Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, John Carroll.

Raise your hand if, when you were young, you wondered if it wouldn't be better if there was some

instruction manual for being a human being. No matter what context you live in, no matter how you're

brought up, there's all sorts of unspoken rules and regulations out there. Things you're supposed to

know that no one ever actually tells you explicitly, right? So today's guest, Camilla Pang,

has set out to do this, to write the instruction manual for being a human being, and she does it from

a very unique perspective. Camilla was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, as well as ADHD,

attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. So when she was a kid, for a long time, she struggled to

understand what was going on with her family, her friends, what were the things that other people

sensed and knew implicitly that she wasn't privy to, right? And she had to work it out explicitly,

figure out ways to understand what was the subtext of what her friends were saying, why people

were laughing in certain places, how to have normal conversations. Now, she's been very, very successful

at this. You know, these conditions are ones that have varying degrees of severity. Camilla has

done very, very well for herself. She has a PhD in biochemistry. She has a book that she's written

that is going to be the basis of our conversation today that recently won the Royal Society prize

for science books of the year. So, but nevertheless, there are, there's a real difference in perspective.

There's some things that some of us take for granted that other human beings, other

varfellow people, have to learn explicitly. So the great thing about Camilla's book is that not only

does she go into how people behave from sort of an outsider's point of view, almost like the

classic anthropologist from Mars kind of thought experiment, why are these weirdos acting in these

different ways? But she uses science metaphors to explain why people act in different ways. So,

as a scientist, Camilla always thinks in terms of science. I think a lot of science friends out there

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