Dr. Vijay Agarwal is a neurosurgeon at the Montefiore Einstein Medical Center. Some years ago he received a curious call from a TV producer wanting his take on the concept for a new show.
"It was just a thought at that stage—you know, "We wanna develop a procedure that implants a chip that separates your work life from your social life, from your everyday life," Agarwal says. "And we were off to the races. I thought it was a very cool concept, and I think I just directly went into how that could be a reality. You know, one of the things that Ben Stiller was really strict on was that he wanted this to be as believable as possible."
Agarwal became Severance's science consultant to help make the "severance" procedure believable. He even had a cameo as the surgeon who implanted Helly. Scientific American spoke to him about the experience:
And so when I started, it really was just a concept: "How do we develop the severance procedure? How do we 'sever' people?" Then we sort of developed the science, and I remember very—in the early days of the show sitting at a, you know, a big conference table with Ben and Dan [Erickson] and a lot of the producers, and we just had a whiteboard in it, and we would just spitball concepts until we found one that was, you know, really believable and the one that people liked and the one that Ben thought would fit with his vision.
…We really implant in an area that is able to process memories but, interestingly, associates those memories with emotion. It's the amygdala and hippocampus, so those sort of middle part of the structures, on the left side of the brain, which is the dominant side of the brain for most people. So what a great area to stimulate to really facilitate this ability to separate our "innies" from our "outies": number one, the ability to process memories, but then, number two, the ability to, to associate those memories with emotion. So that was a perfect place to do it. And then, actually, the procedure was very realistic. So how we put the hole in the skull, the needle with which we use to implant the chip, those are things that we use every day in neurosurgery and neuroscience currently.
Previously:
• Here is eight hours of Severance music to refine to
• Severance-style keycaps fit for some macrodata refinement
• Take a crack at Severance's macrodata refinement
• You may now read Severance's self-help book, 'The You You Are'
