I totally have this condition! it's called Dyscalculia. I didn't even know it was a thing!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia

Frequent difficulties with arithmetic (totally. i can add and subtract. that's about it. i never passed a math class in school. ever. i went to tutors and summer school. never remembered a thing.)
Difficulty with everyday tasks like reading analog clocks (i'm okay with clocks for the most part.)
Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a shopping basket or balancing a checkbook (i am no help with checkbooks. poor maria...)
Difficulty with multiplication-tables, and subtraction-tables, addition tables, division tables, mental arithmetic, etc. (i can add pretty well. but it takes me a while. i've had lots of cashier jobs. that much i can do. but i can't add in my head too well. or subtract. or anything else math-y.)
Difficulty with conceptualizing time and judging the passing of time. May be chronically late or early (i try really hard to be on time.)
Particularly problems with differentiating between left and right (this is me. i always have to check my left and right arms for a long time if i'm giving someone directions. i don't always get it right.)
Inability to visualize mentally (totally.)
Difficulty reading musical notation (too frustrated by the basics of music to learn.)
Might do exceptionally well in a writing-related field — authors and journalists are more likely than average to have the disorder[dubious – discuss][citation needed] (might be dubious, but i'll take it, wiki.)
Difficulty navigating or mentally "turning" the map to face the current direction rather than the common North=Top usage (hopeless with directions. unless i focus really hard. can go somewhere 20 times and forget how to get there. poor maria...)
Having particular difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 10 or 20 feet (3 or 6 meters) away). (totally.)
Often unable to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences (big time.)
Inability to concentrate on mentally intensive tasks (you got it.)
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) (not a problem actually. i can get overstimulated by crowds and lots of other stuff though. i'm kind of a mess as far as overstimulation goes. my imagination is fine.)
Mistaken recollection of names. Poor name/face retrieval. May substitute names beginning with same letter (yeah, i'm bad at remembering names. but so are a lot of people, probably.)

anyway this guy charlie i know said he had this the other day and maria and i thought he was making it up, but it also sounded really familiar. his symptoms. i would get SO frustrated in school and with tutors because they would teach me math stuff over and over and it was all gone the next day. i hated all my math teachers because of this. it was agony. totally wrecked my SAT scores too. my verbal thing was almost perfect. math was a bomb. four years of summer school. and then they just passed you in summer school because you were so sad. the right and left thing is weird though. if someone says "its on my left" or "my right" i think i'm gonna pass out trying to figure out what they mean.

Have you found out what sort of adapted learning strategies there are for overcoming this? Do you have any interest in trying to learn math at this point?

Heh. I was just looking up dysgraphia last night, of which I have a little. I think both are related to ADD, which I have a _lot_ of.

See also this symptom:

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

I have this in spades. Made it horrible to have a roommate for two years at school.

My bit is sometimes i'll flip the order of words around when I'm typing or writing them out, or skip a word, or write the wrong tense from what I'm thinking.

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

i have this too. i assumed it was some form of high-functioning autism.

i'm good at adding but everything in my store is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc, dollars. no $4.50 or $4.99. to make it easier for myself. tax you can do with a calculator. i don't have a cash register. i can't add big numbers in my head either. like 463 + 381 or something like that. i could never do that without writing it down. and subtraction, no way in hell. i can do the supermarket cart thing pretty good. just round the numbers and estimate. my one math skill from years of cashier work. that helps when i buy records and have to figure out a price. i can add lots of little numbers in my head.

isn't this fascinating!?

i've actually thought over the years about getting a beginner math book. just to see if i could teach myself some math. but i've never done it.

i'm not good at math either. i blew the math portions of my SAT and GRE, but did really well on the verbal part.

i'm just glad maria likes to drive. i read directions to her pretty good. i'm not that good about driving in general though. let alone following elaborate directions. the weird thing is the going to someone's house in town multiple times and still getting roads wrong when i drive there again. i have to do it at least 50 times and then i'll usually have it down.

844. Math in my head I'm okay at.

POTENTIAL SYMPTOMS OF DYSCALCULIA
• Frequent difficulties with numbers
• Confusing the signs: +, -, ÷ and x
• Inability to say which of two numbers is the larger
• Unusual reliance on counting fingers
• Difficulty with everyday tasks ie. checking change and reading clocks
• Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting
• Difficulty with times-tables
• Difficulty with conceptualizing time and judging the passing of time
• Problems differentiating between left and right
• Having a poor sense of direction
• Having difficulty estimating the distance of an object
• Inability to grasp mathematical concepts and rules
• Difficulty keeping score during games.

the good news is nobody gives a shit if you can do math or not

left and right is weird for me. i know which is my left hand and which is my right, but if i'm giving someone directions, i blank out if i have to tell someone whether to go left or right. i just can't visualize which way something is from my particular point in space. left and right are relative. i'm better with semi-fixed directions like east and west.

that's what happens to me! i forger which is which.

"forget"

its true about math. i've gotten this far...

part of me loved that ray bradbury interview where he says you should just teach kids how to add and subtract and then stop teaching them math! if they need to learn it later they will! good old ray.

i'm not against learning math (although i was when i was flunking it in school, har har). some people do better when it's dressed up as things like logic puzzles, though.

when someone says "okay, is it on MY left..." i try to visualize myself turning around and being in their position to figure out what their left is. and even that takes me a long time to figure out.

stage left and right in the theater = always a source of hilarity

the only card game i'll play is war. its the only one i can handle. i avoid all written instructions too. too hard. especially if numbers are involved. i never play board games because i always forget how to play. maria made me play scrabble once - her whole family plays - and i thought i was gonna commit suicide. my whole spatial thing is fucked. my parents had me tested by the school shrink in the 9th grade and she totally dissed my block arranging skills in the written report my parents got.

i totally have this

Some of this sounds like me, I'm awful at any math above basic arithmetic, often get right and left confused, etc

I used to teach Dyscalculic kids at a specialist school, so feel free to ask me stuff about this! In general it's the sort of thing I'd be wary about self-diagnosing; for instance: I'm awful at any math above basic arithmetic does not really sound like full-blown dyscalculia (though it may be a spectrum - dyselxia is).

It's tricky because all of Dyscalculia, Dyslexia, and ADD are v.v. strongly correlated with one another, but sometimes you do get out-of-the-blue-sky dyscalculia and it's kind of whoa.

My trainer was an acolyte of this lady: http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Dyscalculia_Guidance.html?id=2diFAAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y - Skott if you're looking for a book aimed at dyscalcic learners you might find it helpful! BTW I listen to 'yr smooth sailing mix' about once a week still.

I really struggle to do mental arithmetic and some (not all) of the other things on the list. but I'm also halfway through a maths degree and doing well... So Scott, go buy that textbook!

I tell myself that one of these days I'm going to spend some time at Khan Academy and get a handle on basic math I've forgotten since K-12.

My personal dys-ease is difficulty comprehending spoken numbers. If someone says a phone number to me, I struggle to translate those sounds into numbers I can remember or write down. Before caller ID and similar services, I spent a lot of time replaying voice mail messages.

i keep my home phone number written down in my wallet...

and maria's cell phone number...

can go somewhere 20 times and forget how to get there. poor maria...

I laughed and then I felt bad...

its funny to me how i really never questioned any of this. just got used to the fact that its almost impossible for me to remember a phone number. and other stuff like that. brains are weird. because i have a REALLY good memory for all kinds of other stuff.

It doesn't help that French French says '4 twenties' for eighty and '4 twenty-fifteen' for 95 but the only way I could ever remember phone numbers in French was because they used to be four pairs of numbers so I would basically only have to remember four double-digit numbers. I was never able to caluculate in French beyond very simple things like addition or subtraction.

Oh hang on, about 90% of this applies to me too. Is this really a real thing, or is it just a posh French word for 'crap at maths'. I mean, even simple mental arithmetic like subtracting 4 from say, 31 is enough to make me start counting on my fingers and it's very embarrassing as an adult.

27

oh sorry, I thought this was a contest

I'm not even sure 90% is right... That's a lot, right? ;-)

if all you guyses "math deficits" were a new yorker cartoon contest, my entry would be, "this is normal"

dyspoopia

feel like i have that some times

The only time I ever did any good in maths was when they gave us problem solving tasks where you had to write about your work to solve the problem and how you came up with your answer. I could ACE the hell out of those because even if I got the problem wrong, I could explain in great detail how I came up with my wrong answer.

But if I just had to come up with a number on normal exams, I was screwed. I liked trig because there were lots of formulas that had names that I could remember and it sort of made sense to me, but everything else was just like a fog.

I mean, you know it's pretty bad when you have to ask the person next to you how to turn you exam score into a percentage, lol

I'm totally on the dyscalculia spectrum. maps and directional stuff I'm awful at. I never really hated school until I had to learn a multiplication table. I still can't remember basics like 7*6 and have to do the math to figure it out. I'm never on time for anything. can't sleep if there's noise. good w/ faces, terrible w/ names.

however, after getting diagnosed w/ ADD as an adult I aced a statistics course that murdered everybody else in the class. this was after getting medicated, so I do buy the correlation thing.

can go somewhere 20 times and forget how to get there. poor maria...

This is me too. My flatmates used to play a game where they would ask for directions somewhere I go every day and see how far I could get. I visual places as something like photos - I know what the places look like. But how they link up together I have no idea. When walking I tend to get there - unless it's directions someplace unvisited. It's kind of related to self confidence (I'm bopolar) - I don't doubt the directions, only whether I did turn left etc.

But it's not just 20 times, it's the village I live in - I can't give directions at all. Wondering if there is a name for it? disorienta? too common. dismapia, disatlasomething?

"I still can't remember basics like 7*6"

I think that's pretty normal - I would just add 6 to 6x6. Multiplication tables are terrible, they should just teach kids the 2x and 3x and the squares and let them calculate the rest.

yeah my struggles to remember the multiplication tables in school was really embarrassing, especially since it was in such contrast with me generally being v good at maths.

actually i can match myself to quite a lot of those things. arithmetic i suspect it's just because i'm out of practice, which is kind of shameful, i have to return to brain training. generally though i feel 'normal' in all of those apart from directions, and which i am comically useless. i can get lost walking in a straight line, it should be a joke, but it isn't.

at* which

I was good at maths at school and I can still say yes to half of these. Mainly I have no attention span or organisational skills whatsoever. I used to be good at mental arithmetic but now I make the first step in a mental sum and then lose focus and ask Google/Windows calculator. Even then I'll probably get confused about which way round a division needs to be or lose track of what I'm doing.

And I was always bad at spatial awareness puzzles. Geometry, those IQ puzzles where you're meant to say which of 4 choices is/isn't a rotation of the first 3D object, or the ones where you get 3 sets of shapes inside shapes arbitrarily changing from white to black or from circles to squares etc and then it says "which is the next symbol in this sequence?"... uh I dunno, could be any of them, you're making this up

(I sometimes wonder if I'd have been declared ADD if I'd grown up in a time and place where that was deemed to exist, and whether it would be good or bad if I had been)

I can't give directions at all. Wondering if there is a name for it?

Environmental agnosia?

Self-diagnosticians ott would have a blast with the Agnosia wiki page.

I get the numbers 4 and 7 mixed up an awful lot. Like if I know someone lives at number 54, I'll often think they're at 57 for example. If it's more than a 2-digit number, I'm basically fucked.

ha, actually that reminds me of a problem of mine that people, when i tell them, generally don't recognise at all - when i'm dealing with alphanumeric things like passwords i often mix up 6 and g and always have to take a moment to figure out which it is i'm doing. mildest most arbitrary case of dyslexia possible?

Anybody know if dysgraphia affects typing? That would explain a lot.

Dysgraphia is more of a description of a problem than an explanation. It can affect typing, but not necessarily. Typically, people with dysgraphia find it easier to type than write by hand, even if they also have some trouble typing.