> but that kind of mental visualization ability (doing arithmetic on visualized paper) has to be extremely rare. That is savant level capability No way. I woul

> but that kind of mental visualization ability (doing arithmetic on visualized paper) has to be extremely rare. That is savant level capability No way. I would say most of the math students I've taught at the university level could do it to some extent. It's not all that helpful. The problem is that your visual scratch pad is quite limited. If you're forced to always rely on it you won't get far without having to unlearn bad habits. This happens to people with amazing memories too. I can't name a single colleague at my top 10 university that has an eidetic memory. The people I've met with amazing memories have systematically had a lot of issues because of their memory. It's too easy to rely on remembering things and then you never build good heuristics and don't generalize well.