Awhile back I wrote about a painful muscle strain I’d developed in my shoulder and neck area.  Like many dyscalculics, I have a poor [...]]]> This has been sitting in my editing box for more than a month now.  Since it’s Dyscalculia Awareness Month, I figured it’s only appropriate that I dust it off and publish it.

Awhile back I wrote about a painful muscle strain I’d developed in my shoulder and neck area.  Like many dyscalculics, I have a poor sense of my body in space, and how not to move without hurting myself.  Most of the time I hurt myself in small ways, by running into things.  Other times I develop repetitive stress injuries because I’m not aware that I’m holding myself in an awkward, damaging position.

It started when I was sick, curled up on the couch in a position that didn’t feel awkward at the time.  I was sort of aware of pain and discomfort, but I kept working out, and then I did some work on my car, and then I woke up the next morning unable to sit up.  It seriously took me several minutes to figure out how to get out of bed without screaming.

Since then I’ve had some deep tissue massage, some stretching, some ultrasound massage, more stretching, a lot of advil, more stretching, sports gel, more stretching, hot and cold packs, and more stretching.  The injury seemed to stay about the same.  It would hurt like hell when I woke up, then I would massage the area with sports gel, and it would be much better.  Then I’d wake up the next morning once again in horrible pain.

What finally helped was a trick from the Alexander Technique that I’d learned several years ago — the “semi-supine” position.  The idea is to relax your muscles by lying on your back in a completely neutral position; that is, your feet are flat on the floor, your knees are bent, your head is supported, and your spine is allowed to fall into its natural shape.  By doing this for ten minutes I already felt better than I had in weeks.  This 46 second video demonstrates how to do it.

Alexander Tehcnique, Semi-Supine Position

Since My New Year’s resolution was to improve my proprioception with the precise goal of not doing this crap to myself anymore, I had already checked out some books from the library about the Alexander Technique.  One of them introduced me to the “prone position”, in which you lie on your stomach, your chest supported by a few books or a yoga brick, and your forehead on the floor.  In this position, your spine bears no weight at all; and according to the book, it was a good remedy for tightness in in the shoulder and neck area.  After doing that for ten minutes, following ten minutes in semi-supine, I felt almost normal.

So, at last, my shoulder and neck are feeling a lot better.

There are a lot of Alexander resources out there.  This video is pretty informative, though I get a bit of a “dear leader” vibe from it.  The book I found to be the most useful was called How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live. It’s free of a lot of the pseudoscience that plagues these sorts of books.  In fact, it goes a step farther, with the author explaining in basic evolutionary terms why humans have trouble with movement and injury while other animals don’t.  Basically, the issue is one of neuroplasticity.  Whereas other animals are born knowing how to walk, humans have freed up that brain space to enable us to learn.  The upside is that we’re really adaptable.  The downside need to be taught almost everything that we know and do, including movement.

Dyscalculia is a math disability, similar to dyslexia. A lot of people joke about having “math dyslexia” without realizing that it’s quite real. In addition to effecting a person’s number sense and ability to [...]]]> March 3rd is World Dyscalculia Day.  Celebrate by learning about this disorder, and helping to get the word out!

Dyscalculia is a math disability, similar to dyslexia. A lot of people joke about having “math dyslexia” without realizing that it’s quite real. In addition to effecting a person’s number sense and ability to work with math concepts, dyscalculia can cause difficulty telling time, reading a map, learning the rules to games, remembering dance steps, or dealing with formal music education. Also called “math disability” or “math disorder”, dyscalculia is recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (315) as well as by the World Health Organization.

There are plenty of places to learn about dyscalculia on the web. To meet other folks with dyscalculia, check out the Dyscalculia Forum. For a basic introduction to the disorder, the wikipedia article is pretty thorough. LD Online has a description of the presentation of dyscalculia in different developmental stages, from early childhood through adulthood. Last but not least, there’s my own article at Squidoo, What The Heck Is Dyscalculia?, which is a humorous look at life as an adult with math disorder.

Happy World Dyscalculia Day!

I [...]]]>

Rickie Sugars is glad the study proves a link between learning disabilities and poor mental health.

I have no idea when this story ran in the Vancouver Sun, but it’s worth a look.  The Learning Disabilities Association of Canada has released a study on the long-term effects of undiagnosed learning disabilities.  The results?  Lasting psychological harm.

I can certainly attest to this.  My LD went undiagnosed until half way through my junior year of college.  By that point, I was at a top-20 liberal arts college, surrounded by people who were able to do the assignments AND the reading for all of their classes, and my self esteem was not only in the toilet but flushed into the sewers.  Since my disabilities are in areas that are the focus of most entry-level professional jobs (paperwork, scheduling, filing, and occasionally light bookkeeping as well) I essentially have no career to speak of.

As a result of this, I’ve been diagnosed with major depression and dysthymia, anxiety and panic disorder, stress-related asthma, and even a heart condition.  It’s taken my whole adult life to come to terms with this. I have had to rebuild myself from my foundations.  In short, friends, it has sucked, and it has sucked mightily.

Mad props to LDAC for taking this issue seriously, and for getting the word out.

I get confused when there two of something.  That is, when I am trying to remember the difference between two related but distinct concepts.  For instance, there’s the difference between “affect” and “effect” that I wrote about yesterday.  Another example is the difference between “inductive” and “deductive” reasoning, which I must have learned about half [...]]]>

I get confused when there two of something.  That is, when I am trying to remember the difference between two related but distinct concepts.  For instance, there’s the difference between “affect” and “effect” that I wrote about yesterday.  Another example is the difference between “inductive” and “deductive” reasoning, which I must have learned about half a dozen times by now in difference college and grad school courses, but which I still can’t remember.  Inductive reasoning is general to specific no, I just looked it up and I was wrong.  See what I mean?

Inductive reasoning is specific to general, whereby you use a set of facts to arrive at a general conclusion.  For example, “all ice is cold” is inductively derived based on the fact that all the ice I’ve ever touched is cold.  It’s a useful thing for theory-building.

Deducutve reasoning is the other way around.  This is what Sherlock Holmes was famous for — reasoning that the specific person standing before him is a stonemason, for instance, because that person is covered in the type of dust that generally covers stonemasons.

But I digress (I do that a lot).  These are just the two examples I can think of right now, but I know there are more.  When I can’t quite get something straight in my head I often find thinking, “it’s because there are two possibilities, I just know it — if there were three or five I’d have no trouble remembering this”.  It’s as if my brain, hearing that “A” means “fu” and “B” means “bar”, takes a snapshot of the information and then files it upside down and sideways.  “Right,” says my brain, “Bar, fu, A, B.  got it.  No problem, boss!”.

Other people I know don’t seem to have this problem. I don’t know if it’s to do with my learning disabilities or if it’s an unrelated quirk of my brain.