Inside the mysterious minds of horses

Janet Jones https://janet-jones.com/author has been fascinated by horses since childhood. She’s now a horse trainer and a neuroscientist, which allows her to explore the minds of the animals to which she’s devoted her life. She even recently wrote a book all about their brains https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/252291510-a-horse-s-world. She says there’s an enormous gap between the way humans have relied on horses for tens of thousands of years – and what we actually know about their brains. And they have lots to teach us humans. That’s why we’re diving into science today. Interested in more science? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists, sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:16Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:23Emily Kwong?

  Horses. Maybe it's because I was born in the year of the horse, according to the Chinese zodiac, but I've always been a bit obsessed with them. Their strength, beauty, and high emotional intelligence, which makes horses perfect companions for a neuroscientist like Janet Jones.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  I love all the horses that I work with. No, I'll take that back. I love most of the horses that I work with.

• 0:47Emily Kwong?

  Janet has been riding since childhood and is now a horse trainer who has her own horse. This one horse has become her forever horse, a Dutch Warmblood from Minnesota. They've been together for years.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  He approaches you immediately. He wants to know, you know, who you are and what you smell like and why you're there. And he's, he's just really very curious.

• 1:10Emily Kwong?

  And when they met, she noticed he had this bright white diamond in the center of his forehead. It reminded her of the North Star.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Horses in general are like my compass. And so I decided to name him True North.

• 1:23Emily Kwong?

  Or True for short. Now Janet's relationship to True, and really to all the horses she's trained, has changed her life. And it inspired her to write a book about the cognition and behavior of horses. It's called A Horse's World, and there just aren't that many books like it.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  It's like there's a huge animal hiding in plain sight, one who has aided human civilization more than any other animal. Horses experience the world in a totally different way than we do. And yet, we ride them, we work with them. And so horses are perhaps the best example of an animal that can broaden or stretch the edges of our minds.

• 2:19Emily Kwong?

  So today on the show, inside the mind of one of the most majestic animals on earth. Janet Jones explores the neuroscience of horses' brains, the motivations that drive their behaviors, and the neural connection that horses share with humans. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:10Emily Kwong?

  Short Rivers, before we keep going, remember to follow our show. Just hit the little follow button and you'll get little science treats in your trough, just like a horse, on the regular. New episodes drop every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Okay, Janet, so your book is fascinating, and I want to talk about one of the many differences you highlight between horse and human brains, and that is something called categorical perception. So as I understand it, in humans, our brains automatically organize things into groups. So if you see your friend put on an oversized thing with a zipper down the front, your brain goes jacket, that's jacket, that goes in the jacket category. And even if the jacket is on the floor, you still know, that's a jacket, it won't hurt me.

• 4:54Emily Kwong?

  But horses, by comparison, they don't have this same level of categorical perception skills. They do not automatically sort things into categories to the same extent. And you saw this firsthand with your horse, True, and some fence panels that you came across. What happened there?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  When True was roughly four or five years old, we used to, after we worked in an arena for a while to cool off, we used to just go and walk around the ranch. So one day, we were walking along out there, and there was an arena that was being built way kind of off in the distance. And there were a whole bunch of steel fence panels that were piled up out there. They were just all stacked up there. And these things are pretty big. They're usually about 10 feet long and about five feet high. And they're made of these steel poles.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  True immediately, like, basically told me with his body language, what is that? The next day, we went out to do the same thing, except this time, we approached the fence panels from a different direction. And the minute that I walked out the barn, True snorted, "Blow," actually. And when a horse blows, it's loud enough to break your eardrums. And I thought, well, that's odd because, you know, he just saw these yesterday. And he had been very curious about them and a little bit spooked by them,

• 6:39Speaker 02

  but not terrified the way he was on this second day.

• 6:44Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  So you have to wonder, well, what is it? The horse already saw these fence panels yesterday. And now he's even more frightened of them today. That would not seem to make sense.

• 6:59Emily Kwong?

  Right, that is their lack of categorical perception at work. And it, it kind of reminds me of the concept of beginner's mind. Like, everything is new. It's almost like horses have beginner's mind always for every object.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Sort of, that's sort of it, exactly. And you can see why they need that because they're prey animals. They're in danger from any unknown object. We aren't.

• 7:24Emily Kwong?

  That's so interesting. And you write about how this difference plays out in the real world. Because people have strong categorical perception, you say it does create a proclivity towards stereotypes and prejudices that we humans have to reject consciously, be aware of our biases. We sort people into groups.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  We do.

• 7:42Emily Kwong?

  And horses, you're saying, don't do that.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  They can't do it automatically. They would have to be taught those categories.

• 7:49Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Our brains sort items into, or people into group membership automatically, without our control, without our permission, often without our realization. And so that's why that can be really dangerous is that our brains are telling us maybe about a particular group of people or class of people as if every individual in that group is exactly the same. Horses, because they don't have automatic categorical perception, will treat each, each individual on their own and not consider whether they are part of a group or not.

• 8:32Emily Kwong?

  I want to talk too about, um, when it comes to horse brains and how they're evolved. They can complete memory tasks years after they've learned them without getting a refresher. What kinds of studies have researchers done to test their long-term memory?

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Oh, horses have fantastic memories. They're often quicker to form and more lasting than human memories are. And in fact, one of the big problems that horse trainers have is a horse's ability to learn a bad habit in one trial, something that we did not intend to teach them.

• 9:16Emily Kwong?

  Better teach them right for the first time then.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Exactly. So you have to be pretty precise about what you teach and don't teach. There was one study that did a really good job of looking at long-term memory in horses. These researchers taught horses to use a conceptual rule that would help them identify different geometric shapes. And when the experiment was over, the horses never used that rule again, or nor did they ever see the different shapes again. It had no relevance to their lives.

• 9:54Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You write about this in the book, that the experimenters, they went back 10 years later and showed one of the horses those same shapes, and that horse was 100% accurate?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:05Emily Kwong?

  Even after a decade?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  100% accuracy. Perfect.

• 10:09Emily Kwong?

  They're like elephants.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  They hold memories really, really well. And then when asked to apply that same rule, but to new shapes never, ever seen before, the accuracy rate dropped a little. It dropped to 98%, okay? Then now, let's just compare that to human memory.

• 10:31Emily Kwong?

  I don't know if I want to.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Recall accuracy in human adults for information or rules we do not use is very poor. After one hour, most people remember only about 50% of what they have just learned. After 24 hours, our recall drops to 30%.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  And after one week, you and I can eke out an embarrassing 10% accuracy rate. The horses, meanwhile, remember useless information for a minimum of 10 years.

• 11:17Emily Kwong?

  Wow. Another fact I learned from your book is that horses have more than 355 trillion different facial expressions?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:28Emily Kwong?

  What does that kind of magnitude of facial expression suggest about horse emotions? And I know that a lot more research would need to be done, but what do you think?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  We need to do a lot more research, definitely. I agree with you on that. But I think that this suggests that horses experience more emotions than they've ever been credited with, and they very likely do not experience those emotions the way we do, the way we humans do. But in some fashion, these facial expressions do seem to be matched to the emotion that an animal would be expected to produce, given some particular event that occurred in his life.

• 12:20Emily Kwong?

  It's like you're saying, they have a range of emotions and expressions equal to ours, and we need to respect that also those emotions can be different than ours.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:32Emily Kwong?

  We don't want to project human emotions onto horses.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 12:35Emily Kwong?

  We want to understand the full range of horse emotions.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 12:40Emily Kwong?

  Let's actually end there with the connection between horses and humans. You write that humans and horses are the only cross-species pair known to share neural activation between brains. What is the neural connection that's happening there?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Horses and humans have very similar skin receptor systems. Let's just take a really simple example. When a rider presses the calf of her left leg into a horse's side, the horse's skin receptors pick that up and send neural impulses up the spinal cord to the brain, to the horse's brain. And there it's processed. And when he moves to the right, the rider feels that movement with her skin receptors, which carry neural impulses to her brain where they are processed.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  And this creates a kind of loop in which horse and rider are sharing neural activation back and forth in real time. So when you watch a performance done by a horse and human team, like maybe show jumping or racing or any number of equestrian activities, you are actually seeing the science of shared neural activation between two species. And even more remarkable, it's between a prey species and a predator species.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Horses and humans are the only cross-species pair that fall into that category, that work at that level.

• 14:23Emily Kwong?

  Wow. Janet Jones is the author of the new book, A Horse's World, which is out now. Thank you so much for talking to us on Short Wave.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Emily. I really appreciate it, and I enjoyed every minute.

• 14:38Emily Kwong?

  If you liked this episode, check out our one about octopuses and what their minds may tell us about aliens. It's in the Short Wave archive, check it out. And follow Short Wave wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a science moment and we can gallop off into the sunset together. This masterpiece was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts, and Hannah Glovna was the audio engineer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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