Brad Pitt Fears Face Blindness
In an exclusive interview with Esquire magazine for its June/July 2013 issue, unforgettably handsome actor Brad Pitt admits his fear of having prosopagnasia or the most commonly known face blindness.
Brad Pitt shared that he is having a hard time recognizing faces of the people he knew, meet and even shared smart conversations with. For this, he said that a lot of people hate him.
"So many people hate me because they think I'm disrespecting them. 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, Okay, 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. But I piss more people off. 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. I am going to get it tested."
Some might think that this case is common with famous celebrities especially that they meet and greeted by multitude of people almost every single day. How will they be able to know and associate all faces to names with the hundreds or thousands of people whom celebrities encountered?
But if Brad Pitt is correct and indeed he has this sickness then a heartbreaking life awaits him in the future.
There will come a time that Brad Pitt will no longer recognize his loved ones. They will just be total strangers for him. He will also come to a point when he will not recognize even the simplest objects and their uses.
According to medical accounts, there is no cure for this disease. It might help Brad Pitt to, starting today, take down notes of remarkable features of his loved ones and their names: 'lips' for beloved Angelina, 'curly hair' for daughter Zahara, 'boyish get-up' for Shiloh and 'my twins' for Knox and Vivienne.
If Brad Pitt's intuition is correct, then his case is really complicated and he needs medical attention right away to diagnose the cause of his disease and to know what can be done.
According to medical author William C. Shiel Jr. MD, FACP, FACR:
- Face blindness is a brain disorder.
- Face blindness is thought to be the result of abnormalities, damage, or impairment in the right fusiform gyrus, a fold in the brain that appears to coordinate the neural systems that control facial perception and memory.
- Face blindness can result from stroke, traumatic brain injury or certain neurodegenerative diseases.
- The focus of any treatment should be to help the individual with face blindness develop compensatory strategies.
- Adults who have face blindness as result of stroke or brain trauma can be retained to use other clues to identify individuals
Esquire magazine appealed for understanding, "Brad Pitt won't remember you. If you've met him, he'll have no idea who you are when he meets you again. Even if you've had what he calls a real conversation, your face will start fading from his memory as soon as you walk away. He'll try to hold on to its outlines, but your features will suffer an inexorable erasure, and the next time he sees you you'll be brand-new to him..."