Stuffing

Just yesterday a friend of mine remarked, "How do you know all this stuff?" Without going into all that 'how do I know I know' business, it's of course a comment on how much clutter seems to have accumulated on the shelves of my brain.

It's also the kind of comment I've heard a number of times before. I've wondered about that myself. My conclusion is that the sheer mass of bits and pieces in the storeroom comes from two tendencies. One is the corvid tendency to go (as Khayce might say), "Oooh look, shineeeeeeee!" and pick up yet another piece of mental bling. The other is the corvid tendency to go, "Eh, what's this..." and end up spending hours of a perfectly useful day delving deep into some esoteric subject.

The two things are related in some ways, but the former tends to increase breadth and the latter depth. It's acquisitiveness and inquisitiveness, or (to the more sinister-minded) acquisition and inquisition. Or Memory and Thought, but that's another thing altogether.

There is a third thing, the urge to deliberately fill in spaces in one's education that seem to be void for one reason or another. This is relatively rare; I'm happy with some of those voids, never having had the urge to try things like colonic cleansing (for example).

I think that all these put together make me a good research partner to have. I tend to do all the random-correlation, what-if, how-about-this stuff while someone else does all the heavy lifting. It's not that I can't do structure, but that I can more or less do the basic stuff and the value-added stuff too. I'm far less efficient than other people, though. Too easily distracted...

"Eh, what's this... oooh look, shineeeeeeee!"