#86 When Every Face Looks Unfamiliar: Inside the World of Faceblindness

For most of her life, Sadie Dingfelder thought she was simply quirky: bad with directions, unusually clumsy, unable to recognize faces, and disconnected from many of her own memories. Then, a startling encounter in a grocery store led her to question whether her experiences reflected something deeper.

In this episode of It Happened To Me, Cathy and Beth speak with Sadie about discovering that her brain processes faces, memories, images, and depth differently from most people’s. Her search for answers took her inside leading neuroscience laboratories, where she participated in brain-imaging studies and learned more about faceblindness, severely deficient autobiographical memory, stereoblindness, and aphantasia.

Sadie shares what it is like to attend a party where everyone recognizes her, but she cannot identify anyone else, and how the fear of offending people can create anxiety in social and professional settings. She also explains the strategies she developed during her journalism career, from recognizing people through their voices and mannerisms to navigating conversations without revealing that she did not know who she was speaking with.

The conversation also explores what it means to discover that other people can mentally replay scenes from their lives, visualize images in their minds, and perceive a level of three-dimensional depth that Sadie has never experienced. She reflects on the complicated mix of grief, relief, and self-understanding that accompanied these discoveries.

Sadie’s story reminds us that there is no single “normal” way to perceive, remember, or experience the world, and that many cognitive and visual differences remain invisible to the people around us.

In This Episode, We Discuss

• The grocery store encounter that led Sadie to investigate how her brain works
• The neurological difference between forgetting someone’s name and being unable to recognize their face
• Navigating parties, professional events, and everyday interactions with faceblindness
• The anxiety of unintentionally appearing rude or failing to recognize someone familiar
• Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) and the inability to mentally revisit personal experiences
• The strategies Sadie used throughout her career as a journalist
• How her cognitive differences affected childhood, independence, driving, and relationships
• Stereoblindness and what it means to experience the visual world without typical 3D depth
• Participating in neuroscience research and seeing differences in her brain through imaging
• Aphantasia and how writing creatively without a visual imagination is possible
• The freedom that can come from openly discussing an invisible disability
• The grief and relief of finally understanding lifelong differences
• What Sadie learned from vision therapy and attempts to develop 3D vision
• Why cognitive and perceptual abilities may exist across a much broader spectrum than we realize

About Sadie Dingfelder

Sadie Dingfelder is a freelance science journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The Washington Post. She previously worked as a staff reporter for The Washington Post Express and as a senior science writer for the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology, where she covered neuroscience, cognitive science, and animal behavior.

She is the author of Do I Know You?: A Faceblind Reporter’s Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination, which combines memoir, investigative journalism, and neuroscience to explore the many ways human beings experience the world differently.

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