Alex's Adventures in Numberland - Alex Bellos [29]
After a few years of using an abacus, when you are so familiar with the positioning of the beads, it becomes possible to perform calculations simply by visualizing an abacus in your head. This is called anzan, and Miyamoto’s top pupils have all learned it. The feat was amazing to watch – even though there was nothing to see. Miyamoto read out numbers to a totally silent, still classroom and within seconds the students raised their hands with the answers. Naoki Furuyama told me that he visualizes an abacus with eight columns. In other words, his imaginary abacus can display every number from 0 to 99,999,999.
Miyamoto’s abacus club is one of the best in the country in terms of the dans of its pupils and their achievements in national tournaments. Its speciality, however, is anzan. A few years ago Miyamoto decided to devise a type of arithmetical challenge that could only be answered using anzan. When you read out a sum to a pupil, for example, it can be answered in many different ways: using a calculator, pencil and paper, an abacus or anzan. Miyamoto wanted to show that there were some circumstances when anzan was the only possible method.
His solution was the computer game Flash Anzan, which he demonstrated for me. He told the class to get ready, pressed play and the pupils stared at a TV screen at the front of the room. The machine beeped three times to indicate it was about to start, and then the following 15 numbers appeared, one at a time. Each number appeared for only 0.2 seconds, so the whole thing was over in three seconds:
164
597
320
872
913
450
568
370
619
482
749
123
310
809
561
The numbers flashed by so quickly I barely had time to register them. Yet as soon as the last number flashed, Naoki Furuyama smiled and said the sum of the numbers was 7907.
It is impossible to solve a Flash Anzan challenge with a calculator or an abacus since there is no time to remember the digits being flashed at you, let alone type them into a machine or arrange beads. Anzan does not require you to remember the digits. All you do is shift the beads in your brain whenever you see a new number. You start with 0, then on seeing 164 instantly visualize the abacus on 164. On seeing 597 the internal abacus rearranges to the sum, which is 761. After 15 additions you cannot remember any of the flashed numbers nor the intermediate sums, but the imaginary abacus in your head will show the answer: 7907.
The wow factor of Flash Anzan has made it a national fad, and Nintendo has even released a Flash Anzan game for its DS consoles. Miyamoto showed me some clips from a Flash Anzan TV game show in which teenage anzan stars battled it out in front of screaming fans. Miyamoto says his game has helped recruit many new pupils to abacus clubs all over Japan. ‘People didn’t realize what you could do with soroban skills,’ he said. ‘With all this coverage, now they do.’
Neural imaging scans show that the parts of the brain activated by the abacus, or anzan, are different from the parts activated by normal arithmetical calculations and language. Traditional ‘pen and paper’ arithmetic depends on neural networks associated with linguistic processing. The soroban relies on networks associated with visuospatial information. Miyamoto simplifies this as ‘soroban uses the right brain, normal maths uses the left brain’. Not enough scientific research has been done to understand what benefits this segregation brings, or how it relates to general intelligence, concentration or other skills. Yet it does explain an astonishing phenomenon: that