Publishers Weekly
04/08/2024
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. Agent: Dara Kaye, WME. (June)
From the Publisher
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
Kirkus Reviews
2024-04-24
A spry memoir of life in a whirlwind of neurodiversity.
“I’m about as good at face recognition as Elon Musk is at branding,” writes freelance science journalist Dingfelder. Diagnosed with prosopagnosia, or faceblindness, she explores the many different ways in which minds work. Along with amblyopia, she also has stereoblindness, the inability of the eyes to work together, making it “hard to catch a ball, walk on uneven ground, or merge your car onto a highway.” (She does not drive.) Thus, as she notes in her lively discussion, “we neurodivergent people” often bear multiple labels. For example, a significant percentage of autistic people are faceblind and have ADHD. Dingfelder explores how the brain sorts things such as the faces of others into a vast database for retrieval, with memories processed in areas close to the eyes and then transferred to the occipital lobe at the back of the brain, only to come back into the front of the brain as visual information when needed. Given the billions of neurons in the brain and the many possibilities for differential wiring, so to speak, it’s small wonder that memory can be so various: Two people looking at the same thing may see something entirely different. Oddly enough, as Dingfelder notes, the brain stores facial information by splitting an image between its two hemispheres, reassembling it in a small area of the brain just above the ear. “That seems like a really convoluted way to do things,” she remarked to a researcher, who replied, quite rightly, “Brains are weird.” So they are, and Dingfelder’s accessible examination of their weirdness does much to make readers appreciate how difficult it is to understand what’s going on in the minds of other people.
A lucid explanation of how we experience the world and each other.
