U2 drummer’s rare diagnosis leaves him ‘pained’ during performances

nypost.com:

Larry Mullen Jr. of U2 fame has a diagnosis that makes playing music difficult.Mullen, drummer and founding member of the Irish rock band, revealed in a new interview with Times Radio that he suffers from dyscalculia, a learning disorder.“I’ve always known that there’s something not particularly right with the way that I deal with numbers,” he explained. “I’m numerically challenged.

And I realized recently that I have dyscalculia, which is a sub-version of dyslexia. So I can’t count [and] I can’t add.”Mullen said that the diagnosis affects the way he plays music, admitting that it makes him “pained.”He shared, “When people watch me play sometimes, they say, ‘you look pained.’ I am pained because I’m trying to count the bars.

I had to find ways of doing this — and counting bars is like climbing Everest.”Dyscalculia, according to the Cleveland Clinic, is “a learning disorder that affects a person’s ability to understand number-based information and math.