Hello Community!
I have a urgent question. How are some people be able to calculate numbers so effortlessly?
In my opinion only training alone can’t be responsible to get this results.
I mean to calculate or visualize numbers is quite easy for me but to memorize numbers is pretty difficult. In mental calculation you do calculate,visualize and memorize numbers at the same time which even more difficult.
So if there some of the people here in this community who are gifted in mental calculation?
If anybody here to answer than I have some questions.
Whats going on in your head If you do mental calculation?
Do you have any born abilities like synesthesia, photografic/eidetic memory which helps for mental calculation?
I’m not a competitive mental calculator but don’t they just use mnemonics?
Like, I am very far from being at all competitive at it, but I do the exercises of a page named Sikore for fun, lvl 21, that’s addition, substraction, multiplication and division up to x40, the addition and substraction can get up to 2000.
When I am doing a somewhat big number and I need to remember intermediate results I just store them on a memory palace. I would assume competitive calculators do the same, unless they are just gifted when it comes to working memory.
Mental calculator here at international events, and I’ve done a lot of research on this for my training, coaching and website (World Mental Calculation).
Everyone has pretty much the same working memory capacity (the type of memory that is relevant here) which is equivalent to about 10 digits, including 5 digits visually. I’ve written here about working memory for mental math, about the size of our working memory, and about mental math without seeing the numbers. Author Scott H Young also wrote about working memory more recently here. I’ve done experiments with top mental calculators including Jeonghee Lee and in workshops at the JMCWC and good mental calculators have good working memory capacity but it’s within the normal range—you don’t really get outliers.
I don’t believe in eidetic memory, otherwise people with this superpower would dominate many of the memory disciplines, while we know that memory palaces etc. are far superior to raw techniques.
Synesthesia is real but not sure how helpful it would be.
For me, I understand a lot about numbers, e.g. their factors, so this makes e.g. 84 and 86 feel quite different in my mind. This helps a little.
Almost no mental calculators use mnemonics, and if they do it is only for occasional extreme calculations e.g. at MCWC at least one competitor (Manar) used this successfully for dividing by a square root.
Many mental calculators use the soroban (abacus), which enables them to visualize numbers without it interfering with written numbers that they can see.
I believe that the best mental calculators do have a special “gift” for memorization.
Let’s look at the example of Wim Klein: this mental calculator knew by heart
the 99 × 99 multiplication table [although it’s true that he didn’t study it directly, but rather memorized it indirectly by storing each result through a long, tedious, and repetitive exercise],
prime numbers up to 10,000, which made factorization easier for him,
the squares up to 1,000,
the cubes up to 100,
trigonometric functions [this Wikipedia article mentions his victory over another great mental calculator, Alexander Aitken, at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in 1954, where he defeated him in sine calculations: Wim Klein — Wikipédia]
calendar calculations require a lot of information,
logarithms up to the number 150,
Sources: https://pyth.eu/uploads/user/ArchiefPDF/Pyth16-2.pdf and the book of Steven B. Smith, The Great Mental Calculators: The Psychology, Methods, and Lives of Calculating Prodigies, Past and Present, Columbia University Press, 1983.
Thank you! Thats help a lot to get insights how to best calculater think.
Do you think that some people who don’t do soroban could have for many numbers strong associations or even emotions which help them to memorize numbers easily?