The cow model: breadth, depth and habit in working through a topic

The fence is the frame of the topic. Within it, the author grazes widely and takes in sources, positions and counterpositions. The breadth stays inside the frame.

The author asks:

• Which question does the topic answer?
• What belongs inside the fence, and what stays outside?
• Which sources, positions and counterpositions are on this pasture?
• Whose position have I not read yet?
• Where does the breadth start to leave the frame?

Grazing widely and setting a frame are two different movements. Grazing opens: it collects material, including material that contradicts the author’s first view. The fence closes: it decides what the topic is about and what it is not about.

The fence comes first. Without it, breadth has no direction, and every new source moves the topic. With it, breadth becomes useful: the author can take in a great deal because it is clear where it belongs.

The fence can be moved. When the material shows that the frame was wrong, the author sets it again — openly, not by drifting.

• Breadth is not the same as drifting.
• A fence is a decision, not a limitation.
• Counterpositions belong inside the fence.

The breadth stays inside the frame.

A cow’s stomach has four compartments, and the cow ruminates: it brings food back up and chews it again. The author goes into depth in the same way, returns to the material several times and works it through until it can be absorbed.

The author asks:

• Have I only taken the material in, or have I already brought it back?
• What have I sorted out, and why?
• What is left once the repetitions and the noise are gone?
• What do I actually think after the last pass?
• Could I explain the topic without my notes?

The model turns the four compartments into four passes. Rumen: take in — the material is collected and stored, still unsorted. Reticulum: sort and bring back — the material is sorted, and what needs more work comes back up to be chewed again. Omasum: condense — what is redundant is drawn off, as the omasum draws off water. Abomasum: decide — only here does the actual digestion take place, and the author decides what the text will say.

The order follows the biology fairly closely: feed passes from the rumen and reticulum, where the cud is brought back up, through the omasum to the abomasum, the true stomach. The parallel is still a sharpening, not a description of how thinking works. It gives the passes a sequence that can be checked.

The passes need distance. Returning to the material after a pause shows what was understood and what only felt familiar. One long pass does not replace four short ones.

• Taken in is not digested.
• Shorter is not the same as condensed.
• The decision comes last, not first.

Depth comes from return, not from duration.

The output is milk: a text that nourishes its readers. The test for milk is not whether the author is satisfied, but whether the reader can use it.

The author asks:

• What would make the text useless to the reader?
• Which knowledge do I take for granted that the reader does not have?
• What does the reader do with the text once they have read it?
• Which part of my material belongs in the text, and which in the dung?

The milk test turns the question around. Instead of asking what makes the text good, the author asks what would make it useless: a missing step, an unexplained term, a conclusion without its reason, a wall of material without an answer.

The author knows the topic after four passes. The reader does not. What the author no longer notices — the background, the abbreviation, the obvious next step — is often exactly what the reader lacks.

• Milk is for the reader, not for the author.
• Everything that was digested does not have to become milk.

A text is milk when it nourishes someone else.

The dung has value as well: notes, discarded material and open questions fertilize the next topic.

The author asks:

• Which material did not go into the text, and why?
• Which open question did the topic leave?
• How will I find this material again?
• To which next topic does it lead?

Not everything that is digested becomes milk. The remainder is not waste. A side argument, a source that did not fit the frame, a question that the text could not answer — each can become the start of the next topic.

Dung only fertilizes when it is spread. Notes that cannot be found again are lost. The author files the remainder so that it can be found and connected: with a short label, the question it carries and the topic it came from.

• Discarded is not worthless.
• An open question is a result, too.

Every topic leaves the ground richer for the next one.

On steep pastures, cattle tread horizontal paths into the hillside by walking the same routes year after year. Every thorough analysis is a walk across the slope, and repeated walks become a path that can be walked with ease and pleasure. Slopes that nobody walks become overgrown.

The author asks:

• How often do I walk the whole path — fence, passes, milk and dung?
• In which fixed context do I work through a topic?
• Which operation do I still skip when time is short?
• Which operation do I practice deliberately?

The brain responds to habitual practice in a comparable way. Brain research describes how connections that are used together are strengthened (Donald O. Hebb, 1949) and how actions repeated in a stable context become habits that need less deliberate control (Wendy Wood and David T. Neal, 2007). The cow model uses this as an image. It does not claim a finding of its own.

The path grows from walking, not from intending to walk. The cows walk the same routes every day; the route stays the same, and so the path forms. For the author this means a fixed context: the same time, the same place, the same first step.

An overgrown slope can be walked again. It takes more effort at first, and less with every walk.

• One thorough analysis is a walk, not a path.
• The path is kept open by walking.

Complex thinking becomes habitual when it is walked often enough.