Do you have a mind’s eye, the ability to not just remember, but visualize the past? Do you have an interior monologue? Rich childhood memories, full of sights, sounds, and smells? For science writer Sadie Dingfelder — speaking to an audience of about a dozen Monday night at the Edgewood Avenue bookstore Possible Futures — the answer to all these questions and a few more like it were a clear no.
And until just a few years ago, she thought the same was true for everyone else. Until a fateful trip to the grocery store led her to become the subject of a few lab studies, and to the work of New Haven-area science journalist Carl Zimmer, and on and on — heading toward the edges of neurologists’ understanding of how varied the human experience can be.
Dingfelder and Zimmer were present to celebrate the release of Dingfelder’s first book, Do I Know You?,a book that Dingfelder states in the book’s trailer she has no recollection of having written. That’s just a taste of the off-kilter and often self-deprecating humor that filled the evening, in the service of a much deeper point about how everyone’s brains might just be wired much more differently from one another than any of us think.
Do I Know You? came about, Dingfelder said, because of a “mid-life crisis” she had at the age of 40, triggered by an encounter at the grocery store, in which she accosted a stranger that she thought for far too long was her partner. As she extricated herself from the situation, she had an unsettling thought: “This is not actually the kind of mistake anyone makes.”
