Do you struggle to remember people? You might have something in common with Brad Pitt.
The Oscar winner recently opened up about his struggle with prosopagnosia, commonly referred to as “face blindness.”
Though the actor has never officially been diagnosed with the disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces, he recently told GQ that some think he’s remote, aloof, inaccessible or self-absorbed because he can’t remember them.
At the time, Pitt told the magazine he preferred to stay at home instead of going out, saying, “You meet so many damned people. And then you meet ’em again.”
He admitted he had difficulty remembering people even if he had “a real conversation with them.”
“So many people hate me because they think I’m disrespecting them,” he said.
Pitt revealed that he tried being honest with people and asking them where they had met before, but that backfired. “…It just got worse,” he said of that experiment. “People were more offended.”
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, prosopagnosia is thought to be the result of “abnormalities, damage, or impairment” in the part of the brain that “appears to coordinate the neural systems that control facial perception and memory.”
It may also result from stroke, traumatic brain injury or “certain neurodegenerative diseases.”
“There’s a wide spectrum of symptoms people can have and of the severity in which they are affected by this,” Dr. Leah Croll, an assistant professor of neurology at the Temple University Hospital, recently told “Good Morning America.
“For some people, it may be just some minor difficulties in remembering people’s names and keeping strangers straight,” she said. “And for other people, it may be more severe…they have issues with recognizing their own friends and family or even…recognizing their own reflection.”