Brad Pitt discussed his battle with prosopagnosia, a condition also known as "face blindness" that renders a person unable to recognize faces or identify others by their faces.
The actor discussed the condition during an interview with GQ, saying nobody believed him.
"I wanna meet another," he said of his desire to meet another person with the same condition.
In a 2013 interview with Esquire, Pitt spoke about how prosopagnosia affected his life.
"So many people hate me because they think I'm disrespecting them," he told the magazine at the time. "So, I swear to God, I took one year where I just said, 'This year, I'm just going to cop to it and say to people, OK, where did we meet?' But it just got worse. People were more offended. Every now and then, someone will give me context, and I'll say, 'Thank you for helping me.' "
For the most part, Pitt said he angered people.
"You get this thing, like, 'You're being egotistical. You're being conceited,' " he said. "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."
Sherryse Corrow, a professor of psychology at Bethel University, told USA Today that prosopagnosia is a disorder where someone’s ability to recognize faces or identify someone by their face is impaired.
"Somebody who has prosopagnosia, they can see just fine," Corrow said. "There's nothing about their low level vision that's affected; their memory is usually just fine."
There are two types of prosopagnosia: One that is acquired through brain damage and another that is regarded as developmental — a person who has not suffered significant brain damage but has had trouble recognizing faces throughout their life.
"A lot of people with prosopagnosia won't notice it until their face recognition is really pushed," said Brad Duchaine, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth University. "So they go to college, and they're meeting all sorts of new people. And then they realize, Wow, I'm not like everybody else. Everybody else seems to be able to recognize people's faces quickly. Whereas for me, it takes me many, many meetings to really feel confident that I can recognize somebody."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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