Brad Pitt Receives Invitation From Scientists to Formally Diagnose the Actor's Alleged "Face Blindness"

Brad Pitt’s announcement that he suffers from “face blindness,” also known as prosopagnosia, has scientists at Carnegie Mellon so excited that they’ve issued an invitation to the world-renowned actor to have his brain imaged and examined by their renowned neuroscientist Marlene Behrmann.

“Carnegie Mellon is one of the very few places that can both test for face blindness and perform the brain imaging in our state-of-the-art imaging center,” said Behrmann, a professor of psychology and member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition within the school’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Among the neuroscientist’s recent accomplishments is the identification of the brain’s system responsible for face recognition.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, give scientists a focal point in order to target remedies for disorders such as the one Pitt has claimed having.

“Faces are among the most compelling visual stimulation that we encounter, and recognizing faces taxes our visual perception to the hilt,” Behrmann said, adding that she and her colleagues “have already turned up a few clues as to what causes this problem.”

For this reason, she stated publicly, “If Mr. Pitt would be willing, we would be honored to image his brain for diagnostic purposes.”

As ABC 7 reports, Pitt told the media that his inability to recognize faces often results in people thinking the actor is “disrespecting” them and that telling them about the condition only makes it worse as people then perceive him as egotistical.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), depending on the degree of impairment, some individuals cannot discriminate between unknown faces while still others are unable to distinguish between a face and any other object. Furthermore, some with the disorder fail to recognize even their own face.

The condition can result, according to the NINDS, from stroke, traumatic brain injury or certain neurodegenerative disease and, in the case of an absence of brain injury, appears to run in families.

The Centre for Face Processing Disorders at Bournemouth University reports that a recent study conducted in Germany reported as many as one in 50 people may suffer from face blindness.

At this point, there is no report as to whether Pitt has accepted the scientists' invitation.