The Real Cognitive Neuroscience Behind 'Severance'

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Severance, which imagines a world where a person's work and personal lives are surgically separated, returns Friday for its long-awaited second season. While the concept of this gripping piece of science fiction is far-fetched, it touches on a question neuroscience has been trying to answer for decades: Can a person's mind really be split in two? Remarkably, "split-brain" patients have existed since the 1940s. To control epilepsy symptoms, these patients underwent a surgery to separate the left and right hemispheres.