A Stanford researcher had people tap out Happy Birthday on a table while a partner tried to guess the song. The tappers thought half would get it. Three out of 120 did. Elizabeth Newton ran that for her Stanford dissertation in 1990, and it describes the person holding the deck. They can hear the whole game running in their head while they talk, so every gap in what they say sounds filled in to them. Your side of the table has the harder job. Nelson Cowan's 2001 paper put working memory at roughly four chunks, down from the seven that psychologist George Miller estimated back in 1956. Four things you can hold and move around at once, total. Card rules are close to the worst thing you could pour into four slots. Cognitive load researchers call the problem element interactivity, which means some information can be learned one piece at a time, and some only makes sense when you hold every piece at once. Vocabulary in a new language is the first kind. Grammar is the second. Card rules are the second. Trump means nothing until you already have suit, trick, and lead sitting in there. Four rules that each depend on the other three already blows past the limit, and nobody has ever explained a card game in four rules. The delivery makes it worse. Conversational speech runs about 150 words a minute, and the raw sound of it sits in the part of memory that holds noise for three or four seconds before it fades. Call it ten words of runway while they are on rule fourteen. When researchers tested this in 2012, grade 10 students who read a lesson learned more than students who heard the same lesson out loud. There is a fix, and it came from the same research group that found the problem. A 2002 paper in Learning and Instruction ran four experiments teaching hard material in two steps: the pieces on their own first, how they connect second. Beginners who got the split version did better than beginners handed the whole thing at once. Deal a practice hand face up and play three rounds badly. The rules stick once your hands are on the cards. Everything before that is sound decaying in four seconds.