Face Blindness, Stereo Blindness, Aphantasia, and SDAM with Sadie Dingfelder Part 1

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You have to write down like literally what was in your brain right before the beep.
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And I went into this study thinking that, you know, it's always I feel like I I always have like little snippets of songs running through my head and like not much else.
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And when I did this study, like I think they only caught a song one time.
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Most of the time, I am just existing.
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And and there's nothing really of much consequence going on in my mind except for like experiencing.
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So I'm like, well, I was taking in the green of that leaf.
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Join the Discovering Your Mind Facebook group and enjoy discussions, ask questions, and participate in the podcast in fun and unique ways.
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Aphantasia is a condition characterized by an inability to visualize mental images in one's mind.
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If you have just discovered that you or someone you love has aphantasia, or if you're just fascinated by the subject in general and love learning more about it, you are in the right place.
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The Discovering Your Mind podcast delves into all aspects of the mind's eye, including aphantasia, hyperfantasia, and everything in between.
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Welcome to the Discovering Your Mind Podcast, brought to you by ShaneSbrainDomain.com.
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I am your host, Shane Williams, also known as Shane's Brain.
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And today we're talking with the one and only Sadie Dingfelder.
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Welcome to the show, Sadie.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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You are welcome.
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I'm excited about this one.
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I think it's gonna be fun and interesting.
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Awesome.
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All right.
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Well, where are you joining us from, Sadie?
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West Virginia.
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Oh, West Virginia.
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Mountain Mama.
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All right.
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Tell us what you do for a living.
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I'm a writer.
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I worked for the American Psychological Association and I ran their magazines for a while.
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And I reported on science news.
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And then I went and worked at the Washington Post for a while.
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And then I got laid off, as everyone eventually does in journalism.
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And I got a book deal.
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And so then that was my job for a while.
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Now I'm writing for magazines and trying to get a second book deal.
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Very cool.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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Uh, what about your other hobbies and interests?
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What else do you like to do?
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I love scuba diving and snorkeling.
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Basically, I just want to be in water all the time.
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I like kayaking and swimming and just sitting in ponds.
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All right, cool.
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Well, let's uh move on.
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I just finished your book yesterday.
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Why don't you tell people a little bit about what your book is called and how it happened and just a little bit about your book?
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Yeah.
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Well, so my book is called Do I Know You question mark: A Faceblind Reporter's Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination.
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And the subtitle is important because there is literally another book called Do I Know You about face blindness that came out two months before my book.
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I was I totally was so upset because um I my book had been finished for like more than a year.
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It takes forever for things to get published for some reason.
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And um, so my book is about how like I discovered at the age of 39, right before I turned 40, that I'm face blind, which is some uh something called prosopagnosia.
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And it was really a huge surprise to me to learn that I was just really failing at recognizing faces at a level that I just had no idea.
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You know, I thought I was doing fine.
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Like I knew that I was below average.
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Like I didn't think I was good at faces, but bottom 2% is a lot different than like a little below average, right?
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And then from there, it sort of becomes like a mystery um story because I try to find out why I'm face blind, because it's not genetic in my case, I think.
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And also, and then I discover all of these other ways in which I'm neurodivergent, including aphantasia and S Dam, which often goes along with aphantasia.
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So that's severely deficient autobiographical memory.
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So my book is just me sort of doing this mystery sort of hunt, which involves like interrogating my parents about my early childhood, and they get a little defensive, and I um and I go to science labs across the country, and turns out my brain is interesting and weird enough to interest like at least five or six different groups of scientists who like all um scan my brain.
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There's one woman who was writing her entire like PhD dissertation on me getting lost everywhere.
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Yeah, so so for almost 40 years, I thought that I was pretty neurotypical, you know, like pretty average.
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And it turns out that my brain is not operating normally in a lot of ways, and I had no idea.
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So, and honestly, in in human society in general, you don't kind of want to stick out.
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And we all kind of do assume that our inner lives are roughly the same as anyone else's, and our abilities are roughly the same as other people's, right?
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But it turns out, you know, as you know, like most people are have very different inner lives and sort of cognitive abilities.
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Then I mean, there's a lot more variety in people realized.
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If you happen to be on the tails and you're making the assumption that everyone's thinking roughly like you, you're super wrong.
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Like you're wrong all the time about everyone.
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And that that was like the big eye-opening thing for me is that that my version of sort of human consciousness is not normal.
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It's not typical.
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Okay, very cool.
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So uh there were kind of four main topics that I found in your book that I want to discuss one by one.
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So the first one was face blindness, the second one was stereo blindness, the third one was apantasia, and the fourth one was STAM.
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Yeah.
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So let's start with uh face blindness.
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Is there anything else you want to say about kind of defining that?
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Like what is it?
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Oh, yeah.
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Well, you know, it's interesting.
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Face blindness just means that you are not remembering faces and processing them as efficiently as normal people, as neurotypical people.
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But an important thing to know is that neurotypical people are super weirdly good at faces.
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Every human, even face blind people, are born with a sort of a basic face template that allows your brain to enforce, like makes your brain latch onto faces right as soon as you're born.
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Again, even if you're like autistic and you aren't as into faces as a neurotypical person, you're still way more into faces than almost any other type of animal.
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Primates in general.
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So we all latch onto faces, we focus on faces, and we learn how to process faces probably more than quicker than any other type of object.
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And we have two whole chunks of brain that are about the size of an olive above each of your ears that are a hundred percent devoted to face processing.
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So it's faces are really important to the human brain, like just so important because at some point in you know human evolution, it just became very helpful to be able to keep track of like who your allies are, who doesn't like you, you know, that kind of thing became very important and uh less important to like be able to identify plants, though we can do that too, obviously.
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But like we have a whole chunk of brain devoted to identifying other human beings.
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And so um people who are face blind are often actually just sort of treating faces like we all treat other types of objects.
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So, like if you had to pick a squirrel out of a lineup of squirrels that you saw you saw a squirrel yesterday, you have to pick a squirrel out of a lineup today.
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Like, almost no one can do that.
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Almost no one can do that, right?
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That's the experience of being face blind, is like you can see faces just as clearly as anyone, right?
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Like mostly we are we our vision is fine.
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It's our usually our processing or our memory that is failing.
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So for some people, it's uh there's two types, two main types of face blindness, but there's probably actually a lot more, where there's one type where your brain is not encoding faces efficiently or well, you know?
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And it's kind of wild because if you look at a face, it's a complicated 3D sort of figure.
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And most people can take that this frontal face idea, and when you turn to the side, they can still recognize the person.
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So you've created like a workable 3D model in your mind, and that's something that I can't do at all.
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And then the other half of it is when you see that face again, can you go into your memory and match it to like this other face and then to the whole identity of a person, which is kind of like a whole nother level of memory.
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So it's just a very complicated thing.
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Our brains do, but most people are so effortless at it, they don't even realize how computationally difficult it is.
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Right.
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Okay, so I know you had a lot of experiences that kind of gave you maybe a clue that you were a little face blind.
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Tell your story about how you're like, okay, this is more than I thought it was.
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Yeah.
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So what happened was I was grocery shopping with my boyfriend, who's now my husband, but we'll just call him Steve.
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And I was just tailing him around the store.
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And I kind of lost track for him for the first minute.
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And then when I found him again, he had just gone completely rogue.
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And he was putting all this junk food in our cart, and he also was putting some generic peanut butter into the cart.
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And that's what I chose to like grab back out of the cart.
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And I was like, Since when do you buy generic?
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And he looked back at me and he looked terrified.
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And you know, my husband's like six four, and you just don't see him looking scared very often.
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And so I was like, thought like something terrifying was behind me.
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Like, I literally looked behind me to see what was scaring my husband, my my Steve.
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And uh there was no one behind me because he was terrified of me because he was not Steve.
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He was just some guy who was like shaped like Steve, you know, and he had like the exact same jacket, I feel like that was like the exact same thing.
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And yeah, so I dropped the peanut butter, I was really embarrassed, and I ran off.
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And then it was like really in the car on the way home.
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I said to myself, you know what, this is not a normal kind of mistake.
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Like this wouldn't like my first thought is like this is gonna be a really good funny story because I collect funny stories about myself.
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And I always just thought that I was just uh hilarious.
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Like I didn't think any deeper than like I write these funny stories and I'm hilarious, you know.
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Um, but that was the first time that I thought a little bit deeper.
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And I'm like, why?
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Why are you making these weird mistakes that normal people don't make?
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And uh and so that sent me down this whole rabbit hole that became my book.
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Okay.
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So why do you think it was so hard for you to convince yourself that you were face blind?
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Oh, it was so hard, and it's still hard.
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Okay, so what's wild is that that okay, so I write this whole book and I have like an official stamp of face blindness from Harvard, and I write this whole book about face processing and how I'm really failing at it, but at some level, I still don't believe it.
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Like, you know how you can know something, but there's but it's different than no knowing it, if that makes any sense.
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Like really knowing it and having integrated it into all your other information about yourself.
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So it's like I knew I was face blind, but it was just in its own sort of like compartment in my brain.
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And then I would do something that was super weird.
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Like I would fail to recognize my brother when I was waiting for him.
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And I would say, like, I would do that, and I'd be like, wow, I'm really face blind.
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You know, it's my husband's like, Yeah, you wrote a book about it.
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You have some pins you made yourself.
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And I'm like, Yeah, that's true.
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That's true.
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So I don't know.
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I guess it's just like at a certain age, you have a conception of yourself as basically whatever you have, believe, right?
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So for me, I mean, again, like basically normal.
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I think most of us think we're basically normal, honestly.
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And coming to terms with the fact that you are not normal at all is just kind of hard.
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I mean, I don't think that I have a lot of internalized stigma around neurodivergence, but maybe I do, you know.
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You mentioned this briefly already, but uh I found it interesting in your book.
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You talked about uh the difference between human faces versus animal faces and objects versus faces.
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Can you talk a little bit more about that?
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Yeah.
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So I use squirrels as an example earlier, but it's actually not the best example because squirrels don't tell each other apart by faces, they tell each other apart by their scent.
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And that's actually how most um mammals do it.
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Where most mammals are very scent focused and they care more about scent than about vision.
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I sometimes think, like, yeah, so dogs, for instance, like I if if you imagine their world visually, because that's a good analogy, because we're we're visual animals, they're smell animals.
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But so if you imagine smell from a vision perspective, it's like a long, it's a long exposure photograph because they can see things that were there yesterday, like the the um hot dog you dropped on the ground, you know, or the the dog that peed on the curb like two days ago.
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They can it's almost like they can see the faint fading image of things that used to be there.
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So most animals are scent focused, but primates and humans are very vision focused.
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And um, so most primates can tell other primates apart by their faces, but other animals, their faces don't vary that much.
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Like statistically, the distance between their eyes, the length, the distance from their nose to their ears, all those things do not vary a lot.
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So penguins actually do all look alike to other penguins.
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We're not just being species, but they sound different to each other.
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Penguins tell each other apart by their voices.
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So yeah, so this is like a real primate sort of obsession is faces.
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But other primates, the other naked primates, um, actually tell each other apart by their butts more than their faces, more often, I think.
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And so this this one researcher, I feel like she was somewhere like Sweden or something.
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This is just not research that I can imagine getting funded or approved in America, but she actually tested whether humans and monkeys could tell apart and how they were telling apart faces versus butts, basically.
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And so they showed, and it was in these are human faces and human butts shown to monkeys and humans.
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So the monkeys were great, they could tell humans apart by their butts, and uh yeah, but humans can't tell humans apart by our butts very well, right?
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And the way they test this is really funny because the control is the is um the the flipped upside down, right?
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So like a right side up face is like what you're testing, and then your control condition is the same face but flipped upside down because that actually just makes it and it just sort of throws your visual recognition system for a loop and it makes it a lot harder to recognize people.
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So that's another good way to get the experience of being face blind is to look at a celebrity face upside down, and it should be harder to identify upside down.
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All right.
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Tell us about super recognizers.
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Oh, yeah, super recognizers, they're just the opposite end of the normal curve than the face blind people.
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So they're the people in the top 2%.
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And honestly, they're still a bit of a mystery to scientists, they don't really know how they do it.
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So super recognizers are people who almost literally never forget a face.
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So if they see you on the bus, like, you know, in like 2012, and then they like see you like at a grocery store in 2026, like they'd be like, oh, there's that woman from the bus.
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And so it's just wild to me.
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Their brain just like automatically captures and stores face information, and it's so effortless for them.
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And so they actually end up doing the opposite of what I end up doing because I'm constantly pretending that I know people that I don't know to the point where it doesn't even feel weird to me, you know, like I'm just like, hey, you like, and so I've had to very consciously try to just not lie to people.
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And I also have a button that I made myself to try to make myself stop lying to people all the time that I know them.
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And it says, I'm face blind, I'm just pretending to know who you are.
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Because it's true.
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Like I'm just lying all the time.
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And people don't realize it.
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The super recognizers, they are going around pretending not to recognize people all the time because they freak people out.
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They are people are like, Are you stalking me?
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Like, why do you know my name?
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You know, or whatever.
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They another thing that's really impressive about super recognizers is they can really they can see through age, you know, like if you if they see like a kid and then they see that kid as an adult, like they they often just make that that um connection immediately.
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They had a super recognizer unit in the London police.
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There's another fancier name for the London police, right?
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It's like the London Guard or something.
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Anyway, whatever they're called.
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The London police had like a super recognizer unit that they actually specifically used for a very unglamorous sort of job, which is they were given like just a lot of sort of closed camera footage that from like luxury stores and things.
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Cause like there would be people, they had all this footage, but no one could like that was useless footage kind of because you couldn't, no one knew who the person was.
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And so they'd look through like a book of you know, wanted shoplifters, and then they'd look at the CCTV footage and just like rack up other like sort of crimes for them.
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And then if the and then like this one guy got came in because he got and he like tried to stiff a uh cab driver money, like and he ended up like fighting the cab driver and it gets brought into the police office.
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And the super recognizer there was like, oh, like like she had already flagged him, I think.
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And she was like, Yeah, he's like wanted for millions of dollars of like luxury goods stolen from around London, and they caught him because of the super recognizer unit.
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That is so interesting.
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I noticed in your book too that you know what when you were trying to tell your dad about uh certain things, it seemed like, for lack of a better word, it kind of defaulted to skepticism.
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Yeah.
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Uh, you know, like making excuses like, oh, maybe you're just tired or you're not trying hard enough.
00:18:26.799 --> 00:18:27.839
Or paying attention, yeah.
00:18:28.160 --> 00:18:29.359
Or paying attention.
00:18:29.680 --> 00:18:35.599
And those kind of things are rampant in the world of aphantasia as well.
00:18:35.759 --> 00:18:36.000
Yeah.
00:18:36.240 --> 00:18:37.839
Um, I'm just wondering about your thoughts.
00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:41.359
Like, why do we tend to default to skepticism?
00:18:41.599 --> 00:18:47.519
You know, I feel like for a parent, it it kind of does make sense to feel that way when your kid is a kid, right?
00:18:47.759 --> 00:18:57.599
Because when my brain was still like quite plastic, if someone had noticed that I that like I wasn't doing faces very well, like I could maybe it could have been remediated.
00:18:57.839 --> 00:19:06.400
But what you end up in is a feedback loop where it's not clear, like eventually whatever your thing is gets sort of braided into the way your brain works.
00:19:06.480 --> 00:19:08.559
And at that point, it's like kind of too late.
00:19:08.799 --> 00:19:19.200
So what I guess what I'm trying to say is like when I told my dad I was like a certifiably face blind and he didn't believe me, he was still like, you know, oh, you're just not trying hard enough.
00:19:19.279 --> 00:19:23.839
You don't look at people's faces, and but that's that's not not true, right?
00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:32.319
So, like, because relatively early in my life, I was not able to get the information I needed from faces, and I wasn't getting much information from it.
00:19:32.400 --> 00:19:34.079
I started looking elsewhere, you know.
00:19:34.240 --> 00:19:37.599
I started looking at context, at clothes, at hair.
00:19:37.920 --> 00:19:41.599
And um, and at this point, it's like a hardwired kind of thing.
00:19:41.759 --> 00:19:55.839
So you could definitely, if you if you look at me, like I'm not necessarily even trying like to recognize faces sometimes, but it's because a long time ago I learned there was much better strategies for me, given my brain wiring, basically.
00:19:56.079 --> 00:20:11.680
So it's also so for a parent, you know, like if there's something that you want your kid to be better at and you can give them a way to try harder, you know, or a reason to try harder, or like a new strategy, that could actually change their their life and that could change their abilities.
00:20:11.920 --> 00:20:19.519
But like at the time, at the point you're where your kid's like 40 years old, you just need to be like, okay, like I guess you never learn to recognize faces, you know.
00:20:20.240 --> 00:20:31.839
But you know, my dad, I mean, he my dad was very in contact with my day-to-day sort of learning disabilities because face recognition is it's actually like kind of a visual learning disability.
00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:44.079
It's uh it's like dyslexia, but for faces instead of for words, because you're you're processing it wrong, you know, or you're not processing it efficiently and you're not connecting it to the meaning that you want to be connecting it to.
00:20:44.319 --> 00:20:51.279
Anyway, I had like a lot of other things that definitely should have counted as learning disorders, but no one really had names for it.
00:20:51.519 --> 00:20:54.799
And I just like could not learn the multiplication tables.
00:20:54.880 --> 00:20:58.079
And I remember my dad made this huge poster for me.
00:20:58.160 --> 00:20:59.279
He was so proud of it.
00:20:59.440 --> 00:21:01.680
It was very well led, like drawn in.
00:21:01.759 --> 00:21:05.519
And he was like, look, like the because he did it so that you only had like one product.
00:21:05.599 --> 00:21:08.000
So like two times four is the same as four times two, or whatever.
00:21:08.160 --> 00:21:11.920
He was like, Look, it's the same, and you don't you only have to learn half as many or whatever it was.
00:21:12.000 --> 00:21:14.799
And I was like, I'm not learning any of those.
00:21:15.279 --> 00:21:21.920
Like, and again, like I was trying, but it just memorizing numbers without context means nothing to me.
00:21:22.079 --> 00:21:25.039
I just I can't hold numbers in my head for very long.
00:21:25.519 --> 00:21:26.400
All right, well, cool.
00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:29.359
That is a great explanation about the skepticism.
00:21:29.440 --> 00:21:32.319
Uh, I really like that explanation for that.
00:21:32.400 --> 00:21:33.200
So thank you.
00:21:33.519 --> 00:21:34.640
What about science?
00:21:34.880 --> 00:21:37.680
How can science squelch skepticism?
00:21:37.839 --> 00:21:40.720
What is the science behind face blindness?
00:21:41.119 --> 00:21:46.000
People are always very convinced by brain scans and sort of neurological explanations.
00:21:46.240 --> 00:21:54.960
But the thing is, is that honestly, neuroscience is such a young, a young science that we don't actually really know how anything works yet.
00:21:55.039 --> 00:21:59.839
So we also don't know how anything goes wrong, you know, but you still see a lot of neuroscience.
00:22:00.319 --> 00:22:04.480
science-based explanations and in like sort of modern media.
00:22:04.640 --> 00:22:11.200
Like everyone with ADHD thinks they have like a dopamine limitation, like not enough dopamine or whatever, right?
00:22:11.440 --> 00:22:14.240
And that's definitely that's definitely not the problem.
00:22:15.279 --> 00:22:19.359
You have the right amount of dopamine unless you have like MS or something.
00:22:19.599 --> 00:22:20.400
Parkinson's.
00:22:20.559 --> 00:22:26.960
But anyway, with the face blind researchers, face blindness is a very sneaky problem.
00:22:27.599 --> 00:22:34.640
And and so when I post like I post videos that are like if you can't follow a movie like you're probably face blind.
00:22:34.799 --> 00:22:42.400
Like if you if all the characters in the movie look the same to you, that's like the number one sign of face blindness because mass media makes media for the masses.
00:22:42.559 --> 00:22:47.359
And 98% of people can keep track of characters just based on their faces.
00:22:47.440 --> 00:22:49.359
And if they get a haircut, it's not a huge deal.
00:22:49.519 --> 00:22:52.880
If they put on a hat or put on makeup, not a huge deal for most people.
00:22:53.039 --> 00:22:58.160
But for faceblind people it is a huge deal because it gets past all of our secret hacks, right?
00:22:58.240 --> 00:23:00.480
Because you have all of these hacks and you don't even know.
00:23:00.640 --> 00:23:05.839
You don't even know how you develop them or what they are or when you're employing them, I think most of the time.
00:23:06.079 --> 00:23:12.880
And so the these scientists have figured out ways to get around our hacks, basically.
00:23:13.039 --> 00:23:35.759
And so when I went and did my face recognition testing, I was given so many different types of tests that basically the idea is just to bombard people until like they find the weaknesses in your sort of defense system because we're all really good at faking it or sort of figuring out faces from context or whatever else.
00:23:35.920 --> 00:23:38.720
And then it's really fluky too and you think you're crazy.
00:23:38.799 --> 00:23:46.480
So like one time my friend Dan just told me that like he had just come to my book talk and I had talked all about how I'm faceling blah blah blah.
00:23:46.559 --> 00:23:51.680
And then I recognized him at like 10 yards in a parade that I was not expecting to see him at, right?
00:23:51.839 --> 00:23:55.119
And that's the hardest thing is like not not expecting to see someone.
00:23:55.200 --> 00:24:00.720
And then I see my friend Dan walking in a parade that I didn't know he was in juggling probably in an outfit.
00:24:00.880 --> 00:24:08.319
And he was like Sadie's a fraud like she just recognized but like who knows I maybe it was how he moved you know maybe I don't know how I did it either.
00:24:08.480 --> 00:24:10.319
It's really flu it's really fluky.
00:24:10.640 --> 00:24:29.039
And um so so the thing that scientists bring to the table I think is the complexity right like they're like you know what there's a lot of ways to be face blind like to pick any two face blind people at random and they might be failing at completely different parts of the face recognition and retrieval process.
00:24:29.279 --> 00:24:52.400
Yeah brains are so complicated and so interesting and all of our big buckets like ADHD and autism and even face blindness which feels very narrow they have so much heterogeneity that they are not mapping into the physical reality of our brains very it's not a one-to-one map at all and it may not be mappable in any realistic way in the long run.
00:24:52.720 --> 00:24:53.200
Right.
00:24:53.440 --> 00:24:56.640
That's why I always tell people you are 100% unique.
00:24:57.039 --> 00:25:33.200
Yeah yeah though you know it's some a lot of times it's people just sort of overgeneralize I feel like my mom just texted me this the other day and she's like well there's nothing normal no one's normal and I'm like okay no one's exactly the same as anyone else but most people are in that big part of the hump of the normal curve like which is to say within two standard deviations like that's still pretty broad right but if you're within two standard deviations on any given trait you're probably within two standard deviations on almost all the other traits right the people who hang out in the tails tend to hang out in the tails across domains.
00:25:33.440 --> 00:25:44.240
And so that means that like if you really if it was possible you know to like look at the standard deviation of standard deviations basically there were the people in the tails are in the tails.
00:25:44.319 --> 00:26:18.480
And so there we are the weirdos like you know everyone's unique everyone's special we're not like I'm not saying we're cooler or whatever but there are weirdos we're in the tails and we're having a different experience than everyone else right but even within the quote unquote normal people like what I do on this podcast is I just ask people questions right and it doesn't matter where they're at every interview is is unique and I hear things I've never heard before from normal people.
00:26:19.039 --> 00:26:23.440
Yeah yeah I mean that's yeah the human experience is vast for sure.
00:26:23.920 --> 00:26:43.119
That's what I love about it is you know science can make these groups and make these generalizations and decide these certain things but there are all these little details that you miss unless you focus on the person sitting in front of you and just listen to what they say.
00:26:43.359 --> 00:26:55.599
It's all like point of view kind of and like magnitude questions because on the other hand if you cut open any of our brains like our Wernicke's area like that does language is always basically in the same spot.
00:26:55.759 --> 00:27:12.240
Like that's kind of wild you know so in some ways like actually humans are almost identical and like if you were an alien coming from you know outer space and learning about animals like you might think like animals are all basically the same because we have so much of our DNA in common or whatever else.
00:27:12.480 --> 00:27:25.279
And we think that about ourselves everybody I've ever talked to about this oh I just thought everybody thought the way I I did or visually I did I'm glad I'm glad to know that because like I feel like I feel like that is not appreciated.
00:27:25.440 --> 00:27:31.359
And when I was you probably came across this my book but like this is not just ordinary modern people doing this.
00:27:31.519 --> 00:27:37.680
This is throughout time all of the greatest thinkers assumed that everyone else was thinking like them.
00:27:37.920 --> 00:27:46.160
And so Freud thought everyone was pervy you know like um and Skinner thought that everyone was had apantasia just like him.
00:27:46.400 --> 00:28:01.920
Plato and Aristotle like thought that people like visualizing was the only way to think or words were the only way to think you know so everyone just thought that their experience was basically the same as everyone else's and that's I think that's so wild because it's so not true.
00:28:02.079 --> 00:28:14.480
As soon as you start talking to people and so why did it take us so long to realize that this is something science brings is that it's helping people believe other people's reports about their inner experience.
00:28:14.720 --> 00:28:20.880
So if I say listen guys I can't visualize a lot of people would just be like well we're probably talking about different things or whatever.
00:28:21.119 --> 00:28:21.279
Right.
00:28:21.359 --> 00:28:27.519
It's just a language thing or language because we don't have a great vocabulary for talking about inner experiences.
00:28:27.839 --> 00:28:31.200
And so I'm like yeah I don't know I'm pretty sure I'm not visualizing.
00:28:31.359 --> 00:28:48.400
So the scientist could come in and they can see that you're not using your brain the same way other people are right like they can do fMRI and see your visual areas are not lighting up when you're imagining I have great pictures of my brain not lighting up when I'm imagining but lighting up exactly right when I'm actually seeing faces or places or whatever.
00:28:48.559 --> 00:29:30.799
There was an amazing article that literally came out like two days ago that like in my perfect world would have been a front page story, but I guess there's more important news or whatever where they literally they've tapped individual neurons in brains and they this is I'm just like I think this is so wild because these are human beings that are seeing and imagining and they figured out basically the math program that their brain was using to encode the information at an individual neuron like level and then they could decode it so they could have the person imagine that thing and they could put it like they could say oh look they're look they're imagining a smiley face or whatever.
00:29:30.960 --> 00:29:40.799
So you're literally using the exact same neurons firing in the exact same way not all of the same neurons it's actually a subset when you are visualizing an object.
00:29:41.039 --> 00:29:48.640
Wow and but we're not doing any of that right our brains are like nope we're not gonna be doing that have you ever heard of uh Dr.
00:29:48.799 --> 00:29:49.839
Ellen Langer?
00:29:50.000 --> 00:29:54.880
Uh-uh so she has this this little thing that I just really love.
00:29:55.039 --> 00:29:59.039
I'm gonna show it real quick and I want to get your thoughts on it.
00:29:59.519 --> 00:30:07.440
So I'm at this horse event and this man asked me can I watch his horse for him because he wants to get a hot dog for the horse.
00:30:08.000 --> 00:30:12.480
No one knows better as well but not better than I horses don't eat meat.
00:30:12.640 --> 00:30:18.160
But being nice I said of course he came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it.
00:30:18.400 --> 00:30:22.960
And at that moment I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong.
00:30:23.200 --> 00:30:30.160
Now what people need to understand is that all of our facts virtually all of our facts come from science.
00:30:30.640 --> 00:30:32.160
They come from experiments.
00:30:32.319 --> 00:30:46.079
But experiments can only give us probabilities that if I were to do this exact same thing and you can never do it exactly the same way any experiment but if I were to do it exactly the same way I'm likely to get these results.
00:30:46.400 --> 00:30:52.319
These kinds of horses given this amount of meat tend not to eat the meat.
00:30:52.480 --> 00:30:56.480
You know it's much easier to say horses don't eat meat but it's wrong.
00:30:56.720 --> 00:31:04.640
And because all of the facts we're given all of these absolutes we believe we know if we know we don't need to tune in.
00:31:04.880 --> 00:31:25.759
And so you know many people I think if they saw they were wrong as as I did in that moment would feel bad would worry I was ecstatic because that opened up a world of possibilities that means everything I thought couldn't be maybe it could be that's a that's a great way to look at it.
00:31:25.839 --> 00:31:40.720
But you know what I think she missed out on though is that most research is called nomothetic and it's looking at averages and it's looking at um a big group of of animals and actually trying to smooth out the individual differences.
00:31:40.960 --> 00:31:43.920
And what we're talking about is individual differences.
00:31:44.079 --> 00:32:01.359
And you can do research that is actually focused in on what these these differences are and it's usually called like ideographic research but people in general are most interested in the averages you know but that actually flattens out a huge amount of interesting and meaningful variation.
00:32:01.759 --> 00:32:14.960
So like yeah so that horse is probably in the tail right like most horses don't eat meat but that horse maybe loves meat you know and so that horse is in that 2% that usually gets sort of flattened out when you're looking at averages.
00:32:15.279 --> 00:32:15.599
Right.
00:32:15.839 --> 00:32:18.400
And that's why I think both are are very important.
00:32:18.640 --> 00:32:31.680
We need the sciences we need the averages but don't forget about the horse that can eat meat because it doesn't matter who I interview they say something I never heard before it happens every single time.
00:32:32.000 --> 00:32:42.480
So I love the averages but I love to get to those unique things that we all experience and that we all have that we all assume are normal and everybody does it this way.
00:32:42.559 --> 00:32:59.359
Yeah I I love to pull those out and what happens a lot of times is I will ask somebody a question about how they experience something internally and instead of answering me about their experience they will start talking about research.
00:32:59.680 --> 00:33:16.000
No funny that's right yeah or I need to research that more or they say this or and I just I wonder why so many people tend to default to something they read somewhere once rather than what they're actually experiencing themselves.
00:33:16.319 --> 00:33:23.920
I bet that I mean I would assume that those are the people who are kind of like me are not paying a lot of attention to their internal experience.
00:33:24.079 --> 00:33:51.599
Those are people honestly I love like this is my bias like I like averages I like I like research and I do not introspect a very much and I actually totally thought introspection was mostly garbage until I like wrote this whole book and I was really really impressed with these scientists that are led by Russell Herlbert because they do this extremely like ideographic individual focused investigation into internal experiences.
00:33:51.920 --> 00:34:09.119
They give you like a beeper the beeper like beeps you at random during the day you have to write down the contents of your consciousness right before it beeped right so you don't want to say oh I thought I heard the beep and I I thought about whatever you have to write down like literally what was in your brain right before the beep.
00:34:09.280 --> 00:34:18.079
And I went into this study thinking that you know it's always I feel like I I always have like little snippets of songs running through my head and like not much else.
00:34:18.320 --> 00:34:22.239
And when I did this study like I think they only caught a song one time.
00:34:22.559 --> 00:34:32.159
Most of the time I am just existing and and there's nothing really of much consequence going on in my mind except for like experiencing.
00:34:32.239 --> 00:34:43.039
So I'm like well I was taking in the green of that leaf or I was like looking at the triangle of the bark or whatever like a lot of nature looking I look at nature a lot and just like just look at it.
00:34:43.199 --> 00:34:46.320
It's not like I don't do anything with it.
00:34:46.639 --> 00:35:02.000
So anyway this is all to say that like Russell you know he's like no one really actually knows about their inner experience that well because the notable things are the things you remember the nightmare you had or the the song that is is in your head so much it's annoying the shit out of you.
00:35:02.239 --> 00:35:18.960
But like my actual day-to-day moment is just like I see a green tree or whatever, you know, and then but other people have totally different ones and what he found is like if you have like a psychological problem, you often have like a busy, busy brain like specifically I think it was bulimics or anorexic people.
00:35:19.119 --> 00:35:22.000
This one woman he is like this is a one person study.
00:35:22.079 --> 00:35:24.400
And that's why this is not done very much, right?
00:35:24.559 --> 00:35:39.360
Because it's like you end up with like a very detailed sort of description of this one human being's like inner life but what does that mean in like the larger context how is that applicable to anyone else it's a very labor intensive process too.
00:35:39.599 --> 00:35:54.079
They found though that like in a in a set of I don't know maybe like a few dozen people with anorexia or bulimia they did tend to have like a lot more like going on like two or three internal monologues at the same time like with dialogue like interweaving together.
00:35:54.239 --> 00:36:09.039
And anyway so I thought that was really wild because that's like so different for me where I basically never have any conscious experience and like there's some people who are their heads are just buzzing with things and it seems like it would be very distracting.
00:36:09.360 --> 00:36:09.599
Right.
00:36:09.840 --> 00:36:12.480
I totally resonate with the nothing thing.
00:36:12.719 --> 00:36:19.119
When people ask me to describe it that's what I say I say it is closer to nothing than it is to something.
00:36:19.440 --> 00:36:26.159
These scientists are so rigorous they actually described like six different levels of nothingness that my brain would do.
00:36:26.320 --> 00:36:39.920
So like it's like I know that I'm spaced out or I don't even realize that I'm like not thinking about anything or I'm thinking about something but I don't know exactly what it is or I'm thinking about something and I do know what it is but only after the fact or something like that.
00:36:40.079 --> 00:36:41.599
They really like mapped it out.
00:36:42.079 --> 00:37:12.960
But this is actually to your other point which is that language loves categories right people will be like I'm an extrovert I'm an introvert but like unless you're in the bottom or top two percent you are not you are like maybe you're like a 40% like you know you're 40% extrovert and 60 whatever and but we don't have words for that and people just do like categories and I think language in general just likes categories is that a chair or not a chair we don't want like that's chair ish that's chair adjacent.
00:37:13.280 --> 00:37:20.400
Right and and going back to uh that research you're talking about that's exactly the type of research that I do.
00:37:20.559 --> 00:37:24.000
Yeah the podcast is called Discovering Your Mind.
00:37:24.320 --> 00:37:34.880
I interview someone I ask them questions and I call that episode Discovering the mind of so and so and so it is a very uh personal thing.
00:37:35.119 --> 00:37:40.159
You can't really gain averages from that or conclusions from it.
00:37:40.320 --> 00:37:58.320
I the only conclusion I come from is everyone's unique right because I just get all these beautiful uh descriptions about how they do things or how they think or how this shows up or how their mind smells in this situation or not in that one or and it just goes on and on and on.
00:37:58.480 --> 00:38:10.000
And so I kind of love just delving into that area of who knows what we're gonna uncover and who knows what it means.
00:38:10.239 --> 00:38:11.920
But I think it's pretty cool.
00:38:12.159 --> 00:38:15.920
Yeah you know I just I'm just not that introspective.
00:38:16.000 --> 00:38:50.559
So it was a very weird experience for me to do this deep dive into my own mind with all of these scientists you know and um and sort of to learn how scientists are beginning to describe subjective experience objectively I think that's like the coolest thing because that's all when I you know when I like signed up for psychology all I want to know is what it's like to be someone else you know what is it like to be you what is it like to be a dog that what is it like to be a bat like the like I want to know what it's like like what's the texture of the experience?
00:38:50.719 --> 00:39:00.079
What would it be like if I turned into a bat tomorrow and that's exactly sort of the area that psychology when they were trying to be a serious science just carved right out.
00:39:00.159 --> 00:40:19.519
They were like uh we don't worry about that like we're interested in behavior because we can measure it and but now clever scientists are figuring out how to how to make measurements of things that of behavior that is that is indicative of your inner life like you know reflexes like your your irises contracting or expanding do you have aphantasia embrace your superpower and help spread awareness and style with Shane's brain's new line of aphantasia themed t-shirts and other merch available on shane's braindomain.com and Amazon okay side tangent over let's get back to face blindness here real quick okay what are some misconceptions people have about face blindness I mean I honestly like it's the consistency people think that like we never can recognize faces but actually like we just have a shaky representation of faces so in the right lighting in the right context like we can recognize faces but but we don't have that really impressive robust almost photographic memory that normal humans have which is again just wild how good normal people are at this compared to other animals or even compared to other types of objects.
00:40:19.599 --> 00:40:36.960
Anyway so that's a big misconception and then another one is people all all the people who are faceblind I swear to God they will email me and they'll be like well I can't follow movies but I think I'm just mildly face blind like if you think you're mildly face blind you should definitely take a test because you're probably like freaking super face blind like me.
00:40:37.119 --> 00:40:56.159
Like no one is underestimating how face blind they are I feel like like if you think you might be below average on this like you're probably super below average that's anyway that's my that's my bias perhaps but also people think that you maybe see faces as blurry or you can't see faces at all and that's just not it.
00:40:56.320 --> 00:41:04.079
It's just like dyslexic people they can see the letters they're just not processing it as efficiently as um neurotypical people.
00:41:04.239 --> 00:41:17.280
And that's also something that's like a bigger thing is that we don't realize how much of our world of the objective world that you live in is your brain making educated guesses and getting it wrong a lot of the time.
00:41:17.519 --> 00:42:05.039
And and so if you have um a bit of a weird visual processing quirk of any kind you actually get to experience the world being constructed in your conscious world like and you get actually see like the the the glitch in the matrix in a way that I think neurotypical people don't get to see like I've I've seen a rock transform into a horse like or a horse into a rock actually or a deer into a rock specifically like right before my eyes and that's the kind of mistake your brain actually really loves to cover up you know because your brain is like oh you didn't see that that was not it this is it you know like seriously your brain is very your conscious experience of the world your brain wants it to be smooth and predictable and not scary and not weird.
00:42:05.199 --> 00:42:12.719
And this is why like you take drugs like so that unravels and all of a sudden things you're seeing are not making sense.
00:42:12.880 --> 00:42:20.639
Like you might actually be perceived like tapping into an earlier point in your perception before your brain has just smoothed it out, you know?
00:42:21.039 --> 00:42:29.360
All right very interesting I think you've already highlighted a couple of these but can you identify some upsides and some downsides to being faceblind?
00:42:29.599 --> 00:42:37.760
Yeah the upsides are mostly the result of compensations that you just develop magically or like by accident.
00:42:38.159 --> 00:43:04.559
So for me and for actually I think in general like most face blind people just get more comfortable with ambiguity than normal people have to get because if you never are a hundred percent sure who you're talking to you're just probabilistic on it which is the case honestly even like with my husband in my house like I'm assuming that it's my husband who's in my house the like tall hairy guy but like someone could play a really mean prank on me.
00:43:04.719 --> 00:43:08.559
They really could so I'm not a hundred percent certain that it's always him.
00:43:08.800 --> 00:43:43.039
So I think that we are just a little like in in the world that we live in in the current world where things happen that you didn't even think could possibly happen, you know, I think it actually is is a a real strength to be able just actually like the woman whose clip you just showed to revise if you're like horses don't eat meat and then you see a horse eat meat if you are someone who is used to just quickly revising like oh I'm talking to my brother no I'm talking to my cousin or whatever like we can revise on the run and not give away that it was a surprise and and maybe not be surprised by revisions as much.
00:43:43.199 --> 00:44:05.119
I think that's actually a real strength in the world that face one people at least I got and maybe other faceline people too and then the other and this is something I've heard from a lot of people is um generic friendliness that is convincing Is actually like super helpful to in a lot of different careers.
00:44:05.280 --> 00:44:10.960
Like there's a faceline politician, which is wild to me because like, how can you be a faceline politician?
00:44:11.119 --> 00:44:13.360
You know, but he does it and he's great.
00:44:13.599 --> 00:44:17.519
John Hickenlooper from uh Colorado, I think he's a senator.
00:44:17.679 --> 00:44:19.119
I assume he's still in office.
00:44:19.280 --> 00:44:24.480
He's just generically friendly and like he doesn't treat anyone like they're more important than anyone else, you know?
00:44:24.559 --> 00:44:31.199
So if he's talking to someone and like another senator walks into the room, he doesn't like drop this the random person.
00:44:31.280 --> 00:44:33.280
Like he's just as interested in that person.
00:44:33.679 --> 00:44:40.880
In Washington, DC, there's like a joke that like people are always looking over your shoulder for someone more important, but faceblind people, we're not doing that.
00:44:41.039 --> 00:44:43.760
Like same in Hollywood, like we don't know who you are.
00:44:43.920 --> 00:44:46.480
So we treat everyone with equal respect.
00:44:47.519 --> 00:44:48.480
Awesome.
00:44:48.800 --> 00:44:50.320
Beautiful insights there.
00:44:50.400 --> 00:44:51.599
I love those.
00:44:52.239 --> 00:45:00.159
Other than not being able to follow plots of movies, what are some other signs and symptoms that you may have face blindness?
00:45:00.400 --> 00:45:18.159
I love doing this for children in particular because parents do not realize, I mean, like children who look lost at school pickup, who look lost on who can't find their friends on the playground, who avoid using people's names, and who don't recognize people out of context.
00:45:18.320 --> 00:45:19.679
All of those things are classic.
00:45:19.840 --> 00:45:28.639
So if you're someone who has failed to recognize like your roommate in the store when you weren't expecting to see her or something like that, like you're probably facebind.
00:45:28.880 --> 00:45:30.400
And uh, and I have tests.
00:45:30.480 --> 00:45:36.559
If people want to find out, there's tests I might linked from my website that are real university tests, or you can just Google and try to find some.
00:45:36.960 --> 00:45:45.199
The other signs, yeah, the really the best sign is like if you can't follow movies or television shows and you think all the actors look basically the same.
00:45:46.400 --> 00:45:46.719
Okay.
00:45:47.199 --> 00:45:56.800
Uh just to wrap up on the face blindness thing, um, are there any additional tips and tricks to navigating life with face blindness?
00:45:57.440 --> 00:46:01.280
You know, the thing is like most people who are face blind do not know it, right?
00:46:01.440 --> 00:46:10.960
So if you're an adult and you're face blind, you've probably already developed a whole suite of compensations and ways to like get through your life.
00:46:11.440 --> 00:46:16.559
But tips I've seen people trading online, like maybe tips that people didn't think about.
00:46:16.719 --> 00:46:24.480
So a lot of moms or parents who have kids that and they have to pick them up at school, like feel like bad parents because they can't find their kids, right?
00:46:24.719 --> 00:46:30.239
And so what some parents do is they make their kids wear like very bright accessories or bright clothing.
00:46:30.400 --> 00:46:36.320
Oh, and similarly, if you have a kid who's face blind, like do not make that kid deal with uniforms.
00:46:36.400 --> 00:46:41.440
Like do not send them to a school that has uniforms or a sports team that requires uniforms.
00:46:41.679 --> 00:46:46.639
Like it's really that just makes life impossible for them if you can avoid it.
00:46:47.119 --> 00:46:48.880
Closed captions on television.
00:46:49.039 --> 00:46:52.079
It's so great that everyone's just using closed captions all the time now.
00:46:52.159 --> 00:46:54.639
It really makes life easier for a lot of people.
00:46:54.880 --> 00:47:10.960
That's called the like ramp effect, I think, or the curb cut effect is when you make life easier for one group of people, like wheelchair users, by cutting ramps into curbs, all of a sudden you're helpful to a lot of other people too, like people with strollers or you know, people with shopping carts or whatever else.
00:47:11.199 --> 00:47:11.360
Right.
00:47:11.599 --> 00:47:13.760
So fat people, yeah.
00:47:13.840 --> 00:47:14.800
I don't like a curb.
00:47:14.880 --> 00:47:16.480
I like to go down a ramp.
00:47:17.039 --> 00:47:17.760
There you go.
00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:19.280
Yeah, me too.
00:47:19.760 --> 00:47:21.199
All right, all right.
00:47:21.360 --> 00:47:23.280
What is stereo blindness?
00:47:23.599 --> 00:47:28.880
Stereo blindness, it's so a lot of people are stereo blind, but they've never heard the term stereo blindness.
00:47:29.119 --> 00:47:37.440
Most humans can take the two images from their two eyes and then combine them into a single perception in their brain, right?
00:47:37.679 --> 00:47:40.800
And it is effortless and it's three-dimensional.
00:47:41.039 --> 00:47:50.880
But there's a lot of people who that for whatever reason, a lot of times it's because maybe one eye needed a lens, like a glasses, and the other eye didn't need a correction.
00:47:51.039 --> 00:47:56.559
So if you have very different sort of refractor errors in your eyeballs, that can result in stereo blindness.
00:47:56.719 --> 00:48:04.000
And if you are, if your eyes are not aligned perfectly, like it's your brain has very little tolerance for alignment errors.
00:48:04.079 --> 00:48:05.599
I mean, it's really small.
00:48:05.760 --> 00:48:12.559
Your eyes have to be very well aligned to objects, and it actually depends on whether the object's closer or farther from you, right?
00:48:12.639 --> 00:48:17.360
Because if you have you have something right at your nose, your eyes are crossed in order to see it the same way.
00:48:17.519 --> 00:48:26.880
So brain and eyeball alignment is an surprisingly fine-grained, amazing ability that people learn within like, you know, months of being born, usually.
00:48:27.119 --> 00:48:34.960
And if you don't, then you you can end up totally stereo blind where you're always looking out of one eye or the other at any given time.
00:48:35.199 --> 00:48:38.639
But you know, that's actually a simplification I use in real life.
00:48:38.960 --> 00:48:47.840
Actually, it's not just that you're just tuned into like this screen or that screen, the eye you're not using, you do use a bit of the peripheral vision always.
00:48:48.000 --> 00:48:55.760
So you always have use the peripheral vision for both eyes, but otherwise the central vision is just tuned into one eye or the other eye.
00:48:56.000 --> 00:48:58.159
And as a result, I mean, it's wild.
00:48:58.320 --> 00:49:19.039
This is a basic the if you are like that, if you are like me and you have alternate, you're looking in out of one eye at a time at any given moment, your brain wiring is different from the very first step of vision processing, which is why the first thing your brain does when it gets your two streams of vision is it puts it into the same neurons, basically, like one step into your brain.
00:49:19.119 --> 00:49:25.039
And if you mess that up or do it differently, everything downstream is affected.
00:49:25.199 --> 00:49:37.519
And so, like traditionally, like so people, if you have amblyopia or strabismus, you are probably stereo blindness, is your actual disability, like the name for your disability versus the description of what your eyes are doing.
00:49:37.679 --> 00:49:40.000
It means that you're seeing the world is really flat.
00:49:40.079 --> 00:49:42.639
Um, and so we tend to knock over glasses.
00:49:42.880 --> 00:49:46.159
Usually we're clumsy, we take shorter steps.
00:49:46.320 --> 00:49:48.000
You over time learn to take shorter steps.
00:49:48.159 --> 00:49:54.480
The way you reach and grab things is different, where you actually hold on to objects for longer before you pick it up.
00:49:54.559 --> 00:50:01.519
That it's like a milliseconds longer, but it's it's still an obvious like sort of topographical difference to how you pick things up.
00:50:01.679 --> 00:50:03.280
And we have trouble with crowding.
00:50:03.360 --> 00:50:06.559
So if letters are kind of close together in a sign, we have trouble reading it.
00:50:06.880 --> 00:50:13.039
Again, even if like our visual acuity is perfectly fine, it's a visual processing deficit.
00:50:13.519 --> 00:50:15.440
We see colors slightly differently.
00:50:15.599 --> 00:50:20.239
Like it's wild how much it affects your life and how much they tried to like really bury it.
00:50:20.320 --> 00:50:27.360
Like, you know, I got eye surgery when I was a little baby, and my parents were told, like, okay, you're fixed now, it's fine now.
00:50:27.440 --> 00:50:34.079
And it's like, no, like you literally just hid my disability from other people, but I am still not seeing normally.
00:50:34.239 --> 00:50:39.119
Like, I look normal to other people, but I am not seeing the world normally at all.
00:50:39.280 --> 00:50:39.920
Yeah.
00:50:40.559 --> 00:50:43.840
And so, and it makes and it has like consequences in your life too.
00:50:44.000 --> 00:50:53.039
Like, even people don't know that they're stereoblin, but even when they don't know, they're less likely to learn how to drive because driving is scarier if you can't see in three dimensions.
00:50:53.280 --> 00:50:56.960
Like people who were more likely to trip and fall as older adults.
00:50:57.119 --> 00:51:03.280
Like, um, again, even if you don't know your stereobind, it affects your life like in ways that are pretty profound.
00:51:03.440 --> 00:51:07.440
I think that's the way in which my brain is wired the most differently than other people.
00:51:07.599 --> 00:51:22.480
Like, I think aphantasias puts me in the 2% of weirdos, and certainly prosapagnosia face blindness puts me in the 2%, but it's the stereo blindness that is fundamentally wired my brain differently, the visual system differently than how other people's are.
00:51:22.719 --> 00:51:22.960
Right.
00:51:23.039 --> 00:51:26.159
You'd say it affects your life the most.
00:51:27.280 --> 00:51:29.840
And also, but it's also so invisible, right?
00:51:30.000 --> 00:51:35.440
Like because when I didn't learn how to drive when I was a kid because I was scared, but I never admitted it to myself.
00:51:35.519 --> 00:51:37.679
I said it was for the environment.
00:51:38.079 --> 00:51:39.760
And then I realized it a lot later.
00:51:39.920 --> 00:51:41.519
I was like, no, it's because I was scared.
00:51:41.599 --> 00:51:42.480
Like I was scared.
00:51:42.639 --> 00:51:46.079
I didn't I do a lot of things that are bad for the environment.
00:51:48.719 --> 00:51:49.360
Wow.
00:51:49.840 --> 00:51:57.119
Okay, so is stereo blindness directly connected to misaligned eyes or lazy eye or absolutely.
00:51:57.199 --> 00:52:01.599
If your eyes are not aligned, you're almost certainly stereo blind.
00:52:01.760 --> 00:52:08.719
There are some people whose, if their eyes are very consistently misaligned in the exact same way, their brains can learn.
00:52:08.800 --> 00:52:11.199
It's called like anomalous correspondence or something.
00:52:11.360 --> 00:52:16.000
Their brains can actually learn to see in 3D, even though their eyes aren't aligned, but they are very, very rare.
00:52:16.159 --> 00:52:19.519
So if your eyes are misaligned, you are probably stereo blind like me.
00:52:19.760 --> 00:52:23.599
And stereo acuity is actually not just like an on or off thing.
00:52:23.840 --> 00:52:30.719
So there to be a fighter pilot or a surgeon, you have to be have exceptional like stereo acuity.
00:52:31.039 --> 00:52:38.719
And um, and there's plenty of people who just have poor stereo acuity, like not for any clear reason, just their brain isn't that good at it.
00:52:38.880 --> 00:52:52.000
And so um, people who play sports, like this is a whole area in sports where you can really improve like a batter's performance, like a professional baseball batter's performance by giving them uh stereo like vision training.
00:52:52.159 --> 00:52:53.360
Isn't that cool?
00:52:53.679 --> 00:52:54.079
Yeah.
00:52:54.320 --> 00:53:04.719
So like most people could probably improve significantly in their stereo vision if they wanted to put in the time to do all the exercises and to practice it.
00:53:05.039 --> 00:53:08.079
So when did you become aware that you were stereo blind?
00:53:08.159 --> 00:53:12.079
Was that kind of the same time you were finding about face blindness?
00:53:12.159 --> 00:53:13.599
Did it kind of happen at the same time?
00:53:13.840 --> 00:53:20.639
It was actually like many years before, but I didn't, again, I didn't integrate it and I didn't connect it to anything else, you know.
00:53:20.880 --> 00:53:28.400
I learned all of this when I was interviewing a famous vision scientist named Margaret Livingstone for an article about artists.
00:53:28.559 --> 00:53:39.840
Anyway, it turns out this is actually a weird, this is the only real advantage of being stereoblind, is it makes it a little bit like you're more likely to be a visual artist, especially with painting and photography.
00:53:40.000 --> 00:53:44.800
You are taking the three-dimensional world and putting it on a flat plane, and you're you've already done that.
00:53:44.880 --> 00:53:46.000
You're already an expert in that.
00:53:47.440 --> 00:53:52.320
So I was interviewing her about that, and I and I was like, Well, I'm my eyes aren't aligned and I can't draw.
00:53:52.400 --> 00:53:59.199
And she's like, Well, you still are stair-blind, you just didn't you just didn't take it to a uh artistic place.
00:53:59.360 --> 00:54:00.639
And I was like, What do you mean?
00:54:00.800 --> 00:54:04.480
And then like I went to my ophthalmologist, and like they're like, Yeah, you're totally stairblind.
00:54:04.639 --> 00:54:05.280
No one ever told you.
00:54:05.360 --> 00:54:07.280
And I was like, No, no one ever told me.
00:54:07.519 --> 00:54:12.800
So I that's I found out through this woman, but I didn't think about it until I found out I was face blind.
00:54:12.880 --> 00:54:15.760
And I was trying to figure out how why am I face blind?
00:54:16.000 --> 00:54:20.079
Because most people, it is it's very genetic.
00:54:20.320 --> 00:54:25.199
Like it's there's a strong genetic component, but they haven't been able to find a single gene.
00:54:25.360 --> 00:54:35.039
It's one of these classic, sort of increasingly common things where it's like a choir of genes, and you just get a bad roll, you know, of a few different dice, and that's how you end up face blind.
00:54:35.119 --> 00:54:38.800
But again, like these are genetically affect loaded dice.
00:54:39.199 --> 00:54:42.960
And um, anyway, but the long story short is that my family is not face-blind.
00:54:43.119 --> 00:54:46.639
Like my family actually tends to be excellent at face recognition.
00:54:46.880 --> 00:54:48.079
So I was like, what the hell?
00:54:48.239 --> 00:54:55.760
And I found out that if you're stereo blind, even like it you have lifelong face processing issues.
00:54:55.840 --> 00:55:01.199
Like you're not necessarily totally face blind, but you end up, it messes up your face processing.
00:55:01.360 --> 00:55:09.599
So that's how I that's how I really started to dig in on the fact that it really was affecting my life in all these really huge ways.
00:55:09.760 --> 00:55:15.199
Being face blind also has weirdly affected my entire life in ways I had no idea.
00:55:15.360 --> 00:55:19.679
You know, like I've never dated anyone who was not very visually distinctive.
00:55:19.840 --> 00:55:22.079
Like I've never been asked out by anyone.
00:55:22.320 --> 00:55:26.559
I didn't learn to drive, so that like really limited me to living in big cities my whole life.
00:55:26.880 --> 00:55:33.199
There's a lot of ways that these things can invisibly shape your whole life, and you have no idea.
00:55:33.519 --> 00:55:33.920
Right.
00:55:34.079 --> 00:55:41.280
And and you know, jumping ahead to aphantasia, because that's what I'm most f familiar with, the same thing happens.
00:55:41.440 --> 00:55:54.960
Like you're just used to the way you are, and then when you learn about this thing, oh, that's why I am the way I am, and and that's why my wife reacts the way she reacts, and that's why you know what I mean.
00:55:55.039 --> 00:56:03.679
Like it just solves all these riddles that you never really understood or even knew needed to be understood.
00:56:03.920 --> 00:56:10.880
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of like movies that have surprise endings that make you like rethink the whole previous movie.
00:56:11.039 --> 00:56:11.519
What is it?
00:56:11.599 --> 00:56:12.559
Like I see dead people.
00:56:12.800 --> 00:56:14.000
What was that movie called?
00:56:14.320 --> 00:56:21.840
Uh the Innight, all the Innight Shameline movies are basically how I felt as I was like sort of unearthing all of this information about myself.
00:56:22.239 --> 00:56:22.800
Yeah.
00:56:23.119 --> 00:56:27.199
Yeah, I have an A Fantasia shirt that says, well, that explains a lot.
00:56:29.920 --> 00:56:30.559
Yeah.
00:56:30.960 --> 00:56:31.440
All right.
00:56:31.599 --> 00:56:41.119
Um, in your book, you talked about having either temporary moments of being able to see in 3D or sometimes even permanent fixes.
00:56:41.280 --> 00:56:42.400
Can you talk about that?
00:56:42.719 --> 00:56:43.119
Yeah.
00:56:43.360 --> 00:56:51.599
Well, okay, yeah, that was the coolest thing that happened while I was writing my book is I did get to glimpse the world that everyone else lives in a little bit.
00:56:52.000 --> 00:57:11.039
And the easiest way to do it is with VR glasses because you're the VR can really soup up the information, the uh dimensional information of so the, you know, probably neurotypical people when they use VR, everything looks super 3D or kind of fakely 3D.
00:57:11.199 --> 00:57:17.760
The fakeness and the sort of souped upness is what allows people who can't normally see in 3D to suddenly see it.
00:57:17.920 --> 00:57:30.639
And you know, one of the people I interviewed said, would the first time he saw like a rotating cube in 3D on the VR goggles, he was like ducking, like he was like it felt like it was like coming right out of his face, you know?
00:57:30.800 --> 00:57:39.360
And like people who learn to see in 3D in real life, they always talk about trees and branches, and they're like all of a sudden the trees are reaching out at me.
00:57:39.519 --> 00:57:42.400
It's like scary, you know?
00:57:42.880 --> 00:57:48.159
And I, you know, and when I see trees, like right now, I'm looking at a just sort of a wall of trees.
00:57:48.239 --> 00:57:51.599
And to me, I can't tell what branch is behind what other branch.
00:57:51.840 --> 00:57:55.360
But people who can see in 3D, it's like a beautiful three-dimensional sculpture.
00:57:55.599 --> 00:58:01.360
So I tried really hard to get better at 3D vision, in part because I got a before and after scan.
00:58:01.440 --> 00:58:02.960
Like I could have gotten a before and after.
00:58:03.119 --> 00:58:12.960
I could have been the first person, because like originally they didn't think adults could learn to see in 3D if you couldn't, if you didn't learn it by the time you were like five or six, they thought it was literally impossible.
00:58:13.199 --> 00:58:20.559
And then this woman who happened to be a neuroscientist, she wrote a whole book about it, Sue Barry called Fixing My Gaze or something.
00:58:20.719 --> 00:58:21.760
It's a great book.
00:58:21.920 --> 00:58:34.559
She was a vision scientist, and so this is like such a crazy story because she knew theoretically how 3D vision worked, and she knew what she was missing, but she experientially it was not what she expected, and it was like way cooler.
00:58:34.800 --> 00:58:48.480
And so, because like they tell us, they're like, Listen, you can tell you don't need 3D, you can tell your hand is in front of your other hand because it's occluded, or like you can use, you know, parallax, motion parallax to see that you know, the distances between things, whatever.
00:58:48.719 --> 00:58:53.679
But she's like, No, it's completely different, it's it's experientially so different.
00:58:53.920 --> 00:59:01.599
It's like living in a world versus just staring at it through a window or living looking at a painting, kind of wow, yeah.
00:59:01.760 --> 00:59:12.000
So, anyway, so I got glimpses into that, like especially when it happens, it happened when I was driving and like it seemed like my steering wheel was popping out of me, which is the same thing that happened to Sue Berry, actually.
00:59:12.239 --> 00:59:17.599
And so there's something about like widening your ex expected sort of depth of field.
00:59:17.679 --> 00:59:22.480
Cause like I think people like me just don't expect any depth of field, so we don't really try.
00:59:22.639 --> 00:59:30.880
But if you if your brain is like trying to see this and that, like you're you know, you're the thing right in front of you and the thing kind of far away because you're driving.
00:59:31.119 --> 00:59:36.239
I think that that like sometimes is a way to bootstrap your way into seeing in 3D a little bit.
00:59:36.480 --> 00:59:43.920
Anyway, I did this massive training program too, and I got much better at seeing in 3D, and I got my brain scanned before.
00:59:44.079 --> 00:59:46.320
So if we could see what changed, right?
00:59:46.559 --> 00:59:48.639
But unfortunately, I didn't get good enough.
00:59:48.800 --> 00:59:52.480
Like the scientist was like, listen, your brain's gonna look exactly the same as before.
00:59:52.639 --> 00:59:55.280
He's like, call me if you get under a thousand or whatever.
00:59:55.440 --> 00:59:58.159
And I was like, Oh, I'm just I couldn't get that.
00:59:58.239 --> 01:00:00.719
Was actually literally right where I was plateaued at.
01:00:00.960 --> 01:00:22.719
So anyway, I got access to this like software program that no one gets like everyone should be able to access this like VR software program that can teach you to see in 3D, and because it could it could help millions of people, and there's really no downside except that you can start to see double, like in the and that's actually like a sign that you're doing it right, right?
01:00:23.119 --> 01:00:30.000
But you know, medical devices are regulated and they just don't want people having access to this, like unfettered access.
01:00:30.159 --> 01:00:32.079
And I think it really sucks, honestly.
01:00:32.159 --> 01:00:40.639
I think the medical device field is a big racket because they're all learning, they're all like self-calibrating now, like CPAP machines and stuff.
01:00:40.800 --> 01:00:43.920
So like they're just looping in doctors because it's a racket.
01:00:44.559 --> 01:00:44.960
Right.
01:00:45.199 --> 01:00:46.800
Yeah, I would love to try that.
01:00:47.039 --> 01:00:48.159
Sounds very interesting.
01:00:48.480 --> 01:00:55.760
Yeah, it's really fun, it's cool, but it took a lot of talking people into it to like get me the software anyway.
01:00:55.840 --> 01:00:59.760
So I could still be working on my 3D vision, but I've just been like focused on other things.
01:01:00.079 --> 01:01:07.199
Okay, I think another thing that was in the stereo blindness section was liking to be in the dark.
01:01:07.440 --> 01:01:07.920
Oh, yeah.
01:01:08.159 --> 01:01:09.440
Did you talk about that?
01:01:09.679 --> 01:01:12.159
Yes, so there's like so many so interesting.
01:01:12.239 --> 01:01:12.800
I found this.
01:01:12.880 --> 01:01:22.159
I like so Sue Barry actually suggested this, and she sounded like embarrassed about she was like, Listen, I have this theory and it's probably out there, but this is my theory.
01:01:22.320 --> 01:01:23.920
And I was like, Oh my god, me too.
01:01:24.079 --> 01:01:29.280
Which, okay, so basically, I've always thought that everyone else is like obsessed with like flashlights.
01:01:29.440 --> 01:01:33.280
Like, I'm like, listen, you're in the woods, you don't need a flashlight, like just walk around.
01:01:33.360 --> 01:01:35.519
Sometimes you stub your toe, not a big deal.
01:01:35.679 --> 01:01:43.840
But all the normally sighted people actually really hate being in the dark, but I'm really used to not having as much information, I think, from my visual system.
01:01:44.000 --> 01:01:47.440
So a lot of stereo blind people are just more comfortable in the dark.
01:01:47.519 --> 01:01:57.119
And the way Sue Barry figured it out is she has a staircase that her family, all of her family members would always turn on the light to go up and down the staircase, and she never did.
01:01:57.199 --> 01:02:03.920
And that's what made her realize that they were like more uncomfortable traveling the world without like a lot of light.
01:02:04.320 --> 01:02:11.679
This part about stereo blindness was the most interesting to me because it was something I really didn't know anything about.
01:02:11.920 --> 01:02:16.800
We talked about skepticism earlier, it probably plays a big role here as well.
01:02:17.039 --> 01:02:24.079
And and one of the quotes I wrote down from your book is it says, if someone says they can't see, we should probably believe them.
01:02:24.400 --> 01:02:25.599
Yeah, yeah.
01:02:26.400 --> 01:02:26.880
Yeah.
01:02:27.199 --> 01:02:34.559
Man, there's the I just like heard about this kid who was seeing double her whole life and no one believed her, and she was seeing double.
01:02:34.639 --> 01:02:37.679
It really would have, she could have used some visual help there.
01:02:38.079 --> 01:02:38.800
I think so.
01:02:38.880 --> 01:02:52.239
The thing about stereo blindness is that usually a doctor early in your life knows that you're stereo blind, but they also know that there's no canonically, they didn't believe that there was any cure.
01:02:52.480 --> 01:03:01.360
And so they thought the only thing they could do was to cosmetically line up your eyes, and then they just reassure your parents that it's no big deal.
01:03:01.519 --> 01:03:07.679
And so that's why it's like actually actively sort of buried by the medical industry.
01:03:07.760 --> 01:03:21.519
And I think it's done for the for very compassionate reasons, but the science is beginning to help, like to show that we can actually help people, and cosmetically realigning eyes actually makes it a lot harder for them to see normally in the long run.
01:03:21.760 --> 01:03:31.199
But again, again, we have so much stigma against uh misaligned eyes that getting them cosmetically aligned is is a priority for many parents.
01:03:31.360 --> 01:03:41.360
And I think the medical world just goes along with it, even though it's a hundred percent cosmetic, and we're basically doing like plastic surgery on infants and babies and young children.
01:03:41.920 --> 01:03:43.280
It kind of drives me crazy.
01:03:43.360 --> 01:03:52.800
Like I feel like this is a big deal and no one's listening to me, but I I think I also understand why no one wants to listen to me because it is a very inconvenient sort of truth, you know.
01:03:53.119 --> 01:03:53.519
Right.
01:03:53.679 --> 01:03:55.599
Yeah, that is so interesting.
01:03:55.840 --> 01:04:00.000
So, can you talk about some of the stigma that comes with misaligned eyes?
01:04:00.239 --> 01:04:05.840
Yeah, but I actually only recently would experience it because my eyes were cosmetically aligned my whole life.
01:04:06.000 --> 01:04:10.239
They only recently have decided to go their separate ways, which is very typical, actually.
01:04:10.400 --> 01:04:15.679
So you usually it takes two surgeries to get your eyes in cosmetic alignment when you're a child.
01:04:15.840 --> 01:04:22.239
And then by the time you're like in your 40s, they your eyes drift apart like an old married couple.
01:04:22.800 --> 01:04:32.800
And so I see people talking about getting, you know, another surgery to get their eyes realigned again, but I've decided not to do it because number one, I don't want eye surgery at all.
01:04:32.880 --> 01:04:41.440
It was it was not a delightful experience the first time, and also because I just want to be out here for strabismus awareness.
01:04:41.599 --> 01:04:45.679
You know, I've been posting on TikTok a lot because this is like a good way to sell books.
01:04:46.159 --> 01:04:54.880
So I've been like very active on social media and on every video, it's like you're someone says something mean or weird about my eyes being misaligned.
01:04:55.039 --> 01:04:57.519
And I'm like, yeah, you noticed something about me.
01:04:57.599 --> 01:04:58.960
Let me tell you more about it.
01:04:59.119 --> 01:05:01.440
So trying to use it as a learning thing.
01:05:01.599 --> 01:05:05.599
But but for kids, I mean, it is a real, it's really stigmatizing.
01:05:05.679 --> 01:05:13.440
I read all about the research on stigma, and kids were like more likely to hit their little dollies if their dolls had misaligned eyes.
01:05:13.599 --> 01:05:20.639
Having misaligned eyes in cartoons has long been shorthand for being like a little crazy, right?
01:05:20.880 --> 01:05:27.280
Like if you were trying to draw a crazy person or crazy animal, you would put the eyes like kind of going in different directions.
01:05:27.599 --> 01:05:33.199
So it's yeah, kids are less likely to invite other kids to their birthday parties if they have misaligned eyes.
01:05:33.440 --> 01:05:47.199
Also, and then of course it continues, like, so people are less likely to hire a um a job candidate who has misaligned eyes, or people are less likely to date someone, or you know, it's like you're seen as less attractive if your eyes are misaligned.
01:05:47.599 --> 01:05:54.079
In your book, you talked about how uh left handedness used to carry a similar stigma, but we're over that.
01:05:54.239 --> 01:05:58.079
Do you think we'll ever get over this misaligned eye stigma?
01:05:58.400 --> 01:05:59.760
I think it's gonna be harder because.
01:06:00.480 --> 01:06:06.800
As humans, we're obsessed with eye gaze direction, and this is why we have so much whites around our eyes, right?
01:06:06.880 --> 01:06:13.119
Like if you look at most other animal eyes, they don't have nearly this much like sclera or whatever it's called.
01:06:13.360 --> 01:06:19.280
And so this is actually specifically like evolved to help us see where other people are looking.
01:06:19.519 --> 01:06:24.320
And so when you're yeah, and so people care a lot about gaze direction.
01:06:24.800 --> 01:06:38.559
And if you're talking to someone and it looks like you're not paying attention, like you're not focused totally on them, because one of your eyes is like going that direction, that's actually gives people a gut feeling that you are sneaky or sort of shifty.
01:06:38.800 --> 01:06:51.440
There's a language, this is reflected in language because the words for um lazy eye in many languages is means like like sort of sketchy, like louche, I believe, in French.
01:06:51.519 --> 01:06:58.239
And I mean, the word there's a lot of words that mean both lazy eye and also like sketchy.
01:06:58.800 --> 01:07:00.800
Great insight, great insight there.
01:07:01.039 --> 01:07:01.599
All right.
01:07:02.880 --> 01:07:06.480
What about uh tips and tricks on this one?
01:07:06.800 --> 01:07:10.079
Tips and tricks for navigating life mysteriousness.
01:07:12.079 --> 01:07:13.519
That's it so interesting.
01:07:13.679 --> 01:07:19.920
I mean, you know, if you have a kid who's like legit stereo blind, I guess don't make them do ball sports.
01:07:21.519 --> 01:07:26.559
And like, and like probably, I mean, we actually are okay drivers.
01:07:26.880 --> 01:07:30.000
The way it's been described to me is we're not any worse than anyone else.
01:07:30.079 --> 01:07:37.360
But like, you don't want to be a commercial driver, you know, like a truck driver or even maybe a taxi driver if you're if you're stereo blind.
01:07:37.599 --> 01:07:50.239
Um, in terms of like workarounds, I mean, honestly, you already have them all, you know, your your your brain is already sort of almost seamlessly switching between your eyes and figuring out how to integrate information.
01:07:50.400 --> 01:07:53.199
But our whole worlds actually do jump a little bit.
01:07:53.280 --> 01:07:55.360
Um, and so it can make reading harder.
01:07:55.519 --> 01:08:00.320
And as an adult, like as my eyes have drifted apart, like it is a little bit harder for me to read.
01:08:00.400 --> 01:08:08.000
I often cover one eye so that I can not have like confusing jumping happening when I'm trying to start a new line.
01:08:08.320 --> 01:08:17.600
Tune in next week for part two of face blindness, stereo blindness, aphantasia, and s dam with Sadie Dienfelder.
01:08:19.840 --> 01:08:28.079
If you like what you hear, please subscribe, follow, and engage with us, and share it with your friends and family as we continue to explore this fascinating subject.
01:08:28.319 --> 01:08:33.119
For additional information about this episode or Shane's brain, check out the show notes.
01:08:33.359 --> 01:08:36.319
Thanks for listening to the Discovering Your Mind podcast.
01:08:36.479 --> 01:08:38.399
You are beautifully unique!