Dyscalculia anyone?

[Anonymous]

I can’t even spell it without difficulty. Here’s a link to today’s article in the Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/article/1003500–how-a-little-known-math-disorder-adds-up-to-a-3-9b-problem

And a wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia

I have particular problems with estimating distance and time, doing mental math, or complex math like algebra, remembering faces and names, low-latent inhibition, etc.

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[Evelyn]

I also have trouble with math, mental math, algebra, estimating distance and by all means time. I can only remember multiplication tables for a short time after lots of practice at the “Math Is Fun” website: http://www.mathsisfun.com/timestable.html. I do remember faces, but have trouble putting names with them. I put a 4 x 4 red sheet of paper at eye level on my bedroom wall with the words, graduating in size, Always, Always, Always Remember Names! This has helped me quite a bit. I increased name recollection just margenally at first, but by the end of 6 months I found I was remembering a lot easier and with less effort. I have retained some of the ability since taking down the paper, but I am getting ready to put it back up.

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) By the way what is “low-latent inhibition” (

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[Anonymous]

From the wikipedia link:

Low latent inhibition, i.e., over-sensitivity to noise, smell, light and the inability to tune out, filtering unwanted information or impressions. Might have a well-developed sense of imagination due to this (possibly as cognitive compensation to mathematical-numeric deficits)

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[Evelyn]

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) Yup! I have that! (

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Especially the noise, smell, and the inability filter out unwanted information. It seems like everything is in my face all the time. The TV can totally absorb me and make me tune everything else out. I am so particular to smells that I cannot handle storebought perfumes, I have to make my own with essential oils, “must be real” perfume oils, air fresheners, and other phoney stuff nearly gaggs me.

I have had the gas company out three separate times to find a miniscule leak on the backside of a gasline, it was so faint that the sniffer machine had a hard time finding it, the tech spent at least 3 minutes with the bubble solution trying to find out where it was comming from.

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[Anonymous]

We used to drive my sister to family gatherings since we both live in different cities and she doesn’t have a car. She’s a smoker, and likes to have a last big puff before she gets into the car. Of course, she has to exhale, and she does that in the car 😡 The smoke lingers for a long time. We don’t go visit her because our clothes stink like ashtrays (she uses an air filter, but it doesn’t help).

Once I remarked on how I had become very sensitive to the smell of smoke (I am a former smoker myself). On another trip, she was wearing this strong cologne (I hate strong perfume or colognes), and when we got to my parents’ house, I left the car windows open to try to get rid of the smell. To my horror, she sprayed herself with cologne again before getting into the car (after smoking another cigarette). When I complained about it and that I had just aired out the car, she said “it’s that or the smell of smoke”. I said “I prefer neither, but the smoke smell is less obnoxious”.

Doesn’t matter because she excommunicated me several years ago when my mom passed away.

I can smell our neighbour out front smoking a cigarette at times, from our house. Very sensitive to it.

And noise? Extremely sensitive. We have an electric blanket, I wear earplugs to sleep (my husband snores) and I can literally hear the coils in the electric blanket cycling on and off. It sounds very much like a sump pump (we have one in the basement, that’s how I know). It was keeping me awake for months before I finally realized what it was. Now I just heat the bed up and turn it off. Luckily we’re in summer weather now!

My husband likes to make little noises twirling his coffee cup in the car and it drives me nuts. Any tapping on the table, loud eating noises (we eat in front of the tv to compensate) drive me wild. I always say if you want to torture me, tie me to a chair and eat shrimp chips next to my head 😯

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[Anonymous]

Subitizing seems to be a sticking point with me. I feel the need to constantly count things so I know how many are there, even when there is no practical reason to do so. I think it’s more of a release mechanism, something to keep my mind busy rather than any sort of compulsion.

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[Zita]

I’ve always had a really hard time with math and spelling…..I always remember faces but I’m not so good with names.

So listen I was wondering is there a specific Dr. you would see about Dyscalculia? That would explain a lot…..I hate numbers, I can’t add in my head, I always have to use my fingers even for the simplest of questions. My spelling is so bad that my husband says I should sue the school I graduated from!! lol I have to use spell check for every thing, 9 times out of 10 it’s a sea of red!! lol It’s so embarrassing, I can’t even help my kids with their home work, I just tell them the truth, I can’t do math or spell. I graduated with a 56% average!! I squeaked by!! I’ve always felt really stupid, I never could finish any thing, now that I’m on adderall my house is actually starting to look like a home!!

Thanks so much for this post I’m deffiantly going to look into this!

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[Wgreen]

Neither article mentioned a possible link to ADD. But I’d bet lunch on Monday there’s a connection between ADD and mathematical aptitude, or lack thereof. If you’re an ADDer—in the my-ADD-is-more-than-a-nuisance camp— weigh in here and tell us if you’re a math whiz or not. Of course, it’ll be a statistically worthless poll, but it would be interesting to see a show of hands.

Is there, in fact, any peer-reviewed research out there that has addressed this issue? Anybody know?

Put me down in the math-challenged column. Calculus almost killed me. Differential equations? Forget it.

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[Zita]

I suck at math, I hate it, just thinking about it gives me a head ache!!

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[Anonymous]

I am terrible with math. What is calculus? What is trig? Can’t do algebra, can’t you just tell me what x is so I can see how the equation works instead of trying to solve it.

I told my ADHD psych that once, on an orchestral road trip in high school, I attempted one of the algebra questions so many times that I wore the illustration off the page erasing it over and over again. I remember flunking one exam and being allowed to write the same exam over and over again. I never did get it right, but I passed because I promised my high school math teacher that I would NEVER take another math course again, and even at that, he totally embarassed me at the graduation onstage, refusing to let me have my certificate (ok, I finally got it, but I didn’t go to grade 13 graduation as a result).

What I am having a hard time explaining is how I hyperfocused my way through a professional accounting designation (which I no longer work at). I was able to do one course at a time over an 8 year period while working at the same time. I’m the exception to the rule.

You don’t have to do math to be an accountant. It’s really just a set of complex rules and double-sided accounting, with some estimating involved. I did live in fear of anyone asking me to do a calculation in my head in management meetings – I always had a calculator with me and pretended to be thinking the question over while my boss (a sales guy, not an accountant) came up with the rough answer, which I always confirmed (basically agreed with).

I no longer work as an accountant because I couldn’t keep up with the inevitable changes and I really, really couldn’t hold it all in my head at one time. But it was a thrill, totally exciting, while it lasted!

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[Anonymous]

I had to stay after school EVERY night to complete my homework in Algebra…and then STILL forgot every single formula before class the next day…barely passed the class with a “D”. Spelling was a different story–I went to Regionals for our Spelling Bee. Interesting how our brains work, isn’t it?

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[Anonymous]

Hey, I used to be good at spelling too (never did a spelling bee) but these days I’m failing at it, too many newspapers that don’t get proofread anymore…

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[Anonymous]

i’m pretty much phobic about maths. i did relatively ok with it in school until i was about 10, and then they brought out the long division and long multiplication, at which point my brain exploded.

i spent most of my secondary school maths lessons staring blankly at the board while they spoke some other mysterious language filled with words i didn’t understand, desperately hoping that nobody would ask me anything, and then copying the girl next to me- who at least valiantly attempted to explain it to me in english while i copied it. not that there was a chance in hell it’d stick more than 5 minutes.

my mum wrote me a note for my homework every night, cos i couldn’t even explain to her what i was meant to be doing, and i’d start to panic and hyperventilate and burst into tears. and the next day my teacher would read the note which was pretty much “jenny doesn’t understand her homework, and is very stressed by this- please can we discuss it?” and just sigh and roll her eyes ad send me back to my seat and keep teaching over me- insisting to my mum that i just needed to pay attention.

i learned my tables by rote, but struggled to apply the information- i can say ‘six sixes are thirty six, six sevens are forty two, six eights are forty eight, but yeah… thats just a poem. i might as well say ‘ging gang gooly gooly gooly gooly whatcha ging gang go, ging gang go!’- it means about the same. i need to draw a pretty pattern to SEE the groups of numbers, or it aint gonna work for me- and i can’t hold more than 3 in my head at a time- let alone shuffle them- so mental maths is more a practicing of the fine art of ‘muttering the same numbers over and over while bending fingers and staring at my hands and thinking ‘crap crap crap why can’t i do this what was the question again ok i know there was a four involved….?’ than actual ‘maths’ for me.

i’ve ALWAYS had wicked problems with phone numbers too (i’ll substitute or transpose them- i’ll look at a number and i KNOW it’s 56, but i’ll still say ‘seventy four’ or ‘sixty five’ or whatever, (i can’t spell aloud either- i HAVE to write the word down)

… and telling the time – what the hell is that about?! it needs to be measured in nice solid 10’s- not multiples of 5 minutes that go upto sixty, and are broken down into 4 x 15’s -which are apparently quarters (a quarter is supposed to be 0.25, not 15 – so when i’m working out timesheets i’m DOOMED to utter utter confusion making 15 minutes into .25, 30’s into .5, 45 into .75, etc) ……. and all of the 60’s and 24’s and *sigh* whoever invented that silliness needs a slap- lets not even get into the 24 hour clock business- how the hell is 2pm also 14:00?

and OH the WORST thing ever: on the microwave… if you want to nuke something for 45 seconds, you hit 4, and 5, right? makes 45 seconds. great. BUUUUUT: if you want to nuke it for 2 minutes, apparently you press 200 ?- no, thats 200 seconds- three and a bit minutes!?!, so you should press 120 for 2 minutes, right? ok, wait- but thats gonna give you a minute and twenty? that’d be 80?!, huh?!

urgh.. i won’t even try. i just press the ‘minute’ button a few times and take it out when things start to pop and splatter.

i was ok with money until i moved to canada, cos i handled it lots as a small child- but now- i’ve been here for 7 years, and when i’m staring into my wallet i STILL can’t get my head around the fact that their 10c coin is the same size as our 5p coin, their 25 cent is the same size as our 10p, they don’t even have a 20 or a 50p- or that 4 x 25cent coins make a dollar, not 5 (like 20p’s do). good greif. i have to look at each coin and say ok, that looks like a 10p. but it’s not. it’s a 25. 4 of them make a dollar…. lets just say it takes a while.

i’m ok with maps if i turn them to face the way i’m pointing, and mentally put myself ‘in’ the map. otherwise, no. i can only do compass points if i point up (north), down (south), right (east) and left (west), then visualise where i lived on the map of the uk, remind myself that it was in the south west, and then i can work out that east is DEFINATELY on the right (i so just had to check that).

i have horrible nightmares quite regularly in which i’m trying to make a phone call- and it’s seriously urgent life or death stuff, but i keep pressing the wrong buttons and cannot for the life of me get the sequence right. i have to psych myself up in real life and focus so hard i’m suprised that i don’t burst into flames, just to make the call.

what else is on the wikipedia list….

i don’t even try and remember peoples names any more. i call everyone by whatever makes sense ‘nice lady’, ‘newfie neighbour- lady’, ‘boyfriends mum’ etc. they kinda accept it.

i wear sunglasses, noises frazzle me, i can’t tune out, holding the rules for card games in my mind is never gonna happen… yeah, i’m special.

language- i excell at. i LOVE to write, i love words, i like the patterns, phonics, how irrational spelling can be, how languages steal from each other, poetry, all of it. numbers……. no.

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[Anonymous]

“…mental maths is more a practicing of the fine art of ‘muttering the same numbers over and over while bending fingers and staring at my hands and thinking ‘crap crap crap why can’t i do this what was the question again ok i know there was a four involved….?”

This is me too. I need more fingers and toes.

We have a microwave and convention oven in one and I can’t figure out either. I just know how to press time and 1 or 2 plus two zeros and that’s that. Recently figured out how to use the “hold warm” feature after 10 years, but it’s only one more button press. Now if we could only remember that turning the toaster oven and the microwave on will trip the breaker, we’d be fine.

My husband used to be sooooo frustrated with me and what he thinks is my idiot brain when it comes to math. When I showed him this article and asked “does this sound like me?” he said YES. And now he understands (and I do too) when I am challenged by these sorts of things. It’s not my fault ……

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[memzak]

No I don’t have dyscalculia but I still suck at math. About ½ way through algebra I I would get lost. My sister is a math whiz and really good at helping the math challenged and ever she could not help me. I can do basic math in my head if it’s not too much but mostly I need paper or calculator because my memory sucks. Women have more trouble estimating distances; about 75% of us can’t do it well. I don’t remember where I saw that but I believe it had something to do with gender difference in estimating space, distance, and remembering right and left. If anyone can find the reference I would appreciate it.

I was in accounting for several years and my problem was more along the lines of transposing numbers and letters. If a number was 255 I would put it in the computer as 225, etc. After learning that I’m ADD I have been looking for a new career.

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