Chewing the Cud
We humans spend a lot of time trying to understand what's going on around us. Some of us more than others of course. We process information in order to fix our behaviors in the same way that we process food in order to build and repair our bodies. I think it's useful to take this analogy a little further however, since there is a lot in common between how our bodies work and how our minds work.
The first stop then whenever we are eating food is the mouth, where we chew things up a little or a lot. Some people make a smooth paste while other people seem to choke stuff down without it ever touching their teeth. This initial breakdown of what we eat is paralleled by spending time thinking about things in an effort to understand them. We already use this analogy in psychology when we talk about rumination, as in chewing over a certain thought or uncomfortable memory well beyond the point that it's useful. We take the word from zoology and particularly from animals called ruminants that have multiple stomach chambers that they use to break down fibrous plants and grasses. To put it bluntly, to get from one chamber to another the food actually has to go back to the mouth for some extra chewing. At this point, we don't even really call it food anymore, we just call it cud. If you watch a cow for long enough you'll see it chewing something that it didn't seem to have picked up anywhere, and it will spend quite a bit of time working on it. That’s the cud. Yeah, it just threw up in its mouth on purpose and decided to have another go at it.
On the other extreme, you have animals with no molars at all, only puncturing teeth like a saltwater crocodile or slicing teeth like a great white shark. Both species will hork down massive chunks of food without any initial processing at all and then will rely on super-strong stomach acid to do all the work for them. Kind of like biting into a sandwich, whipping your head around or rolling around on the floor until the rest of the sandwich gets flung somewhere else in the room, swallowing that bite whole, then wandering around the kitchen looking for the sandwich you just lost. These animals seem to take no interest or pleasure in the flavor or quality of their food, either. Interestingly, they both have almost vestigial tongues, at least for the ways that we use ours. They can't move them, they aren't used much for eating or vocalizing, and they don't do much in the way of tasting food. I think it’s also interesting that both of these complex organisms are relatively solitary and can be very territorial toward their own kind, which is quite a contrast to the ruminants that we talked about earlier.
I promise I'm still talking about thinking. We take a bite of experience; we chew over our thoughts in order to see what the experience tastes like and to make it easier to digest or understand. But understanding is not really the final goal. We want to understand so that we can change how we respond and improve our situation or our strategies. Chewing and thinking are just the beginning. We don't stop there.
If chewing is like thinking, then digesting is like talking to someone else. This is where the important work happens. This is where we break things down and convert them into usable pieces, nutrients in the stomach, and words in our speech. We simplify all of that information in our thoughts by forming mental summaries that we call concepts, which is done at the chewing or thinking stage, and we digest those concepts even further by turning them into words that we write, sing, or speak.
This is where we not only come to understand things better ourselves, but it is also where we are finally able to recruit other people to the job of helping us understand things. We toss the words around between us and work as a team to make them fit together in the best way. We network our brains through speech in order to tackle problems bigger than ourselves and to coordinate our group strategy. This also gives us the opportunity to better troubleshoot our concepts and turn concepts into words. So, weirdly, we do our best digesting outside of ourselves.
Talking to someone makes concepts more retrievable and useful. If it fits better, then we can find it more easily and won’t have to figure it out all over again the next time. Talking lets us turn traumatic memories into useful lessons, with the jagged emotions and distorted beliefs filtered out as we go like fish bones, gristle, or hair. Then we hopefully get down to business with fixing ourselves with the useful stuff we just produced together. Ideally, we will change how we act so that we can have a better outcome next time.
I initially began to use this analogy with my clients in order to help those that were struggling to overcome anxiety and depression but were resistant for various reasons to turning to other people for help. Many of us just get stuck chewing over things that are ready to be either digested or discarded.
