Apperceptive Mass: From Katamari to Cognitive Growth

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Matthew Fine discussed Apperceptive Mass: From Katamari to Cognitive Growth. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Tobias: We are right at the top of the hour, which means that it’s JT’s vegetables. Market for everybody who’s looking for the timestamp just wants to [Jake chuckles] skip straight to the veggies.

Jake: Yeah. So, I’m on the road, so we got to set the bar a little lower than normal. So, this week we’re exploring a concept from a 19th century psychologist, which was actually wasn’t even a term yet back then, but he didn’t know that. We’re going to connect it with a Japanese video game. And so, the psych term is something called apperceptive mass. Have either of you had any experience with the term, apperceptive mass?

Tobias: I have not.

Matthew: I have not. No.

Jake: Okay. Well, eventually, as you’ll see, we’ll be able to even tie some of this back to Charlie Munger. It’ll get pretty self-evident by then. But my interest in the term came about, because I was relistening to the 2022 Berkshire AGM. Buffett brings it up explicitly. It was the first time I’d ever heard that term.

We’ll first rewind the clock back to the early 1800s, and we’ll meet this guy named Johann Friedrich Herbart, H-E-R-B-A-R-T, German philosopher and psychologist. Again, before that was even a thing. He was one of the founding figures of modern educational theory. He coined this term, apperceptive mass. So, what does it mean? Apperceptive means having the ability to understand something new by relating it to past experiences. It’s like this body of knowledge and experiences that you carry around in your head. It’s like this network of ideas that you’ve built over time, frameworks, models that help you connect with new information that’s coming in.

So, for example, let’s say you’re a student who’s learning physics. If you’d already understood basic maths and some scientific principles, like if you drop an apple, it’ll fall back to the earth, you’re then much more equipped to grasp increasingly advanced concepts, because you have this existing context in which to fold the new information into. So, your apperceptive mass, your pre-existing knowledge base, acts as a scaffolding for learning. Maybe even you might call it a lattice work. But if you lack that foundational knowledge, you’re likely to struggle. That’s because you don’t have these cognitive hooks to hang the information on.

So, onto the video game side of this. Have you guys ever heard of this video game called Katamari Damacy? Damacy? I’m not sure how you say that, but Katamari–

Tobias: Oh, I’ve played with my son. I’m one of the top two American players. No, I’ve never heard of it. [chuckles]

Jake: I knew it. All right. You’ve probably seen it before at some point. Katamari means clump in Japanese. It’s this game where you control where this ball rolls around, and objects then adhere to the ball and it becomes increasingly bigger. As more and more things stick to it and as the ball gets increasingly bigger in diameter, it’s then capable of grabbing increasingly larger objects and sticking them together. And so, eventually, the ball becomes big enough to grab entire buildings and eventually reaches galactic proportions. You start off with like this little tiny ball. I’m not sure what it is. I don’t know if it’s the compounding nature of it or what, but it’s incredibly satisfying to play for some reason.

So, you can probably already see where I’m going with all this. Like, you have this app perceptive mass, which is really like a cerebral Katamari. You could pick up increasingly large intellectual objects as the mass increases. The more massive it becomes, your toolbox gets more full and you’re more prepared to then see problems from different angles, tackle more complexity with nuanced solutions. This new information is just easier to assimilate bigger chunks of it, because you have this big mass that’s already rolling around.

So, obviously, lots of advantages to having a healthy apperceptive mass, but it can also lead to pitfalls if we aren’t careful. So, cognitive defects like overconfidence bias or confirmation bias can cause us to interpret new information in a way that already aligns with our existing beliefs, even if that interpretation is actually flawed. No doubt, social media amplifies this problem. We’re talking on the eve of the election. We don’t need to go into to how much I– [crosstalk]

Tobias: There’s an election on?

Jake: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s what I heard. So, some new study, some anecdote, some chart, it fits right into your apperceptive mass wheelhouse, and it just strengthens your confidence that you really know what’s going on. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. It’s like, “Uh-huh, I found the smoking gun that proves what I’ve always believed.” Being smart, you’re actually sometimes at a disadvantage because it’s easier to talk yourself into a really good narrative and find these facts which support your priors. You’re that much better at it.

So, I think it’s key to maintain an open-minded approach, regularly try to update your knowledge base. I think as Ted Lasso said like “Be curious, not judgmental,” which I think is one of really beautiful phrase. I think he stole that from, what was it? Some, I can’t remember, was it Wordsworth or somebody. It’s probably not that. And then, Darwin also would famously write down a fact which contradicted with his previous understanding within 30 minutes of finding it out, because he knew that his mind would then actively work to reject whatever it was that he [Tobias laughs] just learned, because it didn’t fit in with the previous apperceptive mass that he had.

Of course, all this know ties together with Munger’s concept of the lattice work of mental models and emphasizing interconnected knowledge is much more powerful than the man with the hammer. So, to close things out, let’s just take a second to think about this, what the size of Munger’s intellectual Katamari would look like. Imagine it’s rolling up entire planets together or solar systems, it’d be pretty impressive.

Tobias: Yeah. Good long runway. Good one, JT.

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