Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.

I'm Cody Goff.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you'll hear from scientist and award-winning author Camilla Pang about why she wanted to write a manual for

understanding human behavior. You'll also learn about the planetary

chaos that resulted when the Earth's magnetic poles reversed. Let's satisfy

some curiosity.

Plenty of people have wished that there was a manual for human behavior,

but for people who are neurodivergent, like those on the autism spectrum, it can be especially challenging to navigate

social interactions and figure out why other people do some of the things they do.

That includes today's guest. Camilla Pang is a postdoctoral scientist who holds a PhD in bioinformatics from University College London.

She also has autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,

and generalized anxiety disorder. And all of this led her to write the new book

An Outsider's Guide to Humans, What science taught me about what we do and who we are.

The story of why she wrote the book is super fascinating, so here it is.

Well I didn't realize I was actually writing it when I was little because it was just a kind

of concoction of leaves and post-it notes and various objects that kind of formed their own narrative

of this journal. so I he was mainly just an experiment for me to refer back to or

setting experiments and up until I realized that I put it in my PhD thesis, my supervisor was like, this is great, but it is not actually a thesis, your PhD work.

I'm like, interesting.

So I know how dissect them, you know, it's quite hard, it's like separating a tumor from blood.

And so when I realized that the thing that I actually wanted to write about at that time was useful to people.

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