Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships
By Dr Camilla Pang
Viking/Penguin Books, 2020 (239 pages)
[This review was originally written for the BAE Systems (Maritime Services) Mental Health First Aiders newsletter]
Camilla Pang has a PhD in biochemistry and works as a postdoctoral researcher in bioinformatics. She is very intelligent and sparklingly articulate. But as well as the PhD there are other significant letters associated with her name: ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder), ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and GAD (Generalised Anxiety Disorder). And that alphabet soup spells a daily challenge: simple tasks and situations – meeting people, travelling to work or just deciding what to eat or wear – are full of distractions and fears that she cannot filter out. A loud noise, an unpleasant smell or the colour orange might be enough to trigger an emotional meltdown.
So how does this brilliant young woman make sense of a world in which she feels like an alien? When she was just five, she asked her Mum if there was an instruction manual for understanding humans. “No, Millie” was her mother’s heart-broken response. So she set about writing her own, and this is it!
Writing is how I exhale my thoughts, to make sense of what I see and read.
But this is not a conventional book about psychology; and nor a conventional self-help book. What is it? She describes how she “fell in love” with the science books she read in her uncle’s library from a young age. Scientific theories and patterns gave her templates on which she could then make sense of the unfamiliar, confusing and frightening world of people. There are chapters on how to have empathy with others (based on evolution and probability theory), how to negotiate conforming – or not – to the crowd (based on molecular dynamics), how not to be a perfectionist (based on thermodynamics), etc.
It’s a privilege to be let in on Millie’s world, to get a glimpse of the exhausting lengths she has to go to in order to manage the things most of us take for granted. There are ideas and tips about coping, which many of us could find useful. But mostly I took away a greater understanding about the obstacles that our modern environment and over-stimulating culture pose to those who are not neuro-typical. Her coping strategies are based on her models of human behaviour which she draws from a familiarity with fields of science which may be unfamiliar (if not baffling) to many of us. For example, she maps people’s style of relationships by analogy with what to her are the more familiar patterns of cellular biochemistry!
This perspective may be uniquely hers, but as an example of resourcefulness and resilience, Millie is an inspiration. This is an unforgettable book.
Notes
- The protein image above shows 3 possible representations of the three-dimensional structure of the protein triose phosphate. Image credits: By Opabinia regalis – Self created from PDB entry 1TIM using the freely available visualization and analysis package VMD, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1068554.
- Dr Pang describes proteins as her “favourites” amongst the biochemicals that help her explain humans.
- The author appeared as an alumna of Bristol University on the BBC’s 2021 Christmas University Challenge.
- The quote is from Camilla Pang’s profile on www.neurodivergentinstem.com : Camilla Pang — Neurodivergent in STEM
- See also NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman (Avery Publishing, 2015)
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