S1E24 - Interview with Sadie Dingfelder - Author, science journalist, neurodiversity advocate

Sadie Dingfelder - Author, science journalist, neurodiversity advocate

Sadie has prosopagnosia — face blindness — which means she can't recognize anyone by their face. Not her mother, not her coworkers, not her husband (she once grabbed a jar of peanut butter out of a stranger's cart because she thought he was her husband. He was two aisles over).

Sadie has written a memoir about her face blindness and other conditions, called Do I Know You ? , Temple Grandin wrote the foreword.

Because of her Face blindness, Sadie built her own assistive tech system: She photographs everyone she meets and writes notes about them. What they look like, what they were wearing, what we talked about. It's basically a manual face database. It works, mostly, but it's exhausting — and it freaks people out when they notice.

Here's the irony: the technology Sadie actually needs is the one everyone else fears. Facial recognition. The thing governments are banning and privacy advocates are protesting is, for her, just... what normal people already have built into their brains. Sadie tried an early version of a face recognition app right when the pandemic hit — and of course **it didn't work with masks**, which is exactly when a faceblind person needs it most, because masks wipe out the few cues they do use (hair, glasses, context).

Face blindness affects roughly 1 in 50 people, but there's no accommodation framework, no widely available app, and most people don't even know it exists. Sadie didn't find out she had it until she was 40 — along with three other rare neurological conditions (stereoblindness, aphantasia, and severely deficient autobiographical memory), all missed for decades because she had just learned to work around them.

Sadie is a former reporter for the Washington Post and currently works for National Geographic in the USA.

You can find Sadie on Sadie’s website where you can follow her on social media, contact her and read her blog

If you prefer a hardcopy of her memoir and are located in New Zealand, you can purchase Do I Know You ? at PaperPlus

00:00 Introduction - Disability Disrupters Podcast

00:21 Introduction to Podcast guest - Sadie Dingfelder

00:43 Ad - Get interviewed for Disability Disrupters podcast

01:14 Interview with Sadie Dingfelder

28:01 Deep Dive - Why does Society label People instead of recognising that it is systems that are impaired

50:21 Goodbye from Dr Pam

50:34 Advert - Tipjar support for the podcast

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Podcast audio and transcript editor : Britta Offergeld

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