Location Taken: Banff, Alberta, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010
You know, ever since I started reading The Landslide Blog, I’ve been looking for landslide scars in every photo. Finding a bunch too, though this one’s the clearest. But it’s not just photos, I’m looking for them everywhere. Even in video games, where the land is certainly not about to slide down the cliff, since it’s just a giant polygon pretending to be a rock.
This is actually a pretty common mental quirk. You either learn a fascinating new fact or play a game that forces you to do something unusual, and you literally start to see the world in a new way. Even when you’re just wandering around, anything that’s even close to this new way of looking at things stands out at once.
I think of it as the Katamari Effect, after the game Katamari Damacy, which caused the first time I noticed that effect. In that game, you roll up objects that are smaller than your katamari (the ball you’re pushing around), which attach to the katamari, making it bigger, so you can roll up larger items, and get even bigger, and so on. And that doesn’t even capture the glorious oddity that makes up the game in the least!
After a long session of rolling around picking up thumbtacks, Mount Fuji, and everything in between, you get in a mental pattern of sorting things by size, so when you’re just driving down the road a little later, you keep spotting mailboxes and trashcans and bushes and going “That’s smaller than my car, I can pick it up… Wait, bad brain, no running over mailboxes.” And yet, even with the higher chance of property damage, it’s a wonderful state of mind, thinking about objects that you usually just let fade into the background.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the mental quirk that causes confirmation bias. That’s the one that makes you more likely to see neutral results as slanted the way you expected them to be slanted. If you like a politician, you’re more likely to brush aside comments she made that you disagree with, whereas if you dislike her, you pounce on them and shove them in the face of anyone nearby. Just like the Katamari Effect, confirmation bias changes the way you view the world. It’s just a lot tougher to notice happening, since you rarely leave that mental state, creating no opportunities for comparison.
Confirmation bias is a major problem in politics, science, and many other fields, but the Katamari Effect seems a bit more harmless. It’s a temporary effect, after all, fading after a while as the new way of viewing the world loses its freshness. And hey, sorting things by size or looking for tell-tale marks of landslides is actually pretty fun!
