Brad Pitt and Thierry Lhermitte suffer from it: what is prosopagnosia, this disorder which prevents people from recognizing faces ?

Several personalities, including Elodie Poux, Brad Pitt and Thierry Lhermitte suffer from this disorder. DR

On the opposite side of the spectrum from physiognomists, there are those who suffer from prosopagnosia. An inability to memorize a face and associate a name with it, which can be very disabling in social and professional life.

In an interview given to the show C à vouson France 5 this Wednesday April 17, actress Elodie Poux said she suffered from prosopagnosia. A disorder that she shares with Brad Pitt and Thierry Lhermitte. What is it about??

Being unable to recognize the faces of people around us. This is how we could define prosopagnosia. According to the Daily Mail, this disorder could affect 2 to 3% of the population.

For the prosopagnosic, the world is therefore populated by anonymous faces. However, the disorder is not visual, but neurological: people who suffer from it "do not’print" the faces of their interlocutors, even if they meet them regularly. In extreme cases, they also fail to recognize their own face.

Recognition strategies

The disease is diagnosed following various examinations, including face recognition tests: "people are shown pictures of faces and they must indicate whether they are familiar or not", explains Birbeck University of London. "These tests include the recognition of famous faces, well known from popular culture.".

Once the diagnosis has been made, it remains to understand its origin: prosopagnosia can be acquired (it appears following a brain lesion), progressive (it occurs in certain forms of dementia) or congenital (it exists from birth). The latter type of prosopagnosia was discovered recently, and "family and twin studies suggest a strong genetic contribution to face recognition ability in the general population".

There is no treatment for prosopagnosia, but people who suffer from it generally develop strategies to recognize people they are talking to, such as taking advantage of visual information, such as hairstyle, jewelry, clothes, attitudes, gait. They also identify them by their voice.