I’m a science writer. After covering neuroscence and psychology news for more than a decade, I was surprised to find out that my own personal brain is quite unusual. So I wrote a book about it and created message boards and events to mingle with my peeps.

Reddit and Facebook already exist as free-form discussion groups. What I wanted to do is create a spot for curated, non-repetitive conversations. I’m trying out a format where I pose questions, and (hopefully) you all chime in. Then I will synthesize the answers into a new post or in my newsletter.

I’m starting out with the groups that I personally belong to. However, if anyone with ADHD, hyperphantasia, HSAM, super-recognizers, autistic folks, etc. wants to start a community and curate a message board, let me know!

SDAM is not a disorder - it’s just an unusual brain configuration with advantages and disadvantages. To find out if you have it, you have two options:

• Join a study, or

• Ask yourself: Can I mentally time travel to important events from my past? If the answer is no, you have SDAM. Welcome to the club!

Aphantasia is not really a disorder - it’s just an unusual brain configuration with advantages and disadvantages. To find out if you have it, you have two options:

• Join a study, or

• Ask yourself: Can I conjure up mental imagery? If the answer is no, you have aphantasia. Welcome to the club!

If your eyes do not quite line up — a condition known as straismus or lazy eye, you are not seeing in 3D. Even if your eyes are aligned. you may still be stereoblind. The technical term for people whose brains do not combine the images from both of your eyes into a single 3D image is amblyopia. But I prefer to use the term stereoblind, because it makes intuitive sense.

There’s anecdotal evidence of adults being cured by vision therapy, but the quality of vision therapists varies widely, and it’s often not covered by insurance.

For my book, I got to try out a program that runs on a Virtual Reality Headset and it improved my stereovision quite a bit.

To find studies where you can try out new treatments, check out the clinical trial database or find a stereovision researcher at a university near you. (I joined a study run by the Levi Lab.)

Prosopagnosia is not currently in the DSM or the ICD — so from a medical perspective, it doesn’t exist. That means, you face an uphill battle if you’re trying to get services or accommodation for yourself or your kid.

However, if you just want to see where you fall on the face recognition spectrum, you can take the Cambridge Face Memory Test online.

Check out these pages:

All About Aphantasia

SDAM FAQ

Faceblind FAQ

Stereoblind FAQ

Left-Right Confusion