Related to abacus use. Sam Harris podcast "Complexity & Stupidity" https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/complexity-stupidity https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/

Related to abacus use. Sam Harris podcast "Complexity & Stupidity" https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/complexity-stupidity https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/complexity-stupidity mentions abacus skills. The skill "spreads" to other areas of the brain they call it "complementary cognitive artifacts" Quotes : Harris: What else would you put on this list of complementary cognitive artifacts? Krakauer: The other example that I’m very enamored of is the abacus. The abacus is a device for doing arithmetic in the world with our hands and eyes. But expert abacus users no longer have to use the physical abacus. They actually create a virtual abacus in the visual cortex. And that’s particularly interesting, because a novice abacus user like me or you thinks about them either verbally or in terms of our frontal cortex. But as you get better and better, the place in the brain where the abacus is represented shifts, from language-like areas to visual, spatial areas in the brain. It really is a beautiful example of an object in the world restructuring the brain to perform a task efficiently—in other words, by my definition, intelligently.