What are your motor skills like?

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I learnt to tie my shoes when I was about 9 or 10. Neck ties I learnt a little earlier at about 7.
What I thought were square/reef knots were grannies until the age of 12. Only then I learnt to tie propper square/reef knots.

my hand writing's crap(my teachers remind me of this every...single...day), i'll ocassionally drool out of my mouth, in the morning i'm like a pinball ball bouncing on each obstacle, i could be better at sports if my aim wasn't so horrible, i randomly twitch throughout the day, and i... that's all.

As a teenager I would do anything to learn how to play a musical instrument but I could not learn no matter how hard I tried. My fingers just seemed to have an mind of their own twitching and hitting the wrong chords. My pinkie finger especially was impossible to coordinate and the others were not all that much better.

I had poor coordination as a kid. I was diagnosed with hypotonia at 6, which contributed to my fine motor skill problems. I couldn't catch a ball, or stand on one leg without falling over, had trouble with writing, and I learned to walk late. I also didn't learn to ride a bike until I was 7, but my mom said I might have been able to learn earlier, they just held me back because of my problems.

So, I went into physical therapy and adaptive p.e. to take care of these problems and now I'm much improved. My fine motor skills are still not the greatest though and sometimes frustrate me, but I'm way better than I was.

I can hold standing on one leg for about a minute now until I really have to struggle then fall over.

I have poor coordination skills when it comes to sports, however when under no pressure, I have average coordination skills.

Although I am constantly bruised from bumping into furniture, doorways etc and often nearly fall over because of standing on the outsides of my feet, which makes me pirouette uncontrollably ( ) I can do incredibly fiddly things like cutting out the incredibly wiggly shapes I design. Odd, isn't it?

I'm diagnosed as dyspraxic as well as having Asperger's, which means my body posture is usually a mess, I can't write neatly for my life, I can't catch very well at all or co-ordinate a throw either, and I always bump into things, like if I walk through a door my arm or foot might clip the edge of the doorframe, which can be quite painful and I nearly always have bruises on my arms. I'm always tripping up, too...

With all the greif I used to get from both teachers and other kids at school during PE lessons, no wonder I used to truant PE a lot... <.<

One word:Crappy.

My coordination was so back growing up my parents sent me to physical therapy. If they put me on one of those 1 legged chairs, I would just fall over and not catch myself at all. I was so bad at catching balls, I still remember getting chastised by my GYM teacher in elementary school for "not paying attention"... lol if it was only that simple... If I ever hit the ball, it was an accident.

I don't really have much depth perception because I have strabismus(crossed eyes). I've had cosmetic surgery, but it doesn't fix your vision. My vision is 20/20 however and I can drive well enough to never have an accident. People do complain that drive with me that I "squeal" the tires and stop too suddenly. No matter what I do, I haven't been able to stop doing those things however.

Maybe because of having to learn to deal with my lack of depth perception, I catch myself doing internal visualizing alot. At 27yrs old now, I can catch a ball reasonably well, but I find I am not really looking at it too closely. I don't really know how to explain it, but it's sort of a zen thing. If I just focus on the "idea" of catching the ball I seem to be able to do it, but it doesn't seem to be based on "watching" the ball... Does that make sense? lol, Maybe I need to spend some time with some budist monks off in china in the mountains to get good at catching balls like normal people.

Hehe you probably catch like I do.. if Im looking at it with both eyes I cant judge the distance but if Im not looking directly at it and can only see it with one eye I seem to be able to judge the trajectory quite naturally.

For example playing baseball in gym class the instructor had set me aside with another person to just practice catching the ball with the mitt but I kept missing it. After going on like this for a while I hear a *THWACK* and see something move out of the corner of my eye. Next thing I know Im wondering why Im holding two softballs and my hand stings.

The guy was practically gibbering so it was hard to make out but I pieced together later from others that someone had hit a line drive at the side of my head and I caught it barehanded without turning my head or even looking.

Like I wasnt considered enough of a freak already

Similar things happen like that all the time so I dont think it was just luck.

When I worked as a waitress if someone dropped something off the edge of a table Im walking by I can catch it before it hits the ground *provided* I dont move my eyes to try to follow it or look at it (proven through trial and error and sweeping up broken dishes).

I dunno maybe its just a matter of moving your eyes messes up our ability to properly track the movement of the object.

TERRIBLE. And I also have hyper-tight ligaments in the backs of my legs which makes it harder to run properly. I'm flat-footed. I can't throw straight or far. And recently it's getting harder and harder even to walk uphill. And when I push myself into a standing position it feels like ten times as much effort as it should.

But funnily enough, I'm good at rowing. And my handwriting is meticulously neat. (I think because I was always such a perfectionist) I like to do things with a pen in my hand -- thoughts come so much easier that way.

And I can draw. And play music (although quite rusty due to lack of practice )

"Autism May Involve A Lack Of Connections And Coordination In Separate Areas Of The Brain, Researchers Find
16 Jul 2006

Researchers have found in two studies that autism may involve a lack of connections and coordination in separate areas of the brain.

In people with autism, the brain areas that perform complex analysis appear less likely to work together during problem solving tasks than in people who do not have the disorder, report researchers working in a network funded by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found that communications between these higher-order centers in the brains of people with autism appear to be directly related to the thickness of the anatomical connections between them.

In a separate report, the same research team found that, in people with autism, brain areas normally associated with visual tasks also appear to be active during language-related tasks, providing evidence to explain a bias towards visual thinking common in autism.

"These findings provide support to a new theory that views autism as a failure of brain regions to communicate with each other," said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of NIH's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. "The findings may one day provide the basis for improved treatments for autism that stimulate communication between brain areas."

The studies and the theory are the work of Marcel Just, Ph.D., D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Nancy Minshew, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and their colleagues. The research was conducted by the Collaborative Program of Excellence in Autism, a research network funded by the NICHD and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

People with autism often have difficulty communicating and interacting socially with other people. The saying "unable to see the forest for the trees" describes how people with autism frequently excel at details, yet struggle to comprehend the larger picture. For example, some children with autism may become spelling bee champions, but have difficulty understanding the meaning of a sentence or a story.

An earlier finding by these researchers described how a group of people with autism tended to use parts of the brain typically associated with processing shapes to remember letters of the alphabet. A news release detailing that finding appears at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/new/releases/final_autism.cfm.

Participants with autism in both current studies had normal I.Q. There were no significant differences between the participants with and without autism in age or I.Q.

The first of the two new studies recently was published online in the journal Cerebral Cortex. In that study, the researchers used a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to view the brains of people with autism as well as a comparison group of people who do not have autism. All of the study participants were asked to complete the Tower of London test. The task involves moving three balls into a specified arrangement in an array of three receptacles. The Tower of London is used to gauge the functioning of the prefrontal cortex.

This brain area, located in the front, upper part of the brain, deals with strategic planning and problem-solving. The prefrontal cortex is the executive area of the brain, in which decision making, judgment, and impulse control reside.

A little further back is the parietal cortex, which controls high-level visual thinking and visual imagery, supporting the visual aspects of the problem-solving. Both the prefrontal and parietal cortex play a critical part in performing the Tower of London test.

In the normal participants, the prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex tended to function in synchrony (increasing and decreasing their activity at the same time) while solving the Tower of London task. This suggests that the two brain areas were working together to solve the problem.

In the participants with autism, however, the two brain areas, prefrontal and parietal, were less likely to function in synchrony while working on the task.

The researchers made another discovery, for the first time finding a relationship between this lower level of synchrony and the properties of some of the neurological "cables" or white matter fiber tracts that connect brain areas.

White matter consists of fibers that, like cabling, connect brain areas. The largest of the white matter tracts is known as the corpus callosum, which allows communication between the two hemispheres (halves) of the brain.
"The size of the corpus callosum was smaller in the group with autism, suggesting that inter-regional brain cabling is disrupted in autism," Dr. Just said.

In essence, the extent to which the two key brain areas (prefrontal and parietal) of the autistic participants worked in synchrony was correlated with the size of the corpus callosum. The smaller the corpus callosum, the less likely the two areas were to function in synchrony. In the normal participants, however, the size of the corpus callosum did not appear to be correlated with the ability of the two areas to work in synchrony.

"This finding provides strong evidence that autism is a disorder involving the biological connections and the coordination of processing between brain areas," Dr. Just said.

He added, however, that the thickness, or extent, of connections between brain areas may not be the basis for the disorder. Although the neurological connections between the prefrontal cortex appear to be reduced in autism, the brains of people with autism have thicker connections between certain brain regions within each hemisphere.

"At this point, we can say that autism appears to be a disorder of abnormal neurological and informational connections of the brain, but we can't yet explain the nature of that abnormality," Dr. Just said.

In the second study, published online in the journal Brain, the researchers examined the extent to which brain areas involved in language interact with brain regions that process images. Dr. Just explained that earlier studies, as well as anecdotal accounts, suggest that people with autism rely more heavily on visual and spatial areas of the brain than do other people.

In this study, the researchers used fMRI to examine brain functioning in participants with autism and in normal participants during a true-false test involving reading sentences with low imagery content and high imagery content. A typical low imagery sentence consisted of constructions like "Addition, subtraction, and multiplication are all math skills." A high imagery sentence, "The number eight when rotated 90 degrees looks like a pair of eyeglasses," would first activate left prefrontal brain areas involved with language, and then would involve parietal areas dealing with vision and imagery as the study participant mentally manipulated the number eight.

As the researchers expected, the visual brain areas of the normal participants were active only when evaluating sentences with imagery content. In contrast, the visual centers in the brains of participants with autism were active when evaluating both high imagery and low imagery sentences.

"The heavy reliance on visualization in people with autism may be an adaptation to compensate for a diminished ability to call on prefrontal regions of the brain," Dr. Just said.

The second study also confirmed the observations in the first study--that the prefrontal and parietal brain regions of the cortex in people with autism were less likely to work in synchrony than were the brains of normal volunteers. The second study also confirmed that the extent to which the two parts of the cortex could work together was correlated with the size of the corpus callosum that connected them. Dr. Just and his colleagues are conducting additional studies to ascertain the nature of the abnormality of the connections in the brains of people with autism".

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medical ... wsid=47193

Lack of Coordination is also a key characteristic of ADHD but that isn't widely known.

For the record I'm Inattentive ADHD, I'm clumsy and at times drool. That last one I've only noticed in the last few years. I'll be doing something at work and just a little drool escapes me. It's like I'm not concious of it till it escapes the mouth. That's not something that you want to point out to your co-workers.

Mostly I'm about average, I think... I'm a semi-decent self-taught typist with moderately shocking writing (but who writes anymore these days?), I can catch a ball but I throw like a girl, I can kick as high as my head but by that height there's almost no power left, and I drool only when I see hot ladies

I have always thought that when I do that, it's because I'm concentrating and my facial muscles have relaxed. I notice that my mouth usually hangs open when I am focussing on something (even when I'm just daydreaming) so when my head is tilted forward enough, I will drool