Pretend that you’re a piano teacher and you have a student learning a new piece. She has promise, but there are a lot of things you need to tell her. She needs to use a bigger dynamic range. The staccatos need to be staccato. Her fingers are off in a few places. Oh, and she must remember the repeat. So you spend a few minutes going over the piece, outlining what needs work, and what she did well, and then you ask her to try again with those things in mind. She plays the piece again, and it’s a little better, but for many of the points on your list, it seems like she didn’t even listen. She seemed like she was paying attention, so why didn’t she even try to fix the staccatos? The problem isn’t one of intelligence, skill, or effort. The student is dealing with a fundamental constraint—the limited capacity of our short-term memory.
