Quote: "The speed at which a trained abacus user can calculate sums is remarkable, and proficient users are even able to visualize the movement of the beads in their heads in order to achieve astonishing feats of mental arithmetic."

Questions: Do people now day have this skill? Is mathematics a skill you can practice even when you're bad at it? What is the extent of mental math you can accomplish?

Comments: I thought the invention of this tool was interesting in general, this quote for the description was what I saw in particular. In some ways, I would like to learn to do mental math like this. I'm a very visual person, which is why I always have to draw pictures and multiply out numbers for myself. My mental math works to a good degree, but is it possible that I can improve it using this abacus tool enough? I think it's interesting that you can just visualize these numbers. Personally, I think I would confuse myself too much. Either way, it brings to light a new way of thinking, a new way of doing mathematics. How we're learning mathematics stems from that, but for kids now a day, calculators are the best thing ever. I feel like we are slipping on our mental math. It makes me wonder, if we incorporated this tool in our learning, would we subliminally learn mental math too?