FOUNDATIONS IN COGNITION
Understanding a Horses Brain
Introduction
One of the biggest challenges for us humans in understanding how a horses brain works is that we have a frontal lobe and a horse doesn’t. The frontal lobe is the biggest part of the human brain and this is where we plan, strategize, and do a lot of analysis. Our brains can go back to something we learned a long time ago and connect the dots. For example you leave home—life kicks you in the butt and you start to grow up a little bit, you think back on lessons you learned from your parents and realize how smart they were. Horses can’t do that because they don’t have that frontal lobe.
Overcoming Fear
Sometimes we think our horses strategize against us or feel spiteful or they just are intentionally ignoring us and refusing to learn. But their behavior towards us is a combination of their emotional state, evolutionary or hardwired traits, and learned behavior (whether we taught them intentionally or not).
Examples of hard-wired traits are like hard-wired fears. Examples of these are:
Restriction
Confinement
Darkness
Narrow Spaces
Sudden Movement
Unfamiliar Sounds
Predators
Isolation from the group
All of these things are going to trigger a horses fear and when a horse experiences fear, adrenaline and cortisol levels rise and a horse’s fight or flight response kicks in from their reptilian brain (which consists of the brain stem, cerebellum and some other parts). There are also various degrees of sensitivity to these hard-wired fears based on breed and bloodline. Because horses were originally built to run, fear typically induces a flight response where they try to put distance between themselves and what they see as a threat, but occasionally some horses will have a fighting response kick in especially if they feel restricted or confined. Now for a horse to be an effective companion, we do have to help them overcome these fears. Teaching them to overcome these is the first building block to any training program. If a horse can’t handle dark narrow spaces they won’t load in a trailer. If they are afraid of every sudden movement they see, they can’t build confidence working a cow, you get the idea.
Steve Peters says, If a horse doesn’t feel safe, and their adrenaline and cortisol levels are high, it’s nearly impossible to teach them anything. So in order to really teach them, they have to be in a place where they feel safe.
Intelligence in Motion
The Cerebellum is the portion in a mammalian brain that stores movement information. A horses cerebellum is quite a bit larger than a humans, and in science, parts of the brain that are larger usually denote more intelligence in that area which is definitely the case here. A newborn foal can run an hour after it’s born, we humans take months or even years to do that. Horses are incredibly intelligent when it comes to movement, and I actually think our lack of attention to our own movement as humans is one of the primary things that keeps us from being good teachers with our horses. So if we can exercise Marcus’ Aurelius’ advice to be strict with ourselves and tolerant with others—in this case our horses, we will be much more effective in our training.
Neurons that Fire together, wire together
When we teach a horse a new movement, and leave them alone, the areas of the brain that lit up while they were learning, continue to light up, and solidify what we just taught them. This is why we talk about pressure and release of pressure and why it’s so important to apply and release pressure at the right time. A lot of times we will continue picking on a horse over and over again but the problem with that is it doesn’t give the horse time to hard wire that information and a lot of times it just ends up with both of us being frustrated. For example, if I’m working on direction and flexion with a colt, If I hold their head in flexion after they give it to me. They start to try other things to get away from that pressure and don’t internalize what we’ve taught. I try to use a 3 second cap as the cutoff off for when I apply pressure and release pressure (depending on what I’m trying to teach).
To maximize a horses ability to learn we need to do the following:
Help them overcome hardwired fears.
Pay close attention to your own movements during training.
Give them an environment where they feel safe because this keeps adrenaline and cortisol levels lower and makes them more trainable. This also gets serotonin flowing which solidifies learning in this emotionally balanced state. There are a few outward manifestations of our horse being in this state, their heads are usually lowered, and they are licking and chewing.
Give them time to process the things we’ve taught. When your horse offers the correct movement consistently, this is a good spot to stop and tie your horse up for an hour or two. Remember that because a horse doesn’t have a prefrontal cortex, it can’t connect the dots between pressure and release of pressure if too much time takes place between the stimulus and a rewarded response.
Don’t work on too much at one time. If you’re working on reining spins and cutting turns in the same session, it will actually take a horse longer to get good at those movements. This is probably the number one thing I struggle with because I will find multiple holes in my horses and pick on all of them in the same session.
Happy training, and adios!
