Brad Pitt – Reuters
Some people suffer from a problem of remembering faces, as it takes time to know who is standing in front of them, or it may be difficult for them to know in the first place, this condition is known as “face blindness”, and the global star Brad Pitt is the most famous person with this disorder.
Face blindness is a disorder that makes you unable to recognize faces you’ve seen before, including those of friends and family.
In this regard, new research from Harvard University revealed that the disease may not be as rare as it was initially thought, according to a study published on the “Daily Mail” website.
Most estimates predict that about 2.5% of the world’s population suffers from a form of this disorder called “face blindness”.
This case has gained more attention from the media in recent years, after former Oscar-winner Brad Pitt announced in June 2022 his experience with this case, stressing that “no one believes him” when he spoke about it.
Expressive
Two eyes, nose and mouth
Nursery nurse Hannah Reid, who has one of the worst cases of face blindness in the UK, said every face looked the same and was just “eyes, nose and mouth”.
And when researchers at Harvard University gave a variety of tests and questionnaires about facial recognition to more than 3,100 adult participants in the US, they found a group of people who scored very poorly.
Depending on the diagnostic boundaries that were used for face blindness, the researchers found that the condition ranged from a prevalence of 0.13% up to 5.42%.
People with this disorder may cope by using alternative ways of recognizing people, such as remembering the way they walk, their hair style, their voice, or their clothes.
Face recognition – iStock
Brain abnormalities
Face blindness is thought to result from abnormalities, damage, or weakness in the right fusiform gyrus — a fold in the brain — that seems to coordinate face perception and memory.
Prosopagnosia can also result from stroke, brain injury, or certain neurodegenerative diseases. But in some cases it is present at birth. Which makes it most likely the result of a genetic mutation.
In addition, the researchers used different diagnostic criteria to evaluate some of the participants with face blindness. Depending on how severe these symptoms were, they determined the prosopagnosia affected to be between 0.13 and 5.42% of the group. Interestingly, they also found that the more stringent criteria did not always identify the individuals most impaired at recognizing faces.
As a result, they concluded, they should soften the terms of diagnosis, dividing people by condition into “mild” or “severe”.
