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.

Sadie Dingfelder is a freelance science writer, a faceblind reporter and an amnesiac memoirist. You can read her work in National Geographic, the Washington Post and the Monitor on Psychology, where she covered psychology and neuroscience for almost a decade.

Pat Rumbaugh with an M.A. in Sports Psychology taught physical education and coached children’s sports for 30 years. From this experience she learned that everyone could benefit from unstructured play.  In her new identity as The Play Lady she has conducted over 150 play events since founding a play committee in 2009.  The play committee led to the development of the non-profit Let’s Play America (http://www.letsplayamerica.org/) that targets people of all ages; abilities and backgrounds with play days, streets closed to play and other play events.

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