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'At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of 150 meters' is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas 'you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet' falls out of the Lagrangian.
I wonder if I have this. Edit: no I don't think I do.
One of the symptoms of ADHD, as I understand it, is difficulties with symbol decoding (I think that is what it is called). I think it may be related to poor working memory. Say you want to decode a substitution cypher. With ADHD you have to keep referring back to the decoding chart more often than those without. (I took a test on this as part of my diagnosis and I sucked at it).
I think maybe that affects understanding equations with all the symbols and Greek letters and such?
That may be my problem. My daughter was diagnosed with ADHD and although I've never gotten an official diagnosis, her symptoms are pretty similar to my experiences, so it's entirely possible I have ADHD and this is an ADHD thing.
ADHD is very heritable, almost as much as height. So it is pretty likely, indeed.
PS: I can grasp math concepts if explained in certain ways. I had to take a below grade level math class in middle school and needed a tutor for algebra. I blame the teachers lol. I somehow managed to get through all the math in my engineering degree (wtf was I thinking?).
Later on in life I struggled to understand Kalman filters until an online course explained it in a really accessible way, and related it to another class that was well taught on Bayesian statistics. It all clicked. But if I stare at typical math textbooks, it might as well be written in hieroglyphics. It just doesn't sink in.