Do I Know You?
A Faceblind Reporter's Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 25, 2024
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- $15.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning science writer discovers she’s faceblind and investigates the neuroscience of sight, memory, and imagination—while solving some long-running mysteries about her own life.
Science writer Sadie Dingfelder has always known that she’s a little quirky. But while she’s made some strange mistakes over the years, it’s not until she accosts a stranger in a grocery store (whom she thinks is her husband) that she realizes something is amiss.
With a mixture of curiosity and dread, Dingfelder starts contacting neuroscientists and lands herself in scores of studies. In the course of her nerdy midlife crisis, she discovers that she is emphatically not neurotypical. She has prosopagnosia (faceblindness), stereoblindness, aphantasia (an inability to create mental imagery), and a condition called severely deficient autobiographical memory.
As Dingfelder begins to see herself more clearly, she discovers a vast well of hidden neurodiversity in the world at large. There are so many different flavors of human consciousness, and most of us just assume that ours is the norm. Can you visualize? Do you have an inner monologue? Are you always 100 percent sure whether you know someone or not? If you can perform any of these mental feats, you may be surprised to learn that many people—including Dingfelder—can’t.
A lively blend of personal narrative and popular science, Do I Know You? is the story of one unusual mind’s attempt to understand itself—and a fascinating exploration of the remarkable breadth of human experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science journalist Dingfelder debuts with a piquant memoir about her quest to understand her prosopagnosia, or face blindness. She had long known she had difficulty remembering faces, but didn't believe her deficits were severe until her 40s, when she started to reflect on some of the strange scrapes she'd gotten into (for instance, she once teased a stranger for his selections at the grocery store thinking the stranger was her husband). An online facial recognition test revealed she performed as well as "people who have been literally shot through the head," prompting Dingfelder to participate in a series of formal perceptual and MRI tests to better understand her condition. They revealed she also couldn't see depth or visualize images in her mind's eye and had difficulty retaining detailed memories of past events. Dingfelder's account of undergoing facial recognition training and learning to drive without depth perception benefits from her position as both a research subject with firsthand insight into living with neurodivergence and a scientific journalist capable of discussing the underlying neuroscience in accessible language. The zippy prose and humor will keep readers turning pages (after a radiologist compliments Dingfelder on how still she remained during an MRI, she writes, "There are many things I suck at, but I was born to play dead"). Readers will be enlightened and charmed in equal measure.
