The question of brain plasticity is fashionable in the field of scientific research. The objective of many works is to find out how our brain is modified when we train it through certain activities or tasks. These changes can refer to both the brain structure and the normal way of functioning of the various areas of the brain.
One of the works recently published in the journal Neural Plasticity (2016) reviews the most relevant findings regarding the neural effects that practicing with the abacus can have. The abacus is a traditional calculation system that has been used for hundreds of years and through which we can perform arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and even roots. In some countries its use is more widespread among the population and in others it is finding adherents. But, does the continued use of the abacus have any effect on our brain? Yongxin Li, from the Southern Medical University in China, and his collaborators review in their article the knowledge that has been acquired so far on this matter.
Among the most relevant findings we find that:
– Studies carried out using different activities and cognitive tests showed that the group of people with more experience in calculating with abacus activated their right hemisphere more in mental calculation tasks, while the group of participants without experience with the abacus he used the left side of the brain more. Years later, other studies with brain MRI techniques corroborated these data.
– Interestingly, training with the abacus appears to have had an effect on other cognitive functions such as general intelligence and memory, known as ‘transfer’.
– Using imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography, it is observed that, when put before a mental calculation task, the brain of people with great use of the abacus significantly activates the visuospatial network in which frontal areas participate. parietals of the brain . However, when it comes to non-experts in abacus, other different areas are activated, such as Broca’s area, involved in verbal working memory.
– Finally and more recently, other studies have found that training with the abacus produces changes in children both in the gray matter of the left frontal gyrus and in the cerebral white matter, which seems to preserve a better integrity in the training group .
It is still amazing that practicing a single task like the abacus regularly produces so many changes in brain and test performance. It would be interesting to find out if training different cognitive functions can be even more effective in this regard. Science makes slow progress on these questions, but it may not be a bad idea to exercise our mental capacities and thus promote the brain plasticity that we have.
Marisa Fernández Sánchez, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
