If you stumble upon Brad Pitt on the street and he does not recognize you, do not be alarmed. In a new interview with Esquire, Pitt reveals that he genuinely thinks he has a rare medical condition that prevents him from remembering people’s faces. (That, or this is a genius strategy to gently lower people’s expectations about being recognized by the world’s most famous actor/vintner/designer.)

The very real condition is called prosopagnosia or, more informally, face blindness. Pitt’s account of his struggle with the disorder, per Esquire:

“So many people hate me because they think I’m disrespecting them,” he says. “So I swear to God, I took one year where I just said, This year, I’m just going to cop to it and say to people, ‘Okay, where did we meet?’ But it just got worse. People were more offended. Every now and then, someone will give me context, and I’ll say, ‘Thank you for helping me.’ But I piss more people off. You get this thing, like, ‘You’re being egotistical. You’re being conceited.’ But it’s a mystery to me, man. I can’t grasp a face and yet I come from such a design/aesthetic point of view. I am going to get it tested.”

In 2006, Time magazine published a feature shedding more light on the “surprisingly common” condition.

For the vast majority [of sufferers], the problem is not so much about detecting a face—prosopagnosics can see eyes, noses and mouths as clearly as anyone else—as it is about recognizing the same set of features when seeing them again. It’s a disability that complicates everything from following a movie plot to picking a perp out of a lineup. While mild prosopagnosics can train themselves to memorize a limited number of faces (it’s said to be like learning to distinguish one stone from another), others grapple with identifying family members and, in extreme cases, their own face.

While scientists are not exactly certain what causes face blindness, they speculate that it may be the result of a defect in a single, dominant gene. If he indeed has the condition, Pitt would not be the only well-known person to suffer from it. The primatologist Jane Goodall has also struggled with the handicap, but, according to a 2010 New Yorkerfeature by Oliver Sacks, “her problems extend to recognizing chimpanzees as well as people.”

Related slide show:Two Decades of Brad Pitt in Vanity Fair