Recently Brad Pitt confessed to having face blindness but he is yet to be medically diagnosed with this disorder.

He has admitted that his inability to remember or recognize face of people makes him seem arrogant and aloof at times, but is this the only reality he is facing or there is more to it?

Let us understand in detail all about it and how the disorder affects the lives of people suffering from it, on a daily basis.

Face blindness or prosopagnosia

 Face blindness or prosopagnosia is a cognitive/ neurological disorder where the patient suffers from the inability of not being able to recognize people by their face. For instance, a person suffering from this disorder will be able to differentiate between objects and people but would not be able to tell apart one person from another.

The thing is that they are not able to recognize a person they are looking at, while normally anyone would recognize a person they have met earlier even if the other changes their hairstyle or have done a makeover, but for a person suffering from face blindness, all are same.

Another instance would be they cannot tell apart their own family, friends and partner or relative from one another.

What are the causes?

As per health experts the disorder affects by birth and it hinders the ability of the individual to recognize face of people.

Their routine life is severely affected and they cannot even differentiate between two different people with different face features.

• It can be a genetically acquired disorder.
• The person suffering from this disorder may have gone through brain trauma or a stroke that resulted in brain damage within certain areas of the brain leading to face blindness.

Challenges with face blindness

 People suffering from face blindness constantly struggle with a lot more than we can ever perceive:

• They become cold or distant to any social interaction.
• Not being able to form or maintain relationships or interpersonal communication due to this disorder.
• Inability to develop normal social skills as they are constantly struggling to establish their own identity with themselves.
• To people they appear arrogant and self-centered when in-fact they are struggling to find a common ground of communication with a perpetual stranger who they cannot recognize even after having met them a few times.
• The patient feels ashamed of themselves and often suffers from low self-esteem issues as they blame themselves for not being able to recognize people.
• Depending on the severity of the disorder a patient may recognize a person with a certain hair-do or their voice, while some are not able to make this distinction at all.
• Some may even fail to make the distinction between two people if one of them change their hairstyle or have undergone a complete makeover. They find it difficult to establish any feature that is distinct to recognize in any individual.
• To them everyone they meet is a stranger even if they are their own family, they may just walk past them without recognizing them.

Is it curable?

Even with numerous breakthroughs in the field of medical science, this disorder is incurable. However, through constant medical attention the patient can adopt compensatory strategies suggested by the medical practitioner to help them live with it.

Through intensive conditioning programs and various training sessions patients are provided with coping mechanism that helps them in enhancing facial recognition.

Constant practice and alternative strategies implementation as devised by the practitioners are the alternatives; they are able to learn to differentiate between people.