Giving an interview to GQ magazine, Pitt said that he thinks he has the disease, also known as ‘prosopagnosia’, so many people can’t remember his face.
The 58-year-old actor also stated that he had not been diagnosed and that no one believed him:
“No one believes me. I want to meet someone with the same illness. I want to remember people I’ve met because I’m afraid people will think I’m cold and indifferent because of this illness.”
BBC’s Max Evans studied face blindness in 2019.
‘I can’t remember the face of my loved ones’
One day a stranger waved to Boo James on the bus. He didn’t think much about it. Until it turns out that the one waving is actually her mother.
Boo has a rare disease, face blindness. That is, he cannot recognize the face of his family, friends or even himself.
Experts have now launched a new study in hopes of training people like Boo to get to know people better.
‘As if from another planet’
Boo says he’s felt “from another planet” for years. “It’s very stressful and emotionally disturbing to sit and think about it. So I try not to think about it. It’s very hard work. It’s physically and emotionally draining to spend a day out there constantly wondering if you should talk to someone,” she says.
For most of his life, Boo was unaware of his condition, also called prosopagnosia, and blamed himself for “social awkwardness” when he couldn’t recognize people.
“I had to find a way to explain this situation. I couldn’t explain it well, I was just blaming myself for not trying to remember people’s faces,” he says.
“It was like a kind of laziness: I thought I didn’t want to get to know people, I wasn’t interested enough to remember, and I thought it was my fault.”
However, Boo realized his problem in his early 40s when he learned about the disease on television.
“It was only then that I realized that my inability to recognize people was due to a physical condition in my brain,” he says.
“I immediately began to understand myself better, to forgive myself, and to look at things from a different perspective.”
Sometimes it’s hard to even recognize himself
Boo says his childhood was “filled with traumatic experiences” because of other children, caregivers and teachers he couldn’t recognize.
The 51-year-old Welsh woman says she doesn’t recognize her family, old friends or even her father, whom she met on vacation.
Sometimes he even has trouble recognizing himself.
“Recently, my mom said she found old photos on the computer. I was looking at the screen. We were talking about someone in the photo and I was like, ‘Who is that?’ I asked. ‘It’s you!’ she said.
Boo describes his partner, Dewi, as a “guide dog for the face-blind” because if they’re talking to someone they know, he’s secretly revealing who they are.
It also tells the plots of the movies and the identities of the characters, because otherwise it becomes impossible to follow what happened in the movies.
“He’s very kind and patient. Sometimes we turn the movie off if it gets too complicated,” she says.
piece of face
So how do people with face blindness perceive faces? Boo says it’s hard to define.
“I see faces in bits and pieces. I see that they have a nose, eyes, mouth, and ears. But it’s very difficult for my brain to put them together and create an image of a face,” he says.
However, despite his difficulties, Boo has developed tactics and techniques that help him understand who is who:
“There are other data I can use, their hairstyle, the jewelry that someone wears all the time, the way they dress, the tone of their voice when they start talking. Sometimes even someone’s silhouette, the shape of their body, even the way they speak. I think I’m better than normal people at recognizing people by looking behind them.”
raise awareness
It is believed that one in every 50 people has face blindness, although not all of them are as bad as Boo’s.
Experts who conducted a new research on the subject say that most people are not even aware of it.
Swansea University psychologist Dr. “With this, maybe people who find it a little difficult to follow a movie,” says John Towler:
“Maybe they’re watching Game of Thrones, and everyone has long hair and beards so they have no idea what’s going on.”
What is the reason?
There are two types of face blindness.
Lateral face blindness occurs when parts of the brain that control face recognition are damaged by an injury.
Developmental face blindness is seen from birth due to the deterioration of communication between different parts of the brain.
Dr Jodie Davies-Thompson, one of the research team, says, “If we can find out exactly which part of the brain is the problem, we can begin to look for a solution to this problem. We are working on a rehabilitation program for people with face blindness. We hope to increase the communication between specific brain regions and therefore the ability to recognize faces.”