<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>lostmyoldone</author><text>I have ADD and used to have significant trouble with these kind of issues, while I still have trouble with time, almost all of my issues with remembering number (pin codes etc) went away after an &amp;quot;intensive&amp;quot; regimen of essentially n-back training prescribed by my care provider.&lt;p&gt;While my improvement after 30min a day for a couple of weeks was something of an aberration in magnitude (from 70&amp;quot;th percentile to 110&amp;#x27;th, from well below average to above), it was reportedly quite consistent in increasing recall percentile with ~10% as measured against the general population. Which especially at lower percentiles is quite impressive!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not really realated, but to me the whole thing was quite a strange experience!
After roughly a week of daily practice, it suddenly felt like I found a part of my brain I didn&amp;#x27;t even know existed. I could suddenly pick numbers, or sequences of &amp;quot;lights&amp;quot; turning on on the screen, seemingly from nothing! The first times it happened I didn&amp;#x27;t really remember the sequence, I only knew which button to push, but after a little more practice I started to be able to consciously recall the sequence from this new place in my mind.&lt;p&gt;It was truly stunning to be suddenly able to look at a code at the car wash, and sometimes remember it for hours afterwards!&lt;p&gt;Me, who several times had forgotten my card pin, who though I loved and was good at maths had to read digit by digit to get the numbers right (and often still didn&amp;#x27;t), and who had in general tended to permute any kind of number more often than not for the ~30 years I had known what numbers were!&lt;p&gt;The brain is so strange sometimes.</text><parent_chain><item><author>polytely</author><text>I have exactly this, still have a lot of mental math. At school teachers just gave up at some point and gave me a calculator, I still have a lot of trouble with mental multiplication and converting between analog and digital time (doesn&amp;#x27;t help that in Dutch you say 15:30 like &amp;#x27;half four&amp;#x27;).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also terrible at holding numbers in my head, if I do not keep paying conscious attention to it, they get reversed or substituted. I remember all my PIN&amp;#x27;s by the motion you used to input them instead of the number itself.&lt;p&gt;Programming made me discover how much I love math, but I still miss a lot of basics because I never &amp;#x27;got it&amp;#x27; in elementary school, and thus ended up in the lowest levels of math in highschool, where it was extremely boring and tedious (because it was actually way to easy), I wish I could send a programming book&amp;#x2F;numberphile videos to my 12-year-old self, because I think I could have ended up using high-school time way more effectively, instead of just going through the motions.</text></item><item><author>Gene_Parmesan</author><text>I have ADHD (where dyslexia is a common co-morbidity). I&amp;#x27;m not dyslexic, but I tend to experience dyslexia-like symptoms with numbers. Never letters, just numbers. It made math hell in school. Like you describe, it&amp;#x27;s not that the numbers are literally moving on the page. It&amp;#x27;s that they sort of... blob together in my consciousness, like there&amp;#x27;s a blind spot in my visual understanding, and my brain tends to fill in with numbers that look close enough. I tend to transpose numbers very very easily, swapping 6s and 9s, 2s and 5s, 7s and 1s.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s an additional layer of challenge where numbers are involved; with words, there are spellings that are obviously not words, or words that don&amp;#x27;t make sense in a given sentence. With numbers, there&amp;#x27;s no easy way for your brain to check whether what you read is accurate, because there&amp;#x27;s no equivalent of numbers not making sense.</text></item><item><author>FuckButtons</author><text>I’m dyslexic, you’re right, this is an exaggeration, but it’s almost impossible to simulate the real thing. It’s not like the letters move around the page, it’s that you perceive them to be other letters or words. Then you realize that you read doesn’t make sense and your brain just replaces it with the correct words or letters when you read it again. It kind of makes you aware of the fact that what you see and what is there are two distinct things which are not always the same.</text></item><item><author>caymanjim</author><text>This seems like an exaggeration of the descriptions I&amp;#x27;ve heard about dyslexia, in that letters move way too far. Another huge problem is that the first and last letters don&amp;#x27;t change, and I&amp;#x27;m betting that for dyslexics, those anchor letters don&amp;#x27;t exist. With the anchor letters, I find this trivial to read. It barely slows me down at all. Studies have shown that most people can read fairly easily when the first and last letters of a word are fixed and the inner letters are scrambled. Given the difficulty that dyslexics have, I suspect this isn&amp;#x27;t a realistic simulation.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an interesting idea. I appreciate the goal. I just don&amp;#x27;t know that this is anything like the real thing. I&amp;#x27;m not sure it&amp;#x27;s possible to know what it&amp;#x27;s subjectively like.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Website allows you to experience what it is like to live with dyslexia (2016)</title><url>http://geon.github.io/programming/2016/03/03/dsxyliea</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>violetgarden</author><text>Mental math is so difficult for me that it’s embarrassing! The numbers just don’t stay in my head long enough. I used to feel anxiety if math came up in conversation because I simply can’t calculate in my head like others do, and it makes me feel like a fool.&lt;p&gt;In school, I’d think I’d be doing great on my math problems. When I’d get my work back, I did terrible because I’d accidentally change the numbers in the middle of the problem. I also always had a feeling that I missed some foundational information because nothing ever clicked for me. I put it down to switching schools a few times, but I think it may have been something more than that now. I was actually scared to even try programming because I was always told you need to be good at math, so I thought I would fail terribly.</text><parent_chain><item><author>polytely</author><text>I have exactly this, still have a lot of mental math. At school teachers just gave up at some point and gave me a calculator, I still have a lot of trouble with mental multiplication and converting between analog and digital time (doesn&amp;#x27;t help that in Dutch you say 15:30 like &amp;#x27;half four&amp;#x27;).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also terrible at holding numbers in my head, if I do not keep paying conscious attention to it, they get reversed or substituted. I remember all my PIN&amp;#x27;s by the motion you used to input them instead of the number itself.&lt;p&gt;Programming made me discover how much I love math, but I still miss a lot of basics because I never &amp;#x27;got it&amp;#x27; in elementary school, and thus ended up in the lowest levels of math in highschool, where it was extremely boring and tedious (because it was actually way to easy), I wish I could send a programming book&amp;#x2F;numberphile videos to my 12-year-old self, because I think I could have ended up using high-school time way more effectively, instead of just going through the motions.</text></item><item><author>Gene_Parmesan</author><text>I have ADHD (where dyslexia is a common co-morbidity). I&amp;#x27;m not dyslexic, but I tend to experience dyslexia-like symptoms with numbers. Never letters, just numbers. It made math hell in school. Like you describe, it&amp;#x27;s not that the numbers are literally moving on the page. It&amp;#x27;s that they sort of... blob together in my consciousness, like there&amp;#x27;s a blind spot in my visual understanding, and my brain tends to fill in with numbers that look close enough. I tend to transpose numbers very very easily, swapping 6s and 9s, 2s and 5s, 7s and 1s.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s an additional layer of challenge where numbers are involved; with words, there are spellings that are obviously not words, or words that don&amp;#x27;t make sense in a given sentence. With numbers, there&amp;#x27;s no easy way for your brain to check whether what you read is accurate, because there&amp;#x27;s no equivalent of numbers not making sense.</text></item><item><author>FuckButtons</author><text>I’m dyslexic, you’re right, this is an exaggeration, but it’s almost impossible to simulate the real thing. It’s not like the letters move around the page, it’s that you perceive them to be other letters or words. Then you realize that you read doesn’t make sense and your brain just replaces it with the correct words or letters when you read it again. It kind of makes you aware of the fact that what you see and what is there are two distinct things which are not always the same.</text></item><item><author>caymanjim</author><text>This seems like an exaggeration of the descriptions I&amp;#x27;ve heard about dyslexia, in that letters move way too far. Another huge problem is that the first and last letters don&amp;#x27;t change, and I&amp;#x27;m betting that for dyslexics, those anchor letters don&amp;#x27;t exist. With the anchor letters, I find this trivial to read. It barely slows me down at all. Studies have shown that most people can read fairly easily when the first and last letters of a word are fixed and the inner letters are scrambled. Given the difficulty that dyslexics have, I suspect this isn&amp;#x27;t a realistic simulation.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an interesting idea. I appreciate the goal. I just don&amp;#x27;t know that this is anything like the real thing. I&amp;#x27;m not sure it&amp;#x27;s possible to know what it&amp;#x27;s subjectively like.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Website allows you to experience what it is like to live with dyslexia (2016)</title><url>http://geon.github.io/programming/2016/03/03/dsxyliea</url></story>