Welcome to Out of Your Mind

Most people assume their way of thinking and sensing the world is basically normal. And by “normal,” they usually mean universal—like everyone sees pictures in their mind, knows what a face looks like after meeting someone, or has a clear sense of past and future.

But what if none of that is true?

What if you’ve been walking around your whole life missing an entire mental organ—like imagination, or visual memory, or an internal monologue—and just assumed everyone else was faking it?

This is the premise of Out of Your Mind: a blog, video series, and eventually (if all goes well) a book that explores the wild diversity of human consciousness. I’m talking about people who can’t visualize images (aphantasia), people who can’t recognize faces (prosopagnosia), people who live without autobiographical memory (SDAM), or experience time in radically different ways (ADHD, flow states, time blindness).

These aren't just quirky footnotes in a psychology textbook. They're keys to understanding how our minds really work—and how much we assume about each other that might be totally wrong.

What You’ll Find Here

In each installment, I’ll introduce you to someone whose mind works a little (or a lot) differently—and dig into what science can tell us about it. Sometimes I’ll talk to researchers. Sometimes I’ll test things on myself. Sometimes I’ll drag unsuspecting friends into surprise perception experiments.

And along the way, we’ll ask big questions:

• Is it possible to truly know what it’s like to be someone else?

• Can science measure subjective experience—or just describe its shadows?

• How do people with missing mental tools adapt and thrive?

Why This Matters

I’m doing this because I think exploring cognitive differences is the antidote to a lot of bad assumptions. About what’s “normal.” About other people’s motivations, abilities and inner experiences. About how we expect people to behave when their brains are playing a completely different game.

So welcome. If you’ve ever suspected that your brain is broken, or secretly brilliant, or just different in some hard-to-define way—this is your place.

Let's get out of our heads. And into each other’s.

Subscribe for new posts, interviews, videos, and strange cognitive adventures.

Coming soon: What it feels like to have no sense of time—and the little island in your brain that might be key to time perception.

Also: An online test to see how your time perception measures up.