I spent a good part of last year picking up the abacus and meticulously tracking my progress. I can attest to "continue to visualize the abacus in their mind, i

I spent a good part of last year picking up the abacus and meticulously tracking my progress. I can attest to "continue to visualize the abacus in their mind, improving their skills even when the physical tool is unavailable", but make no mistake, this is a domain-specific skill which has little bearing on mathematical knowledge and intuition per-se (at least not at beginner-intermediate levels). One useful aspect which is not often discussed, but might actually complement OP's article, is that the mental abacus converts one kind of mental process (numerical perception) to another (visual scratchpad). Kind of like turning text into a QR-code as a more "efficient" 2D-storage, yet the QR-code contains no "text", and you have to convert it back. This complementary process in the brain becomes interesting when our mental abilities decline or get replaced, and we might as well re-purpose those brain areas using some kind of transfer encoding (e.g. Morse code). A naive first-guess could be to learn lists of logical challenges and strategies in order to clarify results given by an AI in the fastest way possible. So given a GAN, train the human on A, and leave the G and N to the computer.