Elaboration

It would seem the mind abhors a vacuum. Shortly after I'd invented the farcical example of a dodecahedron-shaped earth, I found myself thinking that, surely, major rivers would form along its edges.

Immediately on thinking that, I was almost revolted with myself for my capacity to come up with useless Time Cube-grade nonsense. So why did I think it? Apparently having inflicted the concept of a dodecahedron earth on myself wasn't enough; maybe the concept was simply too bare that it could be put to rest. Like some sort of obsessive-compulsive toymaker, my mind simply had to sew some ridiculous tassels on to the already ludicrous idea of the dodecahedron to really give it the style it deserved.

I'm not sure what category to chalk this up under. I'd like to say it's something like reducing uncertainty, but Uncertainty reduction is taken, it's apparently a part of social communication theory.

Of course, there is such a thing as being too complex to be commonly understood as well. It'd appear that there's an optimum level of complication that makes for a good yarn for most people. If The Magical Number Seven is to be believed, you'd expect the upper bound on this to be somewhere around seven "major features" — but of course, this raises the question: how do you define what's a major feature?

[Technorati apophenia chewing cud dodecahedron earth magical number seven obsessive elaboration posts needing categorization seven registers stylish tassels uncertainty reduction]