A Faceblind Reporter's Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination
April 8, 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.
May 15, 2024
Most people know that feeling of dismay that comes from forgetting a name or failing to recognize an acquaintance. Dingfelder is very familiar with this sensation; she lives with a neurological condition called prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. In this deep dive into the phenomenon, she shares her dawning recognition and the extensive testing she underwent with honesty, humor, and a contagious sense of awe over how diverse brains collect and process stimuli. Her voyage of discovery wanders through university and hospital lab visits, chat rooms and support groups, memories and anecdotes seen through fresh perspectives, and profiles of neurodivergent individuals who experience the world in all kinds of different ways. Referring to the realization of her diagnosis as a midlife crisis, the author emerges with new insights and increased tolerance plus an appreciation for all those who have managed to adapt, survive, and thrive in societies intended for standardized norms. She ends with helpful hints for recognizing prosopagnosia in kids and avoiding becoming obsessed with the condition once identified. An insightful, firsthand account.
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June 1, 2024
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.
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