I want to be smarter

At school they told me I was smart. Scored well on tests. Even an aptitude for Maths they said - I should have asked for a copy of the papers.

I was top of my grade mostly, but was mystified that at high school I was not ripping through the reading lab system that we had as quickly as others. I wasn't scoring high enough on comprehension or speed. But I loved English and I wrote well. Well especially the creative, imaginative stuff.

And in high school I hated Maths. It was so abstract. I wasn't getting it. I must have heard about others who bunked off - this was so not in keeping with my scared good girl style. I think maybe it started when we hid from sports and there were no repercussions. I stayed away from Maths for so long it became irrevocable and I had to shift from science to arts.

But there were problems before this - telling time. I could do it but it took a while to do it on an analogue face. 'Iiiii'ts 4 thirty (six seven eight) 4.38!'. I notice that when I teach an hour-long class I'm fine, but a 1 hour 40 minute class - what are they trying to do to me? Or a 1 hour fifteen class - I recently taught at a school with three of those sessions in a day - remembering the start and finish times was a chore. Once, years ago, I finished a class a whole half hour early. For a couple of years I got behind on my tax. (My now-divorced husband and I used to share an administrator who did it, but my husband's business got so big he took her on full time and I was on my own.).The columns, the numbers, the fear. When I run workshops and schedule day events...it's a pain to have to clunk my brain through the timings and check and double check, because I had noticed that people get really angry at something so obvious being wrong. It was unprofessional.

I was tempted to put these things down to an emotional reason. For example: my bully of a Father taught me to tell the time - in the garage where I had once received a beating, could that be it.... Or a weakness of character - I'm lazy. I dislike it and am nervous of it. 

I'm creative and was for many years a nervous scardey cat (cortisol was my middle name). Once I lost an opportunity to make a lot of money on some shares (sadly no, I am not stock-market savvy) I had been told to buy them as a sure thing by my then boyfriend's father on my coming into some money from my grandmother.I had moved abroad and thought I had set up everything so that action could be taken in my absence. I looked at this letter which in later years I looked at and realized that it simply required signing and sending back and I was frozen. I could not take action, the boom passed and...ugh I can't talk about it anymore.

Maybe that's more about nerves and unworldliness than brain function but I'm not smart enough to know....

I was having lunch with a friend. Have you heard of Dyspraxia, she said. Yes, I said. 'I never knew', she said, I thought  that was 'just me' banging cups down on the table and stuff like that.' I joked that i thought I had the same thing with numbers. Two days later she emailed me - 'it's called Dyscalculia!' I googled the symptoms and (I know, risking classic google hypochondria...) a number of them, including difficulty inputting numbers in a calculator (years ago a friend kindly led me through how to do my tax myself).

I have also trained myself to think more clearly by writing up notes for my coaching Clients and starting to write down exercises I taught and formalize my theatre teaching, too.
Perhaps my laziness and aversion are a character flaws. I applied new strategies and practices to shake them loose.

Last year I had a few inaccuracies on Invoices. I had been feeling good about myself training my 'bohemian brain', teaching myself to love being professional and organised, affirming that my memory was amazing, comprehensive, perfect. I managed to remember to attach the attachments. I got more savvy on the computer. But here I was again this year putting the wrong date on or adding up wrongly. Each year when I do my tax I fancy I get better with the arithmetic. But I caught myself the other day doing a sum half addition and half subtraction.

Though Dyscalculia is about numbers it also mentioned problems with names.... I would notice that I was quite capable of thinking Sunday and saying Wednesday. Thinking November and saying April. I would have to concentrate really hard to know whether I was being told Liverpool Street or London Bridge....that sort of thing.

For years I have been into self improvement. 22 years of deep meditation, which was meant to prolong life, support health and I hoped, make me smarter, too. I have used NLP and Holosync. I bought a photo reading course to help me read all the piles of books I have bought in the hope of getting smarter. My work as a facilitator and coach in the business world began as 'us in the arts bringing something wonderful to the poor people in conservative clothing'. As the years went by my work in the corporate sector evolved through facilitation to coaching and I had realised that there were some fine people with very good intellects and cultural lives in business and I was also grateful for learning how the systems of the world worked (I had no uncles who were lawyers or doctors or even in business so my general knowledge was very poor and my parents had been terrified about and reactive to tax, accounting, legal matters, all the systems stuff). 

I had learned what a big impact people's preferred perceptual modes had an incorporated that into my teaching and coaching work. I had gone from being unconsciously smug about my creative nature to realizing that even the art world required you to be good at the business side  of Show Business. I started to will myself to develop better left hemisphere brain functions. Logic, systems thinking, numbers.

Recently friends recommended bio-feedback. A woman called Dr Lesley Parkinson - specialist in Neuropsycho-Physiology. In fact: Dr. Parkinson is possibly the United Kingdom and European most experienced consultant clinical-psychologist in BioFeedback, Neurofeedback,  Hemoencephalography  and quantitative electo-encephalographic assessment (QEEG) and brain health. 

My friend went because he wanted to sleep better and remember names better. He said he felt a creative boost after treatment. Another friend was prey to fatigue and he became cured of that and also became more verbally adept and even seemed more socially at ease afterward. Another friend reported that she felt she was better able to write applications. They also told me Dr P can cure tinnitus. I have had tinnitus since 1997 and although I have made my peace with it, it would be a bonus to hear silence again.

Dr P has been part of a small experiment with dancers doing a production - some were having 'brain brightening' treatment and even though artistic endeavours are hard to judge to subjectively, this group was somehow pronounced superior to the other group. By rights, and by my limited understanding of science research there may have been three groups. One group to do nothing different, one to try harder and the other to try the research. Any rate the other, or one of the other groups who were meant to just do what they would normally, worked super hard - and still lost to the brightened brains.