The More You Explain, the Less Gets Through — The Paradox of the "70% Blank"

The Mass of Zero Notes #2

You sent a long message to clear up a misunderstanding, and things only got more tangled. You explained your circumstances carefully as an apology, and were told it sounded like nothing but excuses. Have you ever had that experience?

In the last note, I wrote that words carry only about 30% of an intention, and that the listener fills the remaining 70% blank with their own experience and bias. Face to face, the bodily "Tone" present in the room — a trembling voice, the heat of the moment — guides that blank toward a generous completion.

What happens, then, when we try to fill this frustration with reasoning, conveying 100% through the sheer "quantity" of words rather than through Tone? In this note, I want to look at the paradox hidden there.

The More Words We Add, the More Material for Misunderstanding

To fill the frustration of not being understood, we add more words and explain everything. But this does not lead to a pure transmission of intention.

On the contrary, the more words there are, the more complex the information becomes. In a listener who can no longer process it all, a force begins to work not toward deeper understanding, but toward simplifying the meaning.

As I wrote last time, the listener interprets the signs that arrive through "impressions" drawn from their own experience. So as the quantity of signs grows, the impressions they evoke grow too, and the room for misunderstanding widens in proportion.

Each word we add becomes a "hook" for bias to catch on — in other words, material for misunderstanding. The act of explaining everything ends up, against our intention, mass-producing material for misunderstanding.

"Empathy Mode" and "Analysis Mode"

At this point, the listener's cognition is forcibly switched from "empathy mode" to "analysis mode."

When words come with bodily Tone, the listener's brain works in "empathy mode." It cherishes the imperfect 30% and tries to fill the remaining blank with imagination. Here, small gaps are generously received as "flavor" or "resonance." This is because many elements — the speaker's character, the relationship built between the two, an atmosphere that makes talking easy — give the listener the wish to understand. The room for empathy to enter through "Ma" (the interval) exists, too, because the listener is actively trying to understand in this "empathy mode."

But when the density of signs (words) rises without any care for Tone, the listener's brain moves defensively into "analysis mode." The disposition to understand the other fades. Priority shifts to "labeling," to process excess information efficiently, and to "fault-finding," searching for breaks in the logic.

This "simplification of information" in analysis mode is, whether the person intends it or not, a defensive instinct that arises unconsciously when the brain is forced to process a large volume of information.

In other words, in inverse proportion to the growth of information, the door of the mind that opens to receive the other swings shut.

Loneliness Deepening in a Labyrinth of Signs

And so we wander into a labyrinth of signs. Even while facing the person in front of us, the more words we pile up, the more our loneliness deepens.

The stronger the wish to be understood, the more the words multiply. And the more the words multiply, the more the other closes their heart. This is the paradox that arises when we try to fill the "70% blank" with words alone.

That does not mean the answer is to use fewer words. It lies in recovering the Tone that once carried them. To keep reaching out to the other with our voice, holding the frustration of not quite being understood from the very start. That is the sense these notes set out to explore.

Next: Why Broken Words Resonate More

There is a phenomenon that confirms this paradox from the opposite side. Why does a halting conversation in a foreign country, without a shared language, sometimes resonate more deeply than a fluent exchange between native speakers? In the next note, I want to write about this "resonance born from the failure of words," touching on the difference between AI (LLMs) and human beings.

---

These notes explore the margins of the paper The Mass of Zero (2026).

Research page · Paper (DOI: 10.22501/rc.4327675) · Previous: #1 Words Carry Only 30% · Next: #3 Why Broken Words Resonate More