Episode 72 - Do I Know You? - A Conversation with author Sadie Dingfelder

Episode 72 of Late To The Party is live, and today we’re going full neuro‑nerd with the incredible Sadie Dingfelder.  
Sadie is a science reporter who discovered she has face blindness, aphantasia, and a handful of other brain quirks and then turned that whole journey into a hilarious, insightful book called Do I Know You?
We talk perception, identity, weird brain settings, and what it’s like to realise your mind has been running a completely different operating system this whole time.
It’s chaotic, curious, and very, very us.

You can find Sadie here -

Website 

Book Publisher page

Twitter 

Instagram 

Washington Post Author Page

Goodreads

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

It's been so long between these podcasts. I feel like I need to like turn this into some sort of phone call apology. I look oh I'm so sorry. I've just been so busy lately. Look, it's not you. It's it's it's it's totally me. You know, I've had the event, I've I've started a new role at work, and you know, I've just I I've been trying to sp spend some time with me. Do you know what that means? Do you uh do you understand how the how that feels? I don't mean I love I love spending time with you. We have great fun together. We really, really do. It's just that you know, sometimes I just need some some space, you know? And this has been one of those those little moments there. Look, it it it says nothing about you whatsoever. It's it's it's all it's all just me and my feelings and me wanting to to grow internally and to to to to to put to place my hands in the dirt and to smell the beautiful rain and I just wanted to do that uh alone for a while. So I'm sorry, and I promise, I promise. Never to go away for that long again. I really, really promise. Okay, that did that did that work for you. Sure, it's been a while, but it it's been busy. It's been busy. But anyway, let's move on because this is a fantastic talk I had. Oh my god. So today, this episode science, humor, and a brain that refuses to behave by the standard settings. My guest is going to be Sadie Dingfelder. She's a science reporter, author, and there's a brilliant mind behind Do I Know You? Which is her memoir, Meets Sort of Neuroscience, deep dive into face blindness, aphantasia, you know, the surprising ways our minds shape our lives. It's really, really good read. Sadie's work has appeared everywhere from National Geographic to the Washington Post. She has this incredible ability to make science and complex science feel like just human, funny, relatable. That's not an easy task to do. And you're just gonna love this conversation. So let's not waste any more time. My Patreon page is there if anyone feels like they uh would like to contribute to the monthly costs that that are involved in making making the podcast. They feel like buying me a lovely cup of tea, because that's essentially that's just about that much. It's not a lot, but it means a huge thing for me. It just means I get to cover the costs of of running this. So let's get on with this amazing chat with Sadie Dingfilder. Oh, and prepare yourself for the energy. We get stuck straight into it.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

Like, I mean, what is tell me more about Sadie the Cleaner?

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Okay, do you know John Farnum? Have you heard of John Farnum?

SPEAKER_02 3:15

No.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

He's he's probably one of our most famous singers, and he in the 80s he um he had an album which was just extraordinarily popular in Australia, and it just and his and it was incredible. And uh he got some success a little bit overseas with You're the Voice. Um the song You're the Voice, because there are a lot of other people sang that song. But Sadie the Cleaning Lady was when he was young. Um back in what I call the black and white days. I literally thought that the world was black and white. Because I'd watch TV shows that were black and white and assumed that the world, you know. So back in the black and white days, um, yeah, when he was young, he did this song, which is it's a it's a fun, silly song. So it's just Sadie the cleaning lady, you know, and have the lady doing the brushing and stuff. But it was a song that became something he hated in his later life because everyone would wouldn't treat him with any respect or seriousness.

SPEAKER_02 4:16

Oh, because it was like one of his early just silly songs, and everyone remembered it.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

It was a sell this album that he he'd made. It's incredible, it's a masterpiece of an album, it's beautiful. But yeah, they were trying to go to all these record companies and they were saying, What the Sadie guy? No, no, and so he really struggled, but then and and it took a few years of um popularity and feeling comfortable finally that he started to play it live. And people love the song, you know, absolutely love the song. It was a number one heat here.

SPEAKER_02 4:47

Yeah, wow, that's so cool. In the 80s.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Uh no, that would have been in the late 60s.

SPEAKER_02 4:54

Oh, okay. I'm totally gonna check it out because I've heard a lot of Sadie songs, but not that one. There's a murder ballad here in the Appalachians where Sadie gets murdered. There's a there's sexy Sadie, which is a Beatles song.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Sexy Sad, oh my god, yes.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Yeah, Sadie Sadie Married Lady is some sort of musical song, and and then of course Snoop Dogg says he used to know a dame named Sadie, and I don't know what he said after. Like it was his homeboy's lady. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Wow. Well, I've got uh Elton John, because I'm you know Daniel, and um I think there's a couple of others, but not not not that much. But see, my son Henry was named after uh one of those old murder ballads, uh, you know, Henry Lee. Oh, which wasn't really a murder that wasn't a murder ballad, though, Henry Lee. That was but it was an old folk, you know, appellation song.

SPEAKER_02 5:48

Oh, okay, that's cool.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Yeah. I I absolutely adore that music. I listen to a lot of it, and I've got um that box set of the Harry Smith anthology, and yeah, it's it's wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 5:59

I play fiddle.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

Oh, you do? Okay, wow. I got a banjo, but I'm not I don't play it that much. I need to I'd never have time to get back into practice with it.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

Yeah, it's still fine to play an instrument. I just love it.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Wow. Okay, so watch so the music you love is that sort of older folk you know what?

SPEAKER_02 6:18

Not really. I actually really love like Tame and Paula, like they're my favorite second favorite band, and my first favorite band is like Radio.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Um that's that's me too, yeah. Right?

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Yeah, so and I don't really listen to much Appalachian music, but I love playing it. That's sort of weird.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Okay. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

See, here I am all the way over here, and I'm listening to Yeah, you're listening to my music, and I'm listening to your guys.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

And now John Farnum, so now you're gonna have to explore that too.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

I had an amazing experience once where I was in Moscow, and um I went, I went with my friend like to a club that was like in a different club, so it was like a secret club. Oh, okay, yeah, it was, and it was a bluegrass band was playing, and every and singing Appalachian folk songs that I know how to play, like, but phonetically.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Oh, okay, that would be interesting.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

It was modeled, and so I joined them on stage and we did what song do we do? It was uh it was a song, a really popular song, Wagon Wheel.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Oh, Wagon Wheel. Not sure I know that one.

SPEAKER_02 7:30

You don't know that one? It's it's a great song. You should check it out. It's uh it's old Crow Medicine show, but it was like kind of written by Bob Dylan.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Oh, oh well I definitely know what they just don't remember that. I don't remember the lyrics and I don't remember names of songs necessarily.

SPEAKER_02 7:44

Me either. And when my band would play, I will look down at the like set list and I will see the name of the song and it will mean nothing to me. Like I'm like, I guess and but once you hear the first chord of the song, then I'm all set. But if I have to start the song, like it's pretty hard.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

It's embarrassing when I've written a song and I'm trying to remember what you know, I I forget all the lyrics. You know that that's not good.

SPEAKER_02 8:12

Do you have a good memory for the music though?

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Yeah, yeah. I can I can recall a song that I'd written when I was 13 or 14. Wow and sort of recall it's recall it back. It's just bizarre. Um, so for music and melody and things like that, absolutely. Um I've got it.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

I've got a great memory for music too, and for nothing else. Not nothing.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Nothing, yeah. Nothing else useful. That's what I often say. Nothing else useful. Yeah. Just pointless. Um oh look, I quickly wanted to say before we um went on. Believe, I don't ever start with introductions. I actually do the introductions um after you've gone. Um because it's it's boring, it's like a bio, you know, you know what you are. Um the the your email address has just been playing on my mind ever since I saw it. Because what do you think when you see it?

SPEAKER_02 9:01

So of course I think Sadie D, but other people think Sadied like it's a like it's a verb, like you've been sadied.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

Oh no, I think sedied.

SPEAKER_02 9:14

Fair enough. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

And then I started to, I thought, well, how should what would my email address be? And it would be dank.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

Dank.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

That's not a that's not a great introduction, is it?

SPEAKER_02 9:28

At some point I realized it wasn't translating, and so like my Instagram handle is like Sadie Ding, I think. And that's okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

Now I I've uh I've loved having this these back and forth having the email. Um it was fascinating because like uh the whole idea of um of face blindness, I I'm aware of face-blindness only in the the fact that there was a there's a sort of well-known um uh science uh Oliver Sachs. No, not Oliver Sachs. No, he's he's just a local guy. He's a local guy who's um who uh you know he's he's wonderful, he's a wonderful story storying storyteller for for science and concepts of science and um wears like the bright shirts, all that sort of stuff, you know. I'll my brain will have to remember because I've now I've said that, but I'll re I will remember. Future Dan, his name is Dr. Carl Krugelniki. Before the end. Um he's yeah, I discovered that he was as well. And as someone who's constantly having to deal with people, and I just wonder how in the world he does that. So I was trying to watch his face carefully because he was on one of these shows where they do a portrait, the portrait artist of the year. Um it's a it's it's a British thing that's come to Australia as well, and it's wonderful. But as he was coming to meet people, uh I he it's almost like a sort of uh an autistic thing, where for me I kind of just treat everyone the same because I'm not sure necessarily if I've met them before or not. And so it's just to pretend like we're old friends and you know what I mean. Yeah, um, and for him, you you could tell he's he's a little bit standoffish in some ways, and that the way he because he's like, I'm not gonna put myself in a position of of being embarrassed by like the fact that you don't know who I am. Um so uh yeah, I'm just I'm interested to know what that what what that's meant for you in in in your life and particularly. You've done similar things, haven't you?

SPEAKER_02 11:29

It's so interesting because I really do believe that there's like a bifurcation of face-by-night people where if you're already leaning towards being extremely extroverted, you're just gonna get pushed really into the extreme because your options are to treat everyone like a best, like they're your best friend, or everyone like they're a stranger, kind of. And um, and so when I was young, I actually treated everyone like a stranger. I was I didn't realize, well, and then I kind of had this major kind of turning point. You're a dad, right?

SPEAKER_03 12:00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

I bet it feels like your kids are never listening to you. So this is like a good story for all the dads out there because my dad told me something that completely transformed my life, and he had no idea until I wrote my book about it, which is that he said, I so I ran into this. I mean, apparently I I just like brushed off some girl who knew me in a grocery store, and my dad was my dad said, Why were you being rude to Susan? And I was like, I had no idea who that was. And he said, Well, if someone seems to know you, you just need to pretend like you know them. You don't you don't have to actually know anything about a person to have a great conversation, just ask them questions about themselves, and they will think you're the best conversationalist who's ever lived.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

That's and that's good, but for me, for someone who sort of struggles with body dysmorphia, um, that's not a great thing because I'm thinking, are they looking at me saying, what a strange looking person that is? You know, and so it could be completely different. Here I'm being very friendly to someone who thinks, you know, who's thinking negatively, you know.

SPEAKER_02 13:00

Yeah, I don't have that problem, luckily, because my dad also used to take, I love to sneak in places with my dad. We would go to this fancy resort um called the Don Cesar, and and we would go swim in their pool and like hang out by the beach all day. And because I'm I'm from Florida, and that's I feel like that's where I learned another basic life lesson, which is like no one's looking at you, and no one's thinking about you. Everyone's thinking about themselves, and look, unless you're super hot or something, no one's really or like extraordinarily like hunchback of Notre Dame, yeah, you're not gonna get noticed. And I think that what's funny about that is I believe that too much. Like I go through life assuming no one can see me, and I'll and people actually can see me.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

Yeah, yep. And people I am actually here, I'm taking up space.

SPEAKER_02 13:51

Right, right. But I really don't feel like I do, and I think the fact that I can't visualize is part of that story. But are do you have Ape Antasia too?

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Well, I I wouldn't say that um because I do recognize faces, but if it's out of context and I don't know that person very well, then I I will not be able to get my head around how I know them. If that makes sense. So I don't know, I don't know what that is, but it's just that out of context, I find it very hard to to notice people. I'm sure I know I walk past people and I'm supposed to have recognized them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

Well, you know what else is I'm curious if this is true for you, but there's some evidence that the the visual impression of people's face is like, is your visual memory good or not so good? Like, can you remember where you put your keys or um can you remember the layout of rooms?

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah, and I'm good with once I've gone one place on the in the car, I know I can go back there.

SPEAKER_02 14:51

That's interesting. Yeah, you know what I've learned, there's so many different ways to be face blind, right? So my brain is failing at the encoding stage, and your brain is it sounds like your brain is not failing at that, it's failing at the retrieval stage. And one thing that's really nuts about people like you is that if they um you often have a feeling of familiarity that's perfectly accurate, but you can't actually make the connection to an individual person.

SPEAKER_03 15:17

So anyway, it's fascinating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

I I in the book, and I look, oh my god, I just I wished I'd had more time to read more of the book because I'm loving it. I like I really am loving this book. It's just it's it's so much fun to read, and it's yeah, it's also making me do a lot of thinking. Um it's confusing me, which is fantastic, because it's making me because it's confusing me and then that I'm um having to ask questions of myself that I hadn't either thought to question or I don't have an answer for. We'll we'll get into that. We'll get into that. So Aphantasia, I think the way I I understood it, it's more like um being able to uh put an image in your head, like if you say think of an apple. Um I didn't realise until literally like maybe six months ago that I I don't do that.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

You know, you just think of the concept of an apple.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

The concept of an apple, and the same thing was happening when I went to see a psychologist and he was and I was saying I was um I wasn't sleeping well, I was getting up early, and he was saying what you can do is when you when you're not getting into that REM stuff part of sleep, imp image, like do an image of like a silver ball, you know, like a like a crystal ball or something like that. And I said, fantastic, thank you. And then I I you know I proceeded to fail at it every single time. Like, well, I it must mean that I'm just not able to focus, or you know, there was but I never put two and two together to think, oh, I just can't put an image that in my head. You know, but you know what the weird thing is, I've discovered this only this morning I can put an image in my head initially, and then it disappears, and it's never it never comes back.

SPEAKER_02 17:02

Ah, interesting.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

Yeah, it's it's it's a funny thing when you start to think about a concept um or something like this, an idea, then your brain's obviously working away in the background.

SPEAKER_04 17:13

Oh, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Try and make sense of it, you know. Uh when I went to London, um, at that stage I was a bit of a hippie, I loved Ganesha and things. So when I was one driving around London, I said I saw Ganesha everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Like, huh?

SPEAKER_01 17:25

But that's because I was just, you know, ready to see it.

SPEAKER_02 17:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

You know.

SPEAKER_02 17:33

Yeah, when I when I I didn't really know much about vision neuroscience and how vision works until I wrote this book. And it's wild to me how much like when you open your eyes, it feels like it's just ground truth. Like everything you see is just like you kind of assume it's like a camera and and you imagine a homunculus, like some little person in your head seeing, right? And then and you then you start to learn that like your brain, like your eye is just zigzagging all over scenes constantly. And you can only see clearly, like at the very cent in your very central vision, like if you look at a page of text and focus in on a few letters, have you you can only see the c you can only see clearly just like a two, three letters or something. But in our in our conscious experience, you're seeing perfectly clearly everywhere, you know? It's so wild.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

It's an incredible concept. And and again, um reading some book of you know a few years back, it never occurred to me that I was not looking out.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

Oh yeah, yeah. You feel like you're looking out of from your head, yeah.

unknown 18:39

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:40

And you know, for me, uh when I try to explain to people what it means to be stereobl, I'm like, I'm either looking out of my left eye or my right eye. And it's like, of course, that's not really true, but that's like kind of an easy way to explain it.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Right. Like my goodness me. It's just yeah, it's it's the most fascinating thing, but also uh it could be frustrating.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

But it would when for you, it's always been there. So for you, there's you know, it's it's it must be something where you're confused about why other people even bringing this up.

SPEAKER_02 19:13

With inter well, you know, it's I mean, yes and no. I mean, I just am not very reflective. So my entire life, I just assumed, you know, for instance, with A Fantasia, people would like I go to yoga class all the time, and they're like, shine your heart into the air or something, or just like imagine you're you've got a steering wheel. Like, and I would just I didn't understand the other people for other people that you could they can actually almost hallucinate on demand. It's it's insane. It's wild that people can do that. And it's also wild to me on a related note that people can do this mental time travel to moments from their past, because I would love to be able to do that. I mean, there's moments from my past I would love to revisit, right? But it doesn't actually, unfortunately, what makes me feel better about it, and I feel like I'm not really missing out, is that the most people can't like your brain is going to make you time travel to like the worst, most embarrassing moments of your past, not like the like hottest, sexiest times, you know.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

It's it is very strange. Um, you'd said in the book um that all it was talking about your book, saying some of the dialogue is based on taped conversations and uh uh the rest has been reconstructed. I I'm what what other taped conversations are you talking about?

SPEAKER_02 20:31

Well, you know, once I knew I was writing, I mean I was writing a memoir, so some a lot of it takes place in the dissonant past, or some of it does, bits and pieces. But once I knew I was writing, I just started videotaping and audio taping everything all the time, just in case, like, and and uh and so I had like a lot of recorded conversations. Oh, and also I have this long-running tendency when something interesting, usually funny, happens to me, I immediately tell the story to someone either in an email or as a voicemail, you know, and so I actually have like a a lot of logged examples of this because I hold on to them, and I had no idea that this was actually a compensatory mechanism to because I don't have a great autobiography. I have a severely deficient autobiographical memory. So, but I didn't even know that. I just knew that I I wanted to hold on to things, and that was the way to do it.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

Well, see, this is another thing that's that's I've had insight even as early as like this morning. Because I've written, I've been writing a diary for my kids since um well for basically 19 years, since just before my daughter was born. And it's a diary about about me, pretty much. Yeah, and it's as far as like average lengths, it's two novels long.

SPEAKER_03 21:51

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

And I don't remember anything, you know. But it's it's an extraordinary thing that I managed to write what I have. But when I'm reading back on it now with this this sort of new understanding, the things I'm talking about from memory are things that other people have told me. They necessarily they would have been things that people would I would have had either talked about it quite a lot over the years, or people have told me about it. But then I reframe it into something that I've remembered. But if I tried to go back and think of that time, it's it's it's like I said before, black and white. It's there's no colour to my descriptions.

SPEAKER_02 22:31

Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, and you don't have so you know what's crazy? Nor neurotypical people can sometimes recover new details that they didn't really remember before or they hadn't noticed before when they replay their old visual memory. And obviously, we know like memory is not a videotape. No, but but but what's wild is I really feel like the neurotypical world has over-emphasized this because it's a lot more like a videotape to them than it is to me, you know? It is, and there's a lot of contexts in which memory is like shockingly surprising. I did all this research. I did, I I participated in research um at Bay Crest.

SPEAKER_03 23:13

You said a lot of research.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

Oh, I am overrepresented in the Vision Science Theater. I'm gonna go to their conference in May and I'm gonna walk around their the like poster sessions and be like, okay, I was on that study, I was in that study. I'm like, oh, that whole dissertation is just about me. And yeah, and I'm gonna get they're just gonna block me at some point and be like, no one talked to Sadie, she'll do all your tests, but don't do that.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

That's so fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

Oh my god. So the memory is an interesting thing, isn't it? Because um every time you sort of recall a memory, you'll you're essentially rewriting it. And so that's the other thing for you. Okay, so if you have you had moments where you've gone thought about the past, but uh a memory that you haven't thought of before can come up, but it's one that hasn't been rewritten. Because I think I still think no matter what neurotype, like even with with me, there'll be very not not very often, it's very rare, but I will go, oh, oh, I just yeah, that that happened, you know.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's just interesting because like semantic memory is really good at recording certain information, and um episodic memory is really good at recording different kinds of information. So it's just like what kinds of so like storylines and themes, I'm great at remembering those sorts of things much better than neurotypical people, but like the the the like weather that day, the color of the sky, like all the texture of a of a experience are gone. All I have is the like the wireframe.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

Yeah. And do you think your writing has doesn't include sort of giving that painting a picture, a colorful picture of the moment?

SPEAKER_02 25:05

As a reporter, like when I go out on reporting errands, by the way, I just got an assignment for National Geographic and they're sending me to France. I am so excited. Yeah, yeah, I'm so excited. Um of course I won't know what anyone's saying, but I'll do my best. But I whenever I go on reporting errands like that, I I would really make a note to take a lot of pictures, video, and also just write down sensory details, like smells or like textures, things that so I work really hard to get those sensory details down on paper so I can like reconstruct them. But but if you looked at my whole if if you did like a content analysis of my memoir and also other people with SDM's memoirs, like Craig Venter, you will not get nearly as much, I think, beautiful description. But on the other hand, I don't like reading beautiful descriptions either. I skim over that shit. How about you?

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Oh yeah, that's it. It's like, oh, get it, whatever. You know? Just say it was hot. Mind you, there are writers that I uh adore. Future Dan Cormac McCarthy, the road. It was a bad, it was a it was a post-apocalyptic book. It was made into a film as well, where the dad and the child were crossing to try and find somewhere to s to survive. Desperately awful, terrible, you know. But his descriptions are um of like no no colour, of just of ash, of all these things were extraordinary, and I was so taken in by the way he was able to talk about something that's desolate, and there was really nothing to look at, and he was able to describe it in so many different ways. Future Dan here. I just want to read a quick quote from the road just to give an idea of what I'm talking about. His sense of being able to describe the environment around him when there is essentially no colour. It took two days to cross that ashen scab land, the road beyond fell, away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky, a single grey flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire. There, like the last host of Christendom. Which was quite fascinating, but again, it wasn't really necessarily the same we're talking about. It's not about um uh capturing like uh the moods. I'm not sure. It's a it's a really weird feeling to have where I'm like I have to go back and look at all these things and go, okay, I didn't really capture a moment here, did I?

SPEAKER_02 27:53

So you were yeah, so I was gonna ask, like, in your diary that you wrote, it's like probably very narrative, but it's not like what's it like?

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Yeah, it it is. I've got I've got it open on here. Okay, my first uh my first bunch of memories are of Morabach when I was in kindergarten. Uh I have virtually no memory of being inside the house. Philip, my best friend, and I would hang out on the street with other kids or go down to the oval and play on the play equipment or go to the creek and get wet. I have a memory of us doing this one day. We had this big bit of cardboard, and I think we have I think we were trying to float on it. I guess the time got away from us because when I got home my mum was furious. Uh, she called the police to look for me. This was unusual because back then it was okay to wander the streets without fear of harm. And so I'm talking about things like that. That's one of the memories that I was told by my mum.

SPEAKER_03 28:47

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

But if I try to remember back then, I think I've made up a like a ne a movie of me there.

SPEAKER_02 28:57

Can you actually picture it just a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 29:00

No, I think the picture I've I've constructed it. I've constructed it, it's it's me and him. Um, I can't picture really the details or anything like that, and a creek and cardboard. Um but I don't know if it's that creek, if it's that cardboard, if you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

Yeah, yeah. You know what's interesting is um the way your brain works, it's it's called sparse, sparse encoding. So it would it's when you say it was was it that cardboard, most people's brains would just have like a small cluster of neurons that represent all cardboard, basically. So it's like it's an amalgam of every piece of cardboard you've ever seen in your entire life from for most people. Though people with there's people who do have like that photographic memory where they do hold on to like the specifics of that piece of cardboard. And the poor these poor folks are their brains are so cluttered, um, they often sort of feel like they've lost sight of the bigger picture of their life story. Right. Oh, that's true.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Yeah, that's not yeah, that's not necessarily a good thing, is it?

SPEAKER_02 30:04

Yeah, it's I mean, it's most brains sort of strike a balance between getting the the big picture and the small picture, and then and people with um severely deficient autobiographical memory like me just really put all of our money on the big picture, and then people with HSAM, highly superior autobiographical memory, put all their money on the small details. And even in the names, you can tell that like as a culture, we value holding on to those little details.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Um, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 30:34

Yeah, but I don't think I mean, and the person who invented the name um severely deficient autobiographical memory, he actually had a better name idea that he ended up not using, which was nomothetic memory, like nomothetic. Yeah, which do you know that term?

SPEAKER_01 30:50

No, but it's great.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

Yeah, it just means it's just like um it just means like big picture thinkers, kind of right.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Okay, big picture thinkers, yeah. Well, that's that's interesting because I because I've always consider things like masking where you teach yourself to do something that that isn't going to that it's not normal for you to want to do. So masking that sort of stuff is something that I've developed as a skill set. It doesn't necessarily mean that's be me being naturally me.

SPEAKER_02 31:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

So I I when I was uh working, I would sometimes get on the train and I would start writing uh something where I just gave myself the challenge. You have to write something that's going on around you and it has to end when you get to your station.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

That's such a great writing exercise. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

Amazing, and it just made me think, yeah, I I'm I'm sort of unconsciously teaching myself to look at the detail that where I normally wouldn't. And so I had to look around and start to talk about what is the detail of what's going around me, you know.

SPEAKER_02 31:52

And you're encoding it in the way that your brain can hold on to it, which is through words, because you aren't going to be able to visually hold on to it.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Yeah, yeah. It's just it's a fascinating. I love I love coming into having these sort of insights, you know. You you I got a whole I've got a whole section of of quotes. Well, I think it's one quote, but it's just got a lot of questions in it. It says, Do you have an inner monologue? Do you hear it in your mind's ear? Is it in your own voice? Is it like eavesdropping on your own thoughts, or is it like a commentary on what you're doing? I I have no answer to that.

SPEAKER_02 32:28

Really?

SPEAKER_01 32:29

I don't I don't know how to answer that.

SPEAKER_02 32:32

You know, I mean, inner experience can be really hard to pin down, and we don't really have a great language for describing it. But like what how would you describe? Do you have an inner monologue at all?

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Um I I I guess I do. Um I I remember having you know having arguments post-argument with someone when I come up with better concepts and better arguments, you know. But I I must, yeah, I know sometimes I call myself a uh you know a dickhead if I've done something stupid or anything like that, you know, like oh you tweet, you idiot. I think I'd have to be it has things would have to be very silent for me to have that in a monologue. And I'd I I haven't thought to describe it or I'll make sense of what what it is because it's just what I do. So do you understand what I'm saying? Like I I would then have to think what other people do things differently, and then I'd have to have to sit there and be mindful of it for the next few days.

SPEAKER_02 33:31

Right. And you know, and the thing about introspection as a way of trying to understand your inner experience is that the obviously the the act of observation changes how you're you're in your experience. And so, but they there's a workaround, which I got to do with a different researcher, where you get you he you get like a little beeper and earplug, or like little earbuds, and it beeps like randomly throughout your day, and then you have to write down or do like a little message recording of the contents of your mind right before you heard the beep. And so the idea is to sort of catch yourself unawares and then write it down, and you sort of get more of a random sample.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Oh my god, that's amazing. That is so good.

SPEAKER_02 34:20

There's an app that he has an app that you can use. Um, I think it's a good idea. Oh, definitely can do it. It's fun, it's fun, and you know, so I went into this experiment. He asked me to predict what I think my inner life is like. Um, and I said, you know what? It's a probably a lot of emotions, like um, and I can't remember what else. And like lots of music. I always have a song stuck in my head. But yes, yeah, yeah. But in reality, though, most of the time, my mind is very blank. Like there's I'm just sensing, I'm just in the world, like feeling it, seeing it, whatever. And I'm not judging it at all.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

I literally deleted that line that I wrote on my notes. Like when you asked, well, most of the time it's my mind's just blank.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

Yes, oh my god, yes, yes, you're welcome. Welcome to the club. I wish we need a better game, just like no inner monologue. And it's really rude. People will say that we're NPCs. Have you heard of those non-player characters?

SPEAKER_00 35:18

Oh my god, yeah, NPCs, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02 35:22

So rude, so rude. Just because I don't know what I'm thinking doesn't mean I'm not thinking, it just means I don't know what it is. It's below my level of conscious awareness.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

Okay, so now I'm starting to come like well. My wife constantly asks me, so what are you what are you thinking? And I'm my answer was always nothing.

SPEAKER_02 35:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She probably thinks you're hiding something or lying.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

How do you feel? How do you feel about something? I don't know. Are you are you looking forward to the holiday? Yes.

SPEAKER_02 35:51

Okay, so that's a really interesting one because if you can't picture the past, you also have trouble. This is the theory, and this is my experience, imagining the future too. And so I'm pretty open-minded when I walk into new situations because I have no preconceived notion about what it would be because I don't even have the mental machinery to project myself into the future. So, again, like this, these are things that are very odd sounding to people, but it's kind of nice. Like, I think it would be really stressful to constantly be thinking about the past and the future. It allows you to actually maybe be more present. Though a lot of times, though, even when I am quite present, like I'm not I'm present, but like I'm present in my own brain. Like it's my whole brain is thinking shit, and there's actually no sensing going on at all.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Yeah, you've got melodies going all the time. I'm always making up little melodies, and you know, then I just go on, repeat with it and you know, that sort of stuff, or I whistle it, which drives my wife insane, who keeps telling me to shut up. But I can't. It's what I'm naturally doing, I'm naturally just producing you know, arrangements of notes all the time, and it's comfortable. Well, I I enjoy doing that, you know.

SPEAKER_02 37:02

Do you ever write songs about things you're doing in the house? Like doing the dishes.

SPEAKER_01 37:07

Oh my god, yes. My children all have theme songs.

SPEAKER_03 37:14

No way, I love that. Oh my god. Can you sing them for me?

SPEAKER_01 37:18

I know one of my sons is um, it's not it's not particularly, you know, clever.

SPEAKER_00 37:23

It's just Henry, oh Henry, how are you today? Henry, oh Henry, how are you today? Henry, oh Henry, how are you today? Oh Henry, oh Henry, oh Henry.

SPEAKER_02 37:40

I love that, and I also love that it's a waltz. Um they can sing it.

SPEAKER_01 37:52

Eloise, I've got one and my dogs all have one, and then I've got videos of me when they were babies of just singing a particular line or melodic line to them, you know.

SPEAKER_03 38:02

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

All the time. It's just yeah, it's filled with that sort of stuff. And my songs are almost always sort of autobiographical. They were my my therapy for when I was when I was younger, and I didn't understand why I was so bad at school and yeah, all those things, you know.

SPEAKER_02 38:18

If you haven't you haven't gotten to like the Craig Venter part of my book yet, right? I'm dying to tell you. Okay, I not to be a spoiler, but this is so wild to me because do you do you know who he is? He was the guy, I mean, he's he was called the bad boy of biotech in the 90s, and he was like on the book.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

I know the now, yeah, yeah. Because I read a few books on sort of genetics and DNA and you know the thing.

SPEAKER_02 38:39

Yeah, and he what he did, which is I think is so badass, is he was working at the NIH, and the NIH was very laboriously sort of um sequencing the human genome like peptide by peptide, right? And he was like, you know what? What if we just shattered this DNA into like a zillion pieces and had the computer do it automatically and then get the computer to piece it back together? And that sounded just like insanity to everyone at NIH because they're very conservative and they're like, no, obviously, this is a very slow process that will take about 20 years. And so Craig's like, well, I'm leaving and I'm gonna prove that and I'm gonna beat you. And he 100% did it, though. Once NIH saw how good he was doing, they bought like all of the machines, like they got they reached out to the company that was making his machines and they bought them up from him. So and they ended up catching up. But long story short, they decided to call it a tie. So that was a very, I feel like that was quite generous of uh Craig Venter because he was kicking their ass. Um but anyway, but but he says, so his life story is really interesting because he sucked in school because he has a brain that is probably a bit like ours, where he um he doesn't remember things unless he deeply understands them. So like he can't read a textbook and just have that information. Whereas his first wife could read the textbook and almost and literally like flip through it in her mind and remember where on the page information was, in addition to having all the actual information. So poor Craig can't memorize anything by rote. That includes spelling. And so he's and that is I'm the worst speller because spelling in English has no logic to it. Anyway, so so yeah, so basically he he just like I think he failed out of college and ended up getting sent to Vietnam because he wasn't like in college, but in Vietnam he was like a medic and he um completely did great. He like really flourished, even though it was like probably horrifying. And um and when he came back, he got a PhD and like just took over the world. And he said that even though he like can't he can't spell, he like he decoded the longest, most complicated spelling word in English, which is the human genome. But also he said that it was it was his big picture thinking, his ability to see the whole scientific landscape that allowed him to see things that other people couldn't see. Oh, and he also told me that when so he like used to get invited, he's pretty old now, but he used to get invited to speak at graduations all the time, like college graduations. And he would, and oh, and you know what it was, it was like a particular like honors like thing. Like there's some sort of like all the best high school students or whatever. And so he would be speaking to this auditorium of the kids who got the very best grades, and he'd be like, How many of you guys can visualize? And he said they could all visualize, like they uh almost to a person, the people who do the best in in grade school or high school are the people who can do that rote memorization. And then, but once you hit you know college, if you're at a good college or grad school, um, concepts start to matter a lot more. And I think that we can catch up. I don't know if that's so that's my experience is that I got D's in elementary school, and then by the time I got to college, I was straight A's. But there was like it was a rocky period in the middle there.

SPEAKER_01 42:10

Well, this is something that's it's really important at the moment for me because my daughter uh is uh she's Audi HD and um she's very similar to me. She's got a lot of similarities with with me. She's uh just finished a um an exam where she'd worked really hard, but once she got there, all everything just disappeared, and she had a bit of a panic attack, and she, you know, and she just she didn't do a great job of it.

SPEAKER_04 42:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:39

So I've been I've been talking to her about and I've been trying to speak to people um uh about methods that she can use to do this bullshit rote memory stuff um as much as possible. Yeah. And so I was going to I wanted to talk to you about that, about what um if you have any ideas of that sort of stuff, because I've spoken to a friend of mine who I used to look after when I was a carer, and he's he's amazing, he studied psychology, and um he's gonna we're we're giving him some of those biological concepts that she's having to learn, and he's gonna go go and he's gonna talk about how he would go about remembering it. You know, so he and and so he's talking about different senses um and involving stories or whatever whatever works for you to make it interesting, because that's I'm very aware of that fact that it's all about um the motivation, because I, you know, the things I was a good at at school is the things I was motivated because I liked them and I did very well at them, but the things I didn't was shocking, absolutely shocking, because I'm not remember, wrote to memory, and she's clearly got a bit of that as as well. So, how would she go about things like when we're talking about dendrites and the nerves? At the moment, she's talking about nerves and central nervous system. system and all those things. Um I'm trying to go with her and try to create stories around it. So um some of it's a bit naughty like because you know we have uh we have a bit of naughty humor uh when we're talking about that's the way to do it that's totally the way to do it that's how you remember things yeah yeah it's and so it's just like is that what you would do would you how would you go about remembering something that's boring to you you know it my autobiographical memory is so poor that I don't even know.

SPEAKER_02 44:29

I don't remember how I did it. Um but I think like I think that it was it's almost impossible for me to memorize things like I wrote like when I was in an acting class I couldn't memorize any like even a single sentence I would never be able to get out exactly word for word. I would have the gist of it but that's just not my brain encodes concepts it just doesn't encode the words like that and I can't spell I never learn to spell and I'm a full-time professional writer like and I I just thank God for spell check because I would just a hundred percent not be able to be a writer without it.

SPEAKER_01 45:08

Yeah my son's a bit like that as well but um you had mentioned I think in the VMa that um it's just a matter of a lot of repetition that if you're gonna get through it you just has to be a lot of repetition. I did a play and in in my year 12 um the last high school year and I was the main character who was on stage the whole time. So I would have gigantic chunks of text that I'll have to memorize and it took over my life. Yeah and thankfully I was studying other things I really like like music and that that year but I had to spend a long time and I still there were still moments I forgot I'd forget chunks of it but I I I'm kind of glad that I put myself in those positions where um I had I had to try try it out and see how it went. Spelling same thing I think I used to I used to do spelling bees you know when you were too like have you did you have to do that? We had those yeah but I was so bad I mean I would like to grow good would you say I think I got good and I do for me I love words and I like like we talked about before I love playing with words I love combining words. So I think for me that's not a problem I I'm I'm really good at spelling and things like that. Not so much with numbers but with the with words I love I love the the sounds they make and things like that.

SPEAKER_02 46:30

So it's a bit different for me in that respect but again it comes back to motivation doesn't it wait and motivation and creativity for coming up with workarounds um like you said like and if you go into any almost any sort of context with sort of a playful mindset um it it just improves your learning by a thousand percent like when you're stressed out your brain gets into narrow locked in mode and it just it you are not going to learn anything. But if you are relaxed and just messing around and there's it doesn't feel like there's big stakes then I think a lot of neurodivergent people can find or with help they can find ways to do things that are different than the the neurotypical way but it does take a lot more effort and sometimes you're a lot slower you know but it's just trade-offs. You know that said though I feel like we live in a world that really rewards specialists which um can be good. Like so if you America what'd you say in America right now in America yeah and everywhere we reward specialists because we're just such an advanced industrialized world like if I was a hunter gatherer I would have to do all sorts of things all the time and I think it would be a lot harder for me whereas I am only good at like if you look like at my you know educational standardized testing I would be in like the the top like I would be in the top 2% and the bottom two percent on like almost everything right so I had this very jagged exactly yeah which I think is pretty typical and actually if you know like the network theory of neurotypical brains is sort of showing why this is because neuro um neurotypical brains are have like a hub and spoke system more more like a hub and spoke system for um further architecture. And so you usually like if it's a it's like with an airline you usually don't have to make more than one connection to get from where you start to where you're going right but neurodivergent brains have more of a daisy chain situation like a bus like a circular bus route where well where it's like you're you're definitely like if sometimes you might have to take like four or five connections and you're luggage halfway there but but other times you have these super efficient connections. And so for whatever reason both you and I have brains that encode music like it's no big deal but do not encode other things uh very well at all.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

Wow okay so we we're we've been uh abducted and put in a car and we're taken to somewhere we we don't know where the hell we are and basically they they've taken the blindfolds off and said um find your way back what what would you do in that situation? That's not something you've you wanted to do you're certainly not going to be you know I know there was going to be an element of motivation but it's still you you you you're not in a place that you feel comfortable so how would you go about figuring out how to how to get back to civilization?

SPEAKER_02 49:40

I mean that's a good question and I feel like people who are neurodivergent in that situation are starting with at least one good advantage which is that if you've spent your entire life living in a world that was not quite designed for you then you are already good at finding workarounds and I feel like as as a facelind person I'm particularly good at finding myself in weird situations and I don't know what's going on. I don't know who I'm talking to but I can trust myself to figure it out so I don't panic at least so so in that in your scenario like I think that I probably I'm I probably wouldn't panic because I I know that I can figure my way out of shit. I'm getting thirsty Slady come on I'm getting thirsty okay yeah so um I don't what well so it's interesting I mean I think on honestly given my strengths and I would just try to find people right like I would look for signs of humans and try to find people to help me out. How to find people that's like okay would you um would you look at uh how to how do you work out direction what direction to go so um I mean if I was super thirsty I guess I would go downwards right like I'd go downhill to to look for water in general. If I knew that you know it's interesting because I actually did do I did like wilderness survival tons as a kid but it's I feel like it's so specific to where you did it because like if you dropped me off in like North Carolina where my camp was like the the mountains of North Carolina I'd be fine. I'd be okay yeah like I know what you can eat.

SPEAKER_01 51:17

If you do it just have all that sort of stuff going on you know you know which is if there's moss on one side of the tree you could sort of get some idea of direction based on where the sun is in the of that all I remember is what you can eat yeah so maybe I wouldn't do that well I don't know but how about you yeah I I love watching those sorts of shows I'm I'm fascinated by them all and yeah I wouldn't panic I wouldn't panic at all I'd probably well to be honest I'd do you remember um Grizzly Adams do you remember that show yeah um from the 70s yeah he was a guy who I think was Canadian I think yeah he was he just lived with a bear oh with a with a bear um up in the mountains and I've always I've always thought I'd love to be grizzly adams living on my own oh or something like that you know I'd I'd be quite okay with that with the isolation yeah yeah for for how long do you think like really alive just the show alive alive yeah I could I could definitely do if I had the skill sets to be able to to find the food um I I wouldn't be one of those people who who would be like oh I can't handle this um I just now I realize I miss my my family and I'd no I'd I'd be like I'll see them again I'll see them again that's very unusual do you guys have I don't know I there's a show called Pluribus that was on um that is so good it's by the breaking bad people and the I've yeah I know I haven't I haven't seen it available I hope you guys get it because it's it actually really gets into the question of loneliness um and I won't do any any spoilers but it's like super interesting because the main character is like quite a misanthropic kind of person but she gets really lonely really fast when she's truly isolated. Yeah okay nah no that wouldn't not be a problem at all which makes it like it's it's a you feel guilty like my kids my kids know there's this about me as well you know oh you'd be fine you know you can miss us I would miss you but I'd still be able to to function and I'd I'd still be in the moment and I'd I would enjoy the time.

SPEAKER_02 53:37

Yeah you know yeah yes actually now that you're saying that I feel like I have an uh something is chiming in my brain which is yeah that um I can like when I was dating I'm married now but when I was dating um I could get over a breakup like in a week and a half like I had a live in boyfriend who like I had this very dramatic breakup with and I was completely devastated for like one day and then and then by the time I ran into him like again a week and a half later I felt nothing. And I think that that is a benefit of having a terrible memory because I think a friend of like my good friend Miriam who has an incredible memory like she she that would trigger like a flood of memories and she would just be like overcome with emotions whereas I was like oh there's that guy who used to live with me you know I didn't have any of that and you're just somebody I used to know yeah yeah but then there was a podcaster who asked my husband Steve about that and she was she said and I feel like Steve didn't he was alarmed he was like yeah I stad he would get over me in about 24 hours and probably marry someone else oh that that is that is a weird thing I've I've have brought that up with the a psychologist in that um that it's it's it's an awful feeling to have even though it's like it's it's a just a natural way that we we think um is that that those expressions of uh of of love um and that sort of thing and and uh kind of not natural you know yeah it's and it's it's really tough my wife remembers everything every conversation every all these things you know she's great in an argument because she'll just be able to recall things that I'd I have not you know and I my take is that what we've been together for you know about almost 35 years because I haven't got memory it is so hard to argue with people who have that autobiographical memory because they're like well my good friend Syrian has this insane memory and she's like well I remember when you said blah blah and I'm like well I don't remember that and in any case I don't believe it anymore so what's worse it's not great for friends in that is it like like I've gone to I've said to a friend oh man you should watch this this film it's fantastic and he goes what's we saw it together yes yes yes yes yeah that happens to me too that's so funny I will tell people like whole story okay this is the worst one is that I accidentally I my friend Sybil had this incredible story that I just sort of adopted and I made myself the per per and I I told it back to her and she was like no that was actually me and I was like oh and it's like I call them on the podcast autistic moments like just these things where it's just like oh oh my god it's not it's it the funny things are when you are made aware of them you know yeah and then you realize and the big thing is like this isn't just like the glitches only show up when and under certain pressures right but it's that's you all the time like all the time I'm never thinking about anyone's like eye color or whatever like my brother who's kind of like us he his his now wife his girlfriend like quizzed him on her like he's like what color are my eyes and he didn't know after he'd been dating her for like a year oh dear yeah that that that's making a lot of sense don't ask me please yeah what color are your wife's eyes because I'll just say brownish brownish that's safe that's a the majority of people well there you go that's that that's covered I'm not gonna be I'll be more likely to be true I don't know I don't know birthdays okay this is like T and I but whenever you go to the doctors as a woman they say when was the first day of your last period and I have stopped saying I don't know because they think they they are immediately like alarmed right uh but I never know I'll never know it doesn't mean like I'm accidentally pregnant I just literally have no idea I have to look at my calendar it's a and it's a good idea to do that uh my wife makes notes for me when I go to the doctors that's so lucky my husband is also poor memories so he does not help me at all is she good at face recognition yeah oh wow cool yeah which is good for her as a teacher like that's so and so yeah she's so we're so so opposite in in those respects which which which is good as a couple and makes you you know a better functional more functional person she does the things I can't do and I do the things she can't do you know my husband and I unfortunately just double down on all the strengths and weaknesses so no one's doing the taxes on time basically but we're both getting quite good at like programming chat GPT which we don't need to know how to do yeah so you're like Homer Simpson just going round and round and round so how again what do you do then what are you using any tools now to help there's lots lots of the map there that can actually help you with that stuff. You know I mean in terms of like the boring administrative things you have to do for life my trick has always been just to um keep everything as simple as possible. So like I only have like one bank account like I only you know like I couldn't deal with if I had like four credit cards and like three bank accounts it would be the end of the world like so so that's my my and also with belongings I only would have I used to only have four forks for like three for guests.

SPEAKER_03 59:37

Yeah that's that's smart. That's smart.

SPEAKER_02 59:40

But but that all went to hell when I married my husband who is he just like loves having stuff and he has so much stuff and all my stuff has gotten swallowed up and I can't find it. So I guess I don't really have any any functional answers for you there.

SPEAKER_01 59:56

I've had just I've had to just cope because yeah my wife loves to gather things and um I've tried to set up organizational systems. I love organizing stuff you know sitting like basically where I would say um if I needed to find um you know a a spatula I could close my eyes and walk to that spot open it up and grab it because I know exactly where I've put it right of course in place. Exactly yeah and my memory is fantastic with that because I know where I've put it done yes but she moves them I've just given up I've given up and so it makes it difficult because she's like well you never help with this stuff and I'm like well because I know the right way of doing it I know how it's gonna work but I it doesn't work because you don't follow the same you know way of going about doing things it's not doesn't matter to you it's not important. You know so it's it's always going to be an argument because we just we'll never be able to meet in the middle there.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:52

How can you meet in the middle about where to put a spatula you know what else is um Steve and I have a dueling sort of problems with with visual clutter because I I can't find things if it's in a bunch of other things yeah just because of my my visual system is not good at object recognition. And that's as a result without realizing it that's why I never have anything on any countertops like a very minimalist and clean when I'm left to my own devices. Steve however has the ADHD where you leave shit everywhere. And so he's just like there's just shit everywhere and I'm like which one of the which one of our neurodiversities takes precedence here and I actually put that question in my book or in a I wrote a reader's guide to my for my book for book clubs and I put that question in there and you can go and vote online.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:40

And last time I checked Steve has been winning but that's just because there's more messy people out there I think I know and here I am in here like my wife's got a a disc over here but I mean it's it is I couldn't walk over there because there's so much crap down here but we're also trying to sell things on Facebook and uh but in the end even though this is mostly my space it becomes cluttered and I kind of just learn to deal with that because I don't have full control over it.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:07

If I had full control I gotta I've got a one of my best friends and when we go away together as a bunch of the guys go away together the two of us are just you know amazing so beautifully organized we do all the cooking we you know every and we just work so well together I'm thinking if only you know if you were gay you would have married this guy and you would have killed it yeah but alas yeah my very best friend Sybil I feel like is is like a twin soul and like but on the other hand if you did marry like your clone you know you wouldn't have the great balance you have in your relationship.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:44

That's true. You learn that you're oh my god I hate myself I know I know I would I think I would really enjoy it but I think that I would also hate it a lot sometimes so what have you got coming up ahead of you are you gonna continue to uh um you know jump into every form of study that you can come across I've done I'll I've done that for backs for my back uh I just jump in and see what I've whatever I can find.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:13

But have you got more of that coming up I have been yeah so for I've been really interested in this idea of how scientists are newly studying subjective experience objectively and so I've been obsessed with like weird perceptual disorders things that neurologists like have you heard of visual snow syndrome no is that something to do with just a busyness it's so wild it's like the it's like the visual um it's almost like visual tinnitus right if you have tinnitus with hearing like you always hear like a high pitched sound it it's like it it's noise that's in there everyone has like neurological more a lot of neurological activity that your brain filters out um when it is giving you know moving information to your conscious experience and but people with um visual snow syndrome it's like there's a layer of static over everything they see it's kind of like the HBO logo old time ETV you know and and what's wild is of course most people have it their whole lives so they don't have anything to compare it to and and so she figured out that she had this and you know and they'll go to their doctors and say like there's this veil over things and you they check your eyes and your eyes look maybe you get a brain scan and your brain scan looks fine because they're very looking they can only find like a tumor you know that's right they if they can they cannot find functional like quirks in brains with brain skins. So or at least not well with fMRA you might be able to but the point here is is that she there's all that's one so that's a weird phenomenon that's really that's like two percent of the population that's actually like kind of pretty often right like that's like one in 20 or one in 2000 what what is two percent shoot so it's a lot of more people than you would think yeah well there's an oral one for that too I mean I had that as far as after a matter of time in a crowd like that every sound becomes one sound but that takes 15 minutes or so yeah so that is actually um you might have an auditory processing difference. Like I don't want to say disorder because it's not affecting your life but it sounds like you you would have like an auditory it's because I don't know if that's I don't think that's normal. No offense. I've got a little more room on my shelf right to put another thing up collecting labels. But again that's why I'm like kind of trying to advocate for big tent neurodiversity because all of the weirdos are weird in a lot of different ways and you'll never find two of us that are perfect matches you know so our current categories like autism and ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculate, even the narrow ones are way too broad. Even prosepognosia includes so many different ways of failing at recognizing faces. You and I are two different camps. So I'm just like, we are just, let's just be, let's just have a neurodiverse club.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:20

For the outliers, the outlier party. And um neurodivergent.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:24

That's a term I'm using a lot more often nowadays just to have um a catch-all, you know, because um the way I okay, so what my brain does in that's in this situation is that I visualize um I visualize my different neurotypes, so my ADHD, my autism, my dyscalculate, they're all having an argument about how come you keep saying me that that guy first and not me.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:48

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:49

You know, because if I try to list them all off, that's just ridiculous. And who gets to go first and who gets to go last, and it's just a big fight. So that's why neurodivergence is good, because everyone's included.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:58

Well, and I, you know, and this is a thing that I actually struggle with. I'm curious what you think. Because like sometimes when I'm talking, you know, publicly about neurodivergence, people will say, Well, everyone's like, there isn't a normal, normal isn't real. And I'm like, actually, there is someone out there who is like fully at the median of every measurable trait, right? Or maybe not exactly at the median, but like in and most people are within one or two standard deviations, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:25

So, but those of us who are at the tails on one thing are at the tails on other things. Like we do people, it's not randomly distributed through the population, and there is normal, and there, and it is it's a like as everyone says now, it's a spectrum, and everyone's somewhere on the spectrum, right? But if you're gonna chunk off the people who really feel like aliens in a world designed by some other species, um, it's gonna be the people on at the end of the tales that are more than two standard deviations away from the mean.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:56

Absolutely. And another way for people, a visual way of people being able to explain that to people that and is saying it's more like a web. And so there's all these different aspects to within that, or it's like a it could be a wheel or you know, with pieces of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:11

Where you I I know exactly, I love those graphs where you can see all the different, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:16

So it's not a spectrum, it's just you're gonna fit somewhere in each of those pieces of the pie. Um and that's that makes more sense as a as a web. But there's some people who essentially just won't even factor into that.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:28

You know, and I feel like some of the problem is actually our language, like language always is dividing things as like thing and not that thing. Yes, it's very, very binary, and we don't have a lot of words for like ish, like like I'm autistic-ish, you know, or whatever. I'm Jewish. That's actually kind of true. I'm like I know that's it's funny. Like I'm not serious, but I go to our mitzvah's all the time.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:04

Now I know I realize the time was getting on, but I wanted to cover off a couple of things. If that's okay, is that yeah, yeah, thanks.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:10

Yeah, thanks for reading us in.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:14

One of the things that uh we were talking about before about a daughter, and I just wanted to see if I could get your your take on this. My daughter has a very negative view of her neurodivergence. Oh and she keeps saying to me in a joking way, but obviously these things can, you know, there's something it's coming from somewhere, is like um, you know, you're the one who gave all this to me, all these issues. You know, I'm saying, well, it's not an issue at all. Um this is um it's awesome, you know. Yeah, but she just uh see it at the moment as just being you know, I just wish I was normal. You know how how would you go about reframing it for how would you reframe it for yourself? Have you ever felt in that position where you're like you know, I just wish I wish I wasn't?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:02

Yeah, I mean, I I guess I feel like you know, validating her sadness and frustration. Like, yeah, it really sucks like a lot of the time to be in the position we're in. But and but it's interesting because as you I feel like as soon as you're out of like high school, you are now as as soon as you're an adult, you can structure your life around your strengths and and all this, and those are in your strengths you're actually quite strong at. And this is why this is back to my theory of why it's good to be neurodivergent in like a highly industrialized society where there's a lot of specialization. So I know many ADHD people like are sort of like omnivores, but I also think that a lot of us who are just like, I can't do any math in my head, but I'm not bad at math concepts, you know, um, and that kind of thing. So the point is that once you're out of high school, once you're out of grade school, it is not a burden. It becomes a it can really become a huge advantage because you're rare. And being rare is means that you can get more money for the thing you're good at.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:06

Isn't that hard? She wants to be a psychologist, so it's it's it is going to be this year, it's gonna be so bloody hard for her. And I do say the same thing. That's it's not gonna be like this when you get into it to work and you just do something that you love, always make sure you do something you love because I didn't. And uh yeah, it's it's just gonna get through this, it's getting through this year. That's so I'm trying to come up with ways that help her to do this ridiculous rote learning crap.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:30

Oh, it's so hard. I know. I don't even know how anyone does it.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:34

No, I don't either. Um, we've prepared our son really well, he's 14 and he's um he's got a bonsai business.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:42

Oh wow, that's cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:44

Because he's he loves bonsai and he he can remember all the names of everything, and he it only needs to be told to him once he'll know how to do to do this and that. He he's it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. So he's not gonna get to that part in the school where he's having to do lots of those exams. He's gonna be veered more towards uh sort of holder culture in the school will help him by he gets to go and have a couple of days you know to learn these things. So it's for him, I don't think it's gonna be that difficult. It's just my daughter's just she wants to get that, so she wants to get that at high school, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:18

Yeah. You know, though the the other advantage is if you do have to work harder to do all this stuff, you are going to probably understand it better than your peers, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:30

There's you're right, you're right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:33

I'm sure that's like not great comfort, though.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:36

It's no, no, it validates the things I've been thinking too. It totally does validate that um what we're doing together is we're we're she's teaching me and I'm asking her questions, and then I'm trying to find ways to um give names to things, or uh that's just like your favorite TV show, or the like this character, you know, and all these sorts of things. I'm trying to pin all those to make it easier for her, you know. Yeah. So I feel like I'm on the right track.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:00

Yeah, it sounds like you really are, and and and that's what Craig Vinters told me. He was like, There's no shortcuts for us. Like, unfortunately, we have to really understand something and integrate it into all the other things we understand, or we're just our brains are not gonna hold on to it. Whereas like people who have that photographic memory, they can just look at something and spit it back out. They don't have to understand it.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:35

Um, what's coming up for you?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:38

Okay, yeah. What's coming up for me? I'm writing magazine articles for great magazines like National Geographic and the New York Times magazine. And I'm trying to get a book proposal together about for a second book about sort of the objective, the the objective verification of formerly subjective experiences, or how science is digging into this question of qualia, and you know, what is it like to be a cat? What is it like to be Dan? What is it like if you could be beamed into the mind of another creature? Science has some answers now. It used to just be a philosophical question, which bores me, but now it's an empirical question sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:18

Oh, I love that. That's that would just be amazing. That'd be so fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:22

Yeah, I love that. Like, so one example that I really love, two examples, is like if you could beam into the lived experience of a dog, their main sense is smell. So to them, the world is you could think of it as a long exposure photograph because they can see the hot dog someone dropped on the ground three days ago that's no longer there, but it has that trace, and the trace remains. So that's what I always think about with dogs is like sort of short-sighted, but seeing into the past instead of the distance. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:55

A story's being told, but how the hell do you go in as you're saying with the bonoba?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:59

Oh no, I don't want to use the word bonoba.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:03

But so how would with with with us going into that into that mind of the dog, having the life we've had, it would be unbelievably overwhelming for us.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:13

Oh yeah. Right. And like there's a famous essay that says, you know, if you you can never imagine, like you can imagine what it would be like if you turned into a bat, maybe. Exactly. But you can't really imagine what it's like for a bat to be a bat, because their whole experience and their whole frame of reference is battiness. But that said, I think it's plenty to just try to really understand scientifically what it's like to be another creature if you were to be that other creature. Yeah, it's much easier to think about comparison. So, like if you beamed into my lived experience, you would be like, wow, everything's really flat, and I'm afraid to walk down these stairs, you know. I beam into my lived experience, I'm like, it looks the same as always.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:56

Like there's a guy in England called Carl Pilkington, and they it's one of my special interests. I listened to him and Ricky Gervais, who did the Office, the UK version. But there's him, uh Stephen Merchant and Carl Pilkington, and uh I listened to their uh radio shows and podcasts, um, which are long gone. They've stopped doing it for ages, but there's a lot of the material, and I'd listen to it hours every day. And he I love Carl's mind, and Carl's mind is just it's fascinating the way he looks at uh at things like this and builds these stories around, like he even talked about there was a um the the the last chip that went to space. And you know, he he reads a headline of just the basics that then he came back, and then of course there was the human's turn to go off to space. So he didn't get to go back. And so he's built a story around the fact that this chip he was like he was had so much to offer and he wanted to go back into space because it was fun. So all of a sudden he just he got so depressed he went on a bender, he was, you know, he was women and booze, and you know, because he just he was just so depressed and he ended up killing himself because he didn't and all that stuff's coming from his own mind, and it's just it's such I love interesting brains. That's why I'm loving reading the the your your book because it's just I I love hearing people um with interesting minds, and and you and you do it in such a lovely way. It's very it's a nice, it's it's an easy read, but it's about the hard at some hard concepts, you know, which is fantastic, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:30

Great.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:33

Do you think the the general neurotypical reader would would take something else, something very different? Would it be like going into would it be I'm I apologize, it would it be like going into the mind of a dog?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:46

Yeah, I think that well, you know, it's so funny because I get I get emails all the time from people who are just comparing themselves to me and they're like I'm like you with A, B, and C, but not with D or whatever. And it's I love it because I think it just gets people to start get comparing themselves on these, like you were saying, like on the inner monologue. Some people ever people who just naturally assume that their experience is roughly average. And so the person with who can actually almost hear their own voice and their minds as their inner monologue assumes everyone can do that. But it turns out that's actually pretty rare. So um, yeah, so I think that it's pretty, I think that a lot of I think it's really fun to get people thinking about their own lived experience and in contrasting it with people in their lives because it helps you understand other people so much better once you realize that your perceptions and your inner experience might be quite different from other people's, especially if you're neurodivergent. Then it's basically no one else is like you.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:46

Self-reflective. I've been told all my life, uh uh, I've said, but why don't people do this? And they always say just because you're special. You're special, you you know, but other people don't think this way. And I've always been it's been important from a very young age to to want to understand myself and the world around me and all those sorts of things have been, but I don't know if it's a if it's a normal thing for people to to do.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:10

No, it's not normal, and I don't do that at all, right? Like I just until it wasn't until like you know, I was sort of forced to by my own book deal to like take the closer that that I did, because I would never have done it otherwise, really. I I just you know, and unlike you, like I would notice other people not doing the thing that I I'm doing, and I'd be like, Well, that's dumb. They should obviously be doing this, you know, or whatever. I just would be like, clearly, this is better. So my gosh. So when I I worked at a psychology magazine where we would have a draft, sort of like a sports draft for conference sessions, and and I would go in with my list of sessions that I wanted to cover, and I would be like, I'm gonna cut anyone who tries to take my you know transition session. No one ever freaking wanted this, like I was never, I never had to fight for my sessions. Like no one was interested in my topics.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:07

Wow. So I I love and I try to live by the the the the concept of uh embrace doubt. And it sounds like not uh it sounds like you are you don't have to doubt much.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:23

Do you know what else? Okay, so prosopygnosia, if you break down the word agnosia is like agnostic, you know, like not knowing. And so if you're prosopagnosi, if you have prosopagnosia, you are an expert and not knowing and living in sort of that that gray area.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:40

Mm-hmm. That seems to be a lot of our leaders.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:44

Really? Oh god, it feels like here in America, it feels like the leaders all think they know everything without even.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:49

That's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:50

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a real we have a real deficit of agnosia, of of like accepting that you don't know in the world where people are just expected to have an opinion on some complicated matter that yeah, that reasonable people would disagree about. Like, I don't know. I can tell you, like, there's a few things, like I've barely there's like three things that I feel pretty confident about, but I'm not even that confident about them.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:17

No, no, and I don't think you should.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:20

Right. Yeah, I mean it's a very philosophical thing, but I still think it's it's hard to live in uncertainty though, because you know, it's just like how's that actionable? But again, like if you have a lifetime of experience, talking to people and not really knowing who they are, like that gives you a good foundation for living uncertainty.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:36

Absolutely. And if you combine combine that with critical thinking, um uh a respect for um you know science and and understanding and learning and all those sorts of things, I think that I think that's where it it's it's a good. It's always to have doubt, but and always have that little bit, but not so much that your brain just falls out of your head.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:54

Yeah. Yeah, I feel like that neurotypical version of me like wouldn't have been very nice. You know, I think like she would have been like a frat boy, basically.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:06

Your name would have been Scott.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:07

It would have been Scott, and I probably like would have been a sex pest. Like, yeah, yeah, that's right. It's good that I like ended up with the challenges I had.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:20

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:22

This is another theory I have is that in the age of AI, weirdness, human weirdness is going to be increasingly valuable.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:30

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And a music and an art, they can AI can just create the crap pop song. Oh no, I shouldn't say crap, I love pop, the create the songs that are just everyone likes it that makes them happy and they don't have to think about it. It just a chance to do something strange again, like we did in the late 60s and early 70s.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:48

Yes, yeah. Yeah, the the I can't remember. I saw something super weird like a uh on Instagram the other day, and someone wrote, um, AI could never, which is like totally true. Yeah, because it's like this truly human weirdness and this lived in experience is is gonna be increasingly rare and valuable. So your poor your poor daughter just needs to get through get through primary school.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:12

That's it, and then we we're gonna rule the world, Sadie.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:15

Clearly.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:17

The IIs are never gonna be able to get to us. They're gonna explode when we speak to them. Well, thanks so much for taking all this time to talk to me. It was just uh it was awesome. And I like I knew I was gonna have such a great conversation with you just based on the back and forths we had on email.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:38

Me too, me too. Oh, should I say I'm Sadie Dingfelder and I'm the author of a book called Do I Know You? A Facebind Reporter's Journey into the Wait, oh my god, I forgot my own book title. A face reporter's journey into the science of sight, memory, and imagination. My husband grilled me on this, but this was a phrase.