When I first realized Ester had such a great memory, I asked her why she needed the note cards. She explained it like this: She can remember an entire symphony orchestra, a hundred musicians playing at once. But if you ask her what the oboe was doing in the second bar of the third movement, she can’t immediately unravel that information from all the other sounds she absorbed. The cards help her make sense of the music. She can color-code the brass section, so to speak, and keep it separate from the strings and the percussion. She can unwrap the symphony and study it instrument by instrument,
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