Actor Brad Pitt said he is suffering from a rare neurological disorder often called “face blindness”, which has prevented him from recognizing other people’s faces for many years.

In a recent interview, actor Brad Pitt said he suffers from a rare autonomic nervous disorder (prosopagnosia) commonly known as “face blindness”.

Brad Pitt said he has had difficulty recognizing people’s faces for many years

Despite never being officially diagnosed with the condition, in an interview with GQ magazine, Brad Pitt, 58, said he has had difficulty recognizing people’s faces for years. via.

In 2013, Brad Pitt told Esquire magazine that his inability to recognize people’s faces had become so severe that he often wanted to isolate himself. “That’s why I want to stay home,” he shared.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (USA), people with prosopagnosia symptoms will not experience memory loss, vision impairment or learning disabilities.

Dr. Borna Bonakdarpour – a behavioral neurologist at Northwestern Medicine – also said that prosopagnosia is only face blindness, not color blindness or overall vision impairment. It’s not the same as being forgetful.

Each person can experience prosopagnosia to varying degrees of severity.

Some people with this condition may have difficulty recognizing a familiar face, such as a friend or family member, while others may not even be able to identify an image of a face.

mine. Some people may also not be able to distinguish between faces and other objects.

There is also evidence that people with prosopagnosia may become chronically anxious or depressed, because of the isolation and fear that comes with the disease. Basic social interactions become difficult with prosopagnosia.

Therefore, some people who are sick often want to avoid contact with family members, and other loved ones, for fear that they will not be able to recognize or communicate appropriately with the other person.

There are generally two groups of people with prosopagnosia: Those who are born with the condition, and those who develop it later in life.

Research shows that congenital or lifelong prosopagnosia is less common, with the proportion of people with the lifelong condition estimated to be 1 in 50, and scientists hypothesize that this is the case. can happen in the family.

“There appear to be no obvious abnormalities in the structure of the cerebral cortex in people born with this condition,” said Dr. Andrey Stojic, director of general neurology at Cleveland Clinic. So scientists aren’t sure what causes it.”

On the contrary, people with prosopagnosia may develop brain damage as adults, due to head trauma or psychological trauma. Dr. Bonakdarpour said people can also develop “face blindness” after having a stroke, or suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Bonakdarpour said there is no treatment for “face blindness,” but there are ways to control it. People with prosopagnosia often focus on characteristics such as hair color, gait, or voice to distinguish people.

Neurologists often diagnose “face blindness” through a series of tests that assess a person’s ability to remember and recognize faces. This process can be lengthy, as doctors often want to be sure whether the patient is just experiencing face blindness or has a general degenerative neurological condition.

Many people with this condition, like Brad Pitt, will often not receive an official diagnosis. “The difficulties he described, the problems he encountered, are not the typical symptoms of people with face blindness,” Dr. Stojic explains.