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An award-winning science writer discovers she has prosopagnosia (face blindness) and aphantasia (the inability to visualize) 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.

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“Sadie Dingfelder has opened a new window into human neurological diversity, or neurodiversity. She learns about neurodiversity when she discovers she is faceblind. She can see people just fine, but she can’t recognize them. That’s been a problem all her life, and when she is presented with a medical diagnosis—prosopagnosia—she embarks on a voyage of self-discovery that leads her to discover the huge spectrum of human visual processing. The realization that some people see a flat world while others are menaced by three-dimensional objects is stunning. But it doesn’t end there. Digging deeper, she follows psychologists who are unraveling how we think about what we see and how our imaginations and memories are built. It’s a fascinating story that will make you rethink how you see the world.”
John Elder Robison, author of Look Me in the Eye
“It is rare to find a book that makes you laugh out loud while teaching you a great deal of brain science, but Do I Know You? does just that. As Sadie Dingfelder explores her own quirky way of experiencing the world, we all discover the many ways we see, remember, and imagine.”
Susan R. Barry, author of Fixing My Gaze
“Discover Sadie Dingfelder’s World That Lacks Visual Memories. It provides great insight to learn that your thought processes may be totally different from how another person's thought processes work.”
Temple Grandin, author of Visual Thinking
“A personal, vulnerable portrait of late-realized neurodivergence, filled with hard-won self-knowledge and plenty of humor.”
Devon Price, author of Unmasking Autism
“Sadie Dingfelder was born funny, in both senses of the word.”
Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author of Lessons From Lucy
“When a skilled science writer starts to wonder about her own mental landscape and not that of others, a rare and insightful story unfolds. Dingfelder gives us a front row seat to her subjective reality as understood by modern day psychological and brain sciences. This book is chock full of dazzling insights and told with warmth and humor.”
Michael S. Gazzaniga, author of The Consciousness Instinct
“What if you discovered that the ‘quirky’ personality your friends know you for is, instead, sign of several unusual neurodevelopmental features? In Do I Know You? Dingfelder deep-dives into her own psychological profile—but what is really on display is her infectious curiosity and enthusiasm. She delivers a tour de force of that most storied scientific approach: experimenting on yourself.”
Alexandra Horowitz, author of Inside of a Dog
“Sadie Dingfelder’s Do I Know You? is an ode to neurodiversity that is as hilarious as it is enlightening. Sadie is an heir to Mary Roach with her talent for making science engaging, strange and deeply funny. What a delight!”
Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire
"A hilarious and riveting journey into the fabric of what it means to see, remember, and connect."
David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Stanford, bestselling author of Incognito and Livewired
“A coming-out story about learning you are part of a community, that you deserve accommodation, that you can practice radical self-love.”
Brandy Schillace, The Wall Street Journal
“Funny, poignant, philosophical and almost euphoric. The memoir is a”: beautiful reminder that our inner lives are not uniform. None of us can possibly know what it feels like to be someone else, but as Dingfelder shows, it’s fun to try.”
Laura Sanders, Science News

On Sale: Jun 25, 2024
Page Count: 304 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN-13: 9780316545433