Dear Thoughts… Day 2

Cognitive Bias

“Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.” Colossians 3:2 NKJV

A psychologist decided to conduct an experiment on twins. He put the boys in separate rooms with a BIG pile of horse manure in the middle and a big bowl of candy. He left them for half an hour. When opening the first room, the little boy was crying in the corner.

He said to the psychologist he was too afraid to come close to the manure because he might contract a decease and he didn’t eat the candy because he didn’t want a stomach-ache. When opening the second room, the twin brother was covered in manure and his pockets bulging with candy. He said to the psychologist: “I saw all this manure and figured there must be a pony in here, so I looked for it to feed it the candy.” Twin brothers, different views. Same background, different preconceived thoughts.

We like to believe we are rational and logical thinkers. But the fact is that our thought patterns are influenced to think a certain way. We sometimes have preconceived ideas about something before it even happened. Cognitive bias is a psychological term for thought patterns that distort thinking, influences our beliefs, and sway the decisions we make daily based on our past experiences and preconceived thoughts.

This is a natural process occurring in your mind created to assist your mental processing. It’s like a mental shortcut that speeds up our ability to decide. But these shortcuts are created by our thought patterns from the past and our preconceived ideas. “Can I change a cognitive bias” you might wonder? Yes.

Dear Thoughts… I choose to set my mind on things above. On Heaven. On God. On Jesus. To change my thinking from a worldly perspective to a Heavenly perspective. To look for God in every pile of manure this world might give me and to keep an open mind to change my thoughts to be more Christlike. When I start to think negatively, I choose to set my mind on things above.

Prayer: Father, thank You for showing us that people have different views about things. That we will think differently about certain situations. But most of all Lord, thank You for teaching us to change the way we think by setting our minds on things above.  Amen.

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