“We have already contrasted two ways of thinking about sociality in social neuroscience: On the one hand, we find the impoverished conception of sociality that can be found in most research that utilizes brain imaging in laboratory settings- where ‘social’ seems to refer to sequential transactions between isolated individuals or simulations of such transactions in scanners. On the other, we encounter the more subtle arguments of those who seek to understand sociality in terms of the multiple networks of collective association that characterize human existence, in families, groups, villages, towns, nations, and beyond, and the neurobiological consequences of isolation for humans evolved to live in such ecological settings.” (Neuro, 231)

When it all boils down, how will they study me?

Will they cite past knowledge and patterns

Or consider all of me engulfed in everything?

Everything I had done and who I was

Alongside who I was raised by where I come from

Sometimes it seems a conundrum

To study based on isolation

When really there’s always an influence

That seems to find its way into equations

And can a brain scan equate

To what my brain can’t communicate

But my spirit and my mouth can

Consciousness is an outland

Somewhere far off we can’t find

Where we are alive, reside, and decide

Not constricted to the real time

In the deepest recesses of our mind

So study me as you like

With scanners and alike

Or the patterns of those I am like

You will find everything except

My mind within the light.

“Many from the social and human sciences regard this neurobiologization of the self as the most challenging feature of contemporary neuroscience. It seems to threaten the very conception of the human being that lies at the heart of their work: the idea that personhood is a matter of internal mental states, consciousness, intention, beliefs, and the like, existing in a uniquely human psychological realm of mind, embodied in a self-conscious subjectivity, and created in a world of meaning, culture, and history.” (Neuro, 201)

Where is my I?

Who is my self, WHAT is my self. Is there any self to begin with?

Am I just a biological machine?

And are my thoughts just left over steam from the working machine?

I don’t know.

My I is a combination of many things.

Sometimes I feel as though my I is more metaphorical than literal

I can play with my I through music.

I can become whatever I want I to be.

I can become animate or inanimate

Feminine or masculine

Black or white

Machine or human

So what is my self?

To me, myself, my physical self,

It doesn’t matter

Because through music I can expand and extend my self to be anything I want.