SELF: From One to Many and Back to None

Nešić, Janko (2024) SELF: From One to Many and Back to None. Institut društvenih nauka, Beograd. ISBN 978-86-7093-274-6

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Abstract

I had my first electroencephalogram done when I was eight years old. This uncomfortable ritual involved scrubbing the scalp with alcohol at specific points and attaching electrodes to those points to record the brain activity. After the preparation, the machine started buzzing, an endless sheet of paper was fed in, and the inked waveform patterns emerged. A cryptic chronicle of what I was thinking and feeling, of Me, being written in real-time for everyone to see. Could the doctors observe what I was thinking about them and their tedious procedure? Well, even at that age, I did know that they could not see my thoughts, though they could observe if I was drowsing off, that is, if I was not doing what they had instructed me to do, and this made me anxious and scared. Afterwards, looking at this thick book of wavy etchings, which depicted only half an hour of my conscious life, I was not able to connect it with myself; how was this about Me? What did these waves on paper say about me and my experiences? The disconnection between what is inside and what outside, the first and third-person perspectives, still haunts me today as it did when I was a child, although I did not refer to it as such.

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