NEWS AND OPONION: Brad Pitt has prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder. It’s not been officially diagnosed but he says that he has the condition. He also says that nobody believes him. So, what is prosopagnosia? I should say by the way that he loves dogs and the outdoors which qualifies him to be mentioned on this website!
A person with prosopagnosia may avoid social interaction and develop social anxiety disorders because they suffer from face blindness or the inability to recognise faces. That is prosopagnosia. I had never heard of it until Brad Pitt said that he suffers from it.
He loves to be outside and enjoy the outside. He loves dogs and sleeping! He is a great actor as well and incredibly popular. His has been a supporter of animal rights and plant-based eating for a very long time.
I’m also told that he is a vegan. He began being a vegan in 2011 and he is not slowing down. One website tells me that he has been a vegan for decades!
I thought that he was very hard done by, by his former wife Angelina Jolie. I thought she treated him very badly indeed. She sold her share of their vineyard to the wrong person! This really upset Brad Pitt and as I recall.
In 2009, the celebrity couple had acquired equal shares in the Provençal estate Château Miraval in Correns and developed the Miraval Provence brand in a joint venture with the Perrin family.
He is fighting Jolie’s sale of her share in the courts to overturn it. He turned the vineyard into a great success and clearly has a big emotional investment in it.
To return to prosopagnosia. Some people with the condition are unable to recognise a certain facial expression. Sometimes they can’t judge a person’s age or even their gender. It affects different people differently.
The NHS in the UK tells me that some people may not be able to tell the difference between strangers or people they know well. It really sounds very debilitating because some people can’t even recognise the faces of family members.
This means they can’t recognise emotions as transmitted by people’s expressions and it even extends to inanimate objects and animals. The NHS tells me that “other symptoms of prosopagnosia include difficulty with recognising other things, such as cars or animals [or] finding your way around”.
It may lead to mental health issues and social anxiety and even depression. It’s a brain defect in effect. It can be caused by brain injury. Sometimes autistic people have the condition. I sense that Pitt suffers from a mild version of it as he appears to be socially very adept.
It can be caused by a stroke or inflammation of the brain which is encephalitis. Alzheimer’s disease can also cause it. Pitt has not suffered from these health issues so it appears to have been inherited in his case.
