OCT 19 2024
SOROBAN TRAINING
Time spent: 17 minutes
A huge breakthrough! I was able to add five two digit numbers, entirely mentally! I only managed it once, but the dopamine rush was incredible. So far, imagining a real, physical abacus seems to be the way to go, so I shall continue to do so.
MAY 16 2025
It’s been quite some time since I’ve updated this. A lot has happened in my personal life, and Soroban had taken a bit of a back seat, but the hiatus was not without some insights:
1.) Classical Meditation is incredibly helpful. When I initially started this it was with the goal of seeing if the Memory Palace could be used as a form of meditation. Indeed it can, which I will write more about later, but having some breath meditation in my daily routine has been helpful to both the Memory Palace as well as Soroban. I will now be keeping it as part of my routine (perhaps I should rename this to Three Eyes!)
2.) Some Soroban Insights: I’ll detail my new training process in a future post, but the main realization was that attempting to hold the entire soroban as a visual picture seems to be having a good effect.
3.) The memory palace as a form of meditation is incredibly powerful. It’s far more powerful than standard breath meditation, at least in my experience, which ironically is why it’s not always the best choice. Again, more about this in a future post.
All in all I’m excited about where this is taking me. Perhaps in a few months time I will approach the “real-life mentat” goal I wish to achieve.
MAY 19 2025
HUGE soroban improvement. I’m now able to add 5 two digit numbers quite quickly, and able to add 3 digit numbers as well. Doing anzan on multiple two digit numbers is still far from consistent, but I’m able to do so multiple times a training sessions, rather than just once in a blue moon.
Putting more time into working with a physical soroban really helps, as it helps with getting my brain used to chunking the beads into memorable patterns when I’m doing it mentally.
I should probably look into how people learn blindfold chess, it might provide useful insights. It feels similar to learning anzan, especially with this recent insight about chunking.
May 21 2025
I’m now able to do anzan with five two-digit numbers consistently!! This is huge, as it was one of my milestones when I started. Something has just clicked in my head, where the patterns of the beads made more sense, which meant less processing power had to go into simply remembering bead position.
One thing that I realized helped a ton was focusing on familiarity with the “numbers” themselves, i.e. knowing when a rod said, say, 7, automatically, rather than having to go “okay, that’s a 5 bead, and then two 1 beads, so five, six, seven. That’s a seven.”
Initially I thought this would only be important in helping my speed when reciting my answer, but it seems to have been crucial in freeing up mental RAM, which can then go into remembering where I’m at in the calculation.
As for my memory palace, tomorrow I’m going to a public library that I plan to use as a “meta palace” to organize and store the palaces I already have. I was initially using an imaginary space, but it seems to be far too symmetric to store things in detail. I need the asymmetry of a real space, and just going to some place seems more time efficient than constructing an imaginary one.
August 11 2025
Something unlocked with Soroban recently. I’ve started being able to “see” more of the soroban at once.
My plateau as of late has been in my working memory. If I started working on, say, the tens column during a calculation, whatever number I had on the hundreds column would be forgotten once I finished the entire thing.
Now, my previous breakthrough with “chunking” did help with this, but now I’ve started being able to see three or four columns at once without “zooming in” and losing anything.
This means I’ve started actually getting comfortable with three digit by three digit addition, and I’ve even slowly started on two digit by two digit multiplication, all entirely mentally. Given that fast two by two multiplication is one of my goals, this is very exciting!!
August 14, 2025
Interesting insight during my soroban training today.
I have been getting better at “sitting” with my errors. Previously, when I got a sum wrong, it would frustrate me. Now, this did have the advantage of making me constantly experiment to find out what I did wrong, but it did make training…difficult.
Now, I’ve been able to more consistently enter a state of flow when training by just allowing the failures to happen.
It’s a lesson I learned from meditation that I suddenly realized I could apply elsewhere. In meditation, when you lose focus on your breathe, you’re meant to “non judgmentally” bring it back. Some modern practitioners phrase it as a “workout” for your mind, with each return of focus being a “rep”. The idea is to not view an error as a failure.
Now, much like meditation, I actually want to train, rather than just training because I promised myself I would. And the training itself goes better.
I’ll see where this takes me
August 18, 2025
Added a new system to my practice: training like a chess player.
Continuing my goal of not seeing errors as failures, I wanted to make my mistakes actually productive. When I was in chess club, we were taught to analyze every game we play, especially when we lose. Rather than just moving on to the next one, we were meant to go through the game thoroughly, and figure out what we did right and where we went wrong.
Today, when training two digit flash anzan, rather than just trying again when I got the sum wrong, I would work through the numbers again on a physical soroban, then go through it in my head once more.
The idea is to get a better sense of what areas I have trouble with, and work on them.
Good afternoon. I hope you’re doing well. I couldn’t quite understand how you managed to visualize the soroban columns without forgetting the others. Could you please explain it again? Congratulations on all your progress, tt really inspired me!