The famous American actor suffers from a neurological disorder that prevents him from remembering or recognizing faces
If at some point in your life the capricious destiny causes you to cross paths with Brad Pitt, know that in the long run he will not remember you. At the exact moment that you say goodbye after the fortuitous meeting, the actor’s mind will begin to erase the features of your face preserving, in the best of cases, the contours of your face. And if you ever meet again, Pitt will look you in the eye, smile, and have no idea who you are.
No, this is not rude. Not even a narcissistic personality or little interest in others. The famous American actor suffers from prosopagnosia, a rare neural disorder that prevents you from remembering and recognizing faces. This was confessed in an interview with Esquire magazine, released in 2013. In it, Pitt explained that this unusual condition makes it very difficult for them to socialize and that, on more than one occasion, he has made him pass “for a rude”.
This peculiar disorder has become the main theme of works such as Holding up with the universe of Jennifer Niver either The man who mistook his wife for a hat of the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks. In both novels, cases of people suffering from this rare medical condition are reported, which is why they cannot recognize the faces of the people around them. In the case of Sacks, his approach to the life of a patient with this neurological disorder has ended up consecrating him as “one of the great century clinical writers“, as noted New York Times after the publication of the work.
What is it and why does it happen?
Prosopagnosia, also known as face agnosia either face blindness, is a type of cognitive disorder that according to some estimates could affect up to 2.5% of the population. Patients with this perceptual disorder they can pick up the visual information around them without too much trouble. That is, they can see what is happening, recognize objects and process all these stimuli. However, at the moment of truth, when they come face to face with another person, they are unable to recognize the features that differentiate your face from the rest.
This phenomenon can manifest with greater or lesser intensity depending on the patient. While some only have difficulty recognizing the faces of unfamiliar people, others have difficulty even recognize yourself in the mirror. Even so, experts point out that those who suffer from this disorder end up developing mechanisms to recognize people based on, for example, your voice, your way of walking or some other characteristic of your physique.
The first documented case of this disease dates back to 1947when the German neurologist Joachim Bodamer described the case of three patients who, after an accident, had lost the ability to recognize the faces of their friends, relatives and even their own facial features when they saw themselves reflected in a mirror.
In relation to this first approximation, for years it was thought that the acquired prosopagnosia It was directly related to a trauma that ended up causing damage to the occipital and temporal lobes of the brain. However, later the existence of a congenital prosopagnosiain which the individuals who suffered from it never develop the ability to recognize faces properly.
Latest research
A recent study carried out by the Prosopagnosia Research Center of the Dartmouth College (USA) points to a possible explanation for congenital prosopagnosia. According to the researchers, at the base of this disease could be found a neurobiological problem in the brain that affects visual recognition. That is, an abnormality in the functioning of neurons.
For this study, they were MRIs to 22 patients with congenital prosopagnosia and 25 control participants for measure and compare brain responses to certain visual stimuli. For the first time in this type of study, the researchers chose to show video clips of moving faces instead of static images, a strategy to get even closer to the daily life of these patients.
After this test, the researchers identified 12 brain areas (6 in each hemisphere) that, in normal situations, are interconnected and form a facial information processing network. In the case of patients with congenital prosopagnosia, these areas showed reduced responses when processing faces shown through the video clips.
According to Bradley Duchaine, lead author of the study: “These results indicate that deficits in detecting areas of the face may be due to a wide region of the cortex that did not develop properly. In other words, these areas of the brain responsible for processing visual information were not wired correctly during development.”