#so performing a task their outie is familiar w while evoking a strong emotional trigger from the innie is like.

[dykesynthezoid]

I love the theories that Irv has been able to “naturally reintegrate” to a degree, and tbh I don’t think it would be happening just bc of sleep

We can deduce that the severance procedure preserves the outie’s procedural memory, emotional conditioning, and non-autobiographical semantic memory. The innies can remember how to do procedural tasks like driving a car, they tend to have similar baseline emotional attitudes, negative emotions from their outies can carry over, and they can recall objective information about the world. It’s only autobiographical information and episodic memory that the innie is cut off from.

(Interestingly, the outies are, comparatively, cut off from more types of memory than their innies are. The outies don’t appear to be able to access semantic information or procedural memory from their innies; which makes sense, because otherwise they’d know way too much about what Lumon was up to).

We see in early season 2 that innie Irving has leaned into his existing procedural memory for artistic expression. The combination of drawing (his outie’s procedural memory) and the subject being Burt (an explicit visual memory and emotional trigger only innie Irving has access to) is essentially combining memory and brain functions that originate from both the outie and innie. Pairing them together strengthens the possibility for Irving’s two separate brain patterns to begin to overlap and coalesce.

The questions Reghabi asks Mark while reintegrating him point to this canonically being a relevant part of the reintegration process. She switches between questions about autobiographical information (what color were your mother’s eyes? an explicit episodic memory) to objective semantic memory (name a dam, what does MDR stand for) emotional conditioning (what is something for which you feel shame) and back again.