severance procedure—surgical implantation of a chip into the brain to create separate conscious agents with access to separate streams of memory and experience—is purely fictional at present, another brain-splitting surgical procedure, called a corpus callosotomy, is entirely real and has been in use since the 1940s. Instead of separating work life and personal life, this procedure separates the right and left hemispheres of the brain by severing the major line of communication between them, a thick bundle of nerves called the corpus callosum.1 This surgery was used to treat severe and refractory epilepsy; in many patients, it helped control seizures by preventing aberrant neural activity from spreading between the hemispheres.

More here.

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