DO I KNOW YOU?

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.