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Brad Pitt is making headlines once again and is not because he is starring in another movie or because he is getting married to another superstar, but because, according to him, he suffers from prosopagnosia. This condition doesn’t allow him to recognize people’s faces.
In a recent interview, the 58-year-old actor said that although he has never been formally diagnosed, he had struggled for years with the condition, he said. “Nobody believes me!” he told GQ.
But this is not the first time he has publicly spoken about it.
In 2013, he told Esquire that he wanted to isolate himself as a result. “That’s why I stay at home,” he admitted.
“So many people hate me because they think I’m disrespecting them,” Pitt said at the time. “You get this thing, like, ‘You’re being egotistical. You’re being conceited.’ But it’s a mystery to me, man. I can’t grasp a face, and yet I come from such a design/aesthetic point of view.”
So what is prosopagnosia, and what are the symptoms?
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the condition is not related to memory loss, vision impairment, learning disabilities, color blindness, or overall visual impairment.
Dr. Borna Bonakdarpour, a behavioral neurologist at Northwestern Medicine, told The New York Times that prosopagnosia varies in severity. “Some people with the condition may have trouble recognizing a familiar face, like a friend or family member, while others may not even be able to identify their own reflections. Some people may be unable to differentiate between faces and objects,” the publication informed.
What causes prosopagnosia?
It can be a congenital condition that may run in families or happen later in life. “There doesn’t seem to be any obvious structural abnormality” in the brain for those born with the condition, said Dr. Andrey Stojic, director of general neurology at the Cleveland Clinic.
“People who acquire prosopagnosia later in life, by contrast, may have lesions in the brain as a result of a head injury or trauma. People can also acquire the condition after strokes or as they develop Alzheimer’s disease,” Dr. Bonakdarpour told the publication.
Is there a treatment for prosopagnosia?
There is no treatment for the condition, but it can be managed. “Many of the challenges he’s describing, the problems he has, are not atypical for folks who experience it,” Dr. Stojic said. “It be can relatively debilitating for people,” he added. “It’s hard for other people to understand.”