
Photo: The Express Tribune
Yasin Altaf, founder and CEO of Robotics labs, revealed that mental math could also be used to compute a longer range of numbers and is also useful for multiplication, division and more complex mathematical operations. He explained that the students were taught to move beads on an abacus in their imagination, so they don’t really need to carry one around. Mental math techniques are popular among school children in several Asian countries such as India, China, and Japan. Intrigued by the results, Michael Frank of Stanford University and David Barner of the University of California, traveled to a school in Gujarat, India, to observe the mental abacus program and conduct experiments and understand how it works.

Photo: The Hindu
Frank and Barner wanted to understand in particular, how children were able to keep track of all 15 columns of an abacus, when most people have trouble simultaneously visualizing three or four. So they studied children who had spent a year learning the technique – these children were unable to perform calculations with numbers that had more than three or four digits, which means they were only able to imagine three or four columns of the abacus in their minds. Expert mental abacus students, on the other hand, were able to perform more complex calculations. So Frank and Barner increased the complexity by setting them a language task (listening to and repeating a story) and a motor task (drumming their fingers on the table) while performing the calculations. In both cases, the tasks somewhat hindered the childrens’ mental calculations, with the language task posing less of a distraction.This indicated that the mental abacus does not depend on language systems. While most others need to represent numbers with verbal names, mental abacus appears to be entirely a visual task. “What we found confirms and extends previous work suggesting that mental abacus is not based on language, but is really a mental image of some sort, a visual representation,” said Frank. “Because the physical abacus groups beads into columns, it’s easier to hold a mental image of the abacus in your head.” According to Altaf, mental math is for everyone – anyone can use it to sharpen their minds and improve listening skills. You would have to pay attention though and work hard, so if you’re one to daydream in class, the technique might not be for you. Sources: NewScientist, The Express Tribune