Review: Do I Know You? by Saide Dingfelder

Title: Do I Know You?: A Faceblind Reporter's Journey in the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination

Author: Sadie Dingfelder

Year published: 2024

Category: Adult nonfiction (memoir)

Pages: 304 pages

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (MA, CA, WV, FL)

Summary: 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 (face blindness), 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.

Review: This is the first book I read on my new Kindle! It is such an interesting book and an easy read without too much heavy science on a topic that could have been dry. The author does a great job of relating the scientific information at a layperson's level and explaining how it impacts her life.

Dingfelder is very good at describing what each of her syndromes (?) are, how they affect her life, and how she has compensated over the years. What's amazing is how much we all alter our actions to make up for issues we have and we don't even realize we're doing it.

Dingfelder's journey of discovery is amazing. She thought she might have face blindness, but to discover how she worked around it and the other three things she is must have been astonishing. As she points out, she just assumed that's how everyone is. For example, she thought people who had really good memories or who talked about visualizing things were making it up. No, we're not. As a science journalist, having access to the medical community really gave her the advantage to participate in studies, learn about herself, and write this fascinating book. Never again will I take for granted that I am not face blind, have a mind's eye, see in 3D (who knew you could train your eyes!), and that I can retain (most of) memories.

Challenges for which this counts: