Brad Pitt opened up on fighting rare condition prosopagnosia that he’s had for years
Brad Pitt has admitted that he feels ashamed for not recognizing people’s faces and admits it has resulted in sour moments.
Actor Brad Pitt is one of the biggest actors in Hollywood and has been for sometime.
So, while you might think it is all roses and good times, the celeb has insisted that he struggles with a rare condition that isn’t quite understood.
The celeb has even said it has made it more difficult for him to be social with individuals due to how people react to it.
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The now 61-year-old Oscar winner previously said dealing with a condition called prosopagnosia has left him feeling ashamed, isolated and misunderstood.
But what is the condition? Well, according to the Cleveland Clinic the condition is essentially face blindness.
Not that the person with the condition is blind, but rather they can not adequately recognize other people’s faces.
The clinic states: “Prosopagnosia (pro-so-pag-no-zee-ah) is a condition where your brain can’t recognize faces or facial expressions in spite of having normal vision.
“This can make it hard for you to recognize the faces of familiar coworkers, friends or even close loved ones.
“Prosopagnosia falls under a family of conditions, agnosias, which interfere with how your brain processes information from your senses. Most of these conditions happen because of damage to your brain from any number of causes. However, prosopagnosia can also happen without that damage.”
Pitt suspects he may have developmental prosopagnosia, and according to the National Library of medicine, 'the prevalence of developmental prosopagnosia (DP), lifelong face recognition deficits, is widely reported to be 2–2.5%' - which means it affects around one in 50 people.
Pitt has even said that people simply do not believe he has the condition, making understanding more difficult.
Speaking with Esquire, he has said: “So many people hate me because they think I'm disrespecting them.
“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.”
Pitt has admitted he hasn’t been given an official diagnosis but experts have said that he does display the some of the signs, and has described something that patients often experience, that something is off but not being quite sure what it is.
Speaking way back in 2013, Pitt even admitted that he tried a year of having a proactive approach where he would simply ask people where they met, but this didn’t work out that well.
Speaking to Esquire, he said: “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: ‘Okay, where did we meet?’ But it just got worse. People were more offended.”
Pitt said, he doesn’t want to leave a negative impression or create a reputation that he is full of himself or aloof and simply wants to be better understood.
Gerrard Kaonga