{"id":31576,"date":"2023-03-03T21:41:36","date_gmt":"2023-03-04T05:41:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=31576"},"modified":"2023-03-03T21:41:36","modified_gmt":"2023-03-04T05:41:36","slug":"happy-cow-trails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/happy-cow-trails\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Cow Trails"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever heard of the concept of Cow trails?\u00a0 When looking at a field where cows often graze you\u2019ll begin to notice trails that there is no longer growth possible.\u00a0 This is because Cows take the path of least resistance.\u00a0 Day after day they follow this easy trail because it requires less work.\u00a0 \u201cThat cow trail represents our thoughts.\u00a0Over time, we develop patterns of thought in our brains and those patterns beat down a trail making it difficult for us to think and feel differently.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0 When reading Daniel Kahneman\u2019s book Thinking Fast and Slow<\/em>, it reminded me of this concept of the cow trail as it relates to system 1 which is the part of the brain that \u201coperates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control\u201d [2]<\/a>.\u00a0 Like Kahneman\u2019s explanation of our automatic brain, we do the easy thing, the thing that does not require thought.\u00a0 This way of thinking could be helpful like the article relating with Cow trails, we have a patterned way of thinking or responding that leads us down the same thought trail.\u00a0 What if we were able to change the pattern or conditioned response that is part of our bad habits, or like this article it was a way through mental illness.<\/p>\n

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“A happy mood loosens the control of system 2 over performance: When in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors\u201d[3]<\/a>. \u00a0\u201cSystem 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration\u201d[4]<\/a> .\u00a0 In a video I watched regarding this concept of thinking fast and slow they gave an example of how easy it is to fall into system 1 thinking.\u00a0 They had a picture of a baseball and a bat and said it was $1.10.\u00a0 They noted that the bat was a dollar more than the ball.\u00a0 So how much is each item?\u00a0 If you land in the cow trail way of thinking like me you answered $.10 for the ball and the bat $1.00[5]<\/a>\u00a0 Guess what, we are wrong.\u00a0 I will bribe you to read the rest of this essay by giving you the answer at the end.<\/p>\n

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This is one of those books that I\u2019ve had to rethink and rethink, and just when I feel I have an idea of what it is about, I lose it.\u00a0 I tend to be a person who functions in my cow trail mind.\u00a0 Thankfully I feel I\u2019ve had a good childhood with very few trauma\u2019s that maybe would\u2019ve set up cowtrails in my brain for responding to hardships and difficulties a certain way, but gratefully I think overall I have healthy cowtrail type of response.\u00a0 In fact I pride myself in making decisions with my gut and not my head.\u00a0 So in some ways I had a hard time wanting to throw that way of being out as ineffective system1.\u00a0 I wonder if it comes down to trust in one\u2019s self?\u00a0 Does it have something to do with genetic predisposition of well being?\u00a0 Why do I feel resistance to logic?\u00a0 Last week we talked about Empathy in Failure of Nerve<\/em> by Friedman, engaging our feelings to try to understand how someone else may be feeling.\u00a0 What if encountering another\u2019s suffering can be done with empathy AND logic?\u00a0 Slowing our thinking down to fully engage in another\u2019s suffering or problem, and using our slow system 2\u00a0 way of thinking to disengage our thinking of the situation, and setting that aside to be there in their thoughts.\u00a0 I\u2019m think I need to wrestle through that statement more to make sense, but I feel I\u2019m on the verge of a brilliant thought there.\u00a0\u00a0 As Kahneman says “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it\u201d[6]<\/a>.\u00a0 And I think I am officially done thinking about it, for now.<\/p>\n

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System 2 Answer:\u00a0 If the bat is $1.00 more than the ball and they cost $1.10 together, then the ball is $.05 and the bat is $1.05!\u00a0 D\u2019oh!<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Bierdeman, Janelle. Cow Trails and the Brain: Making Sense of Mental Health Treatment. <\/em>Linkedin, 9\/6,2018.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. <\/em>New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. Pg 20<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid, 69.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid, 21.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> https:\/\/fourminutebooks.com<\/a><\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Ibid, 402.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever heard of the concept of Cow trails?\u00a0 When looking at a field where cows often graze you\u2019ll begin to notice trails that there is no longer growth possible.\u00a0 This is because Cows take the path of least resistance.\u00a0 Day after day they follow this easy trail because it requires less work.\u00a0 \u201cThat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":187,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2489,2052],"class_list":["post-31576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp02","tag-kahneman","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31577,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31576\/revisions\/31577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}