August 18, 2025 • 60 mins
From the Navy to Neuroscience: What Horses Can Teach Us About the Brain
Before he became one of the most sought-after voices in equine neuroscience, Dr. Stephen Peters lived an entirely different life — growing up between Japan and England in a military family, serving as a Navy officer, and even working at Goldman Sachs. But a personal tragedy pulled him into the world of brain science, setting him on a path that would change not just his career, but the way thousands of horse owners understand their animals.
In this conversation, Stephen reveals how a clinical neuroscientist’s view of the brain reshapes everything we think we know about training horses. You’ll learn:
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Why attention is a finite resource in young horses — and the surprising age when their brains can actually sustain it.
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How fear rewires the brain and why “making it happen” often comes at a long-term cost.
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The three essential ingredients for learning that apply to horses and humans alike.
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Why “dwell time” isn’t just downtime — it’s the brain’s most powerful consolidation tool.
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How stable design, sensory deprivation, and even whisker clipping can make a horse less capable of learning.
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The simple science-backed approach that can literally make a horse smarter.
It’s a masterclass in connection, not control — rooted in evidence, but brought to life with the kind of cowboy wisdom you can only learn in the round pen. Whether you’ve never sat on a horse or you’ve spent a lifetime in the saddle, this episode will change how you think about brains, learning, and the delicate art of trust.
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Stay tuned for part 2.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Dear Horse World, it's Dr. Steven Peters.
Well, Steve, welcome to theDear Horse World Podcast.
Well, I'm glad to be here.
I am so excited.
I am trying, I'm like, can barely containmy excitement about everything that
we're gonna talk about in this episode.
I want you.
To share with everybody a little bit ofyour origin story, because before we press
(00:24):
record, you shared some parts of your lifethat I actually was completely unaware
of, and I think it's really remarkablefor you to share a little bit of like,
what did life look like before you werean like a neuro practice, neuro practice.
Probably what people don't know about me.
I come from a military family,so when people ask me, well,
(00:44):
where do you come from?
I've lived in Japan.
I've lived in England.
We've been all over with amove, uh, every few years.
I was born in Hawaii when it wasstill a territory, even had a horse
strawberry in Hawaii because likeevery kid, uh, who's looking at
that black and white TV with rabbit.
(01:05):
You know, ear antennas, uh, Iwatched a steady diet of raw
hide and wagon train, et cetera.
And so that's what I thought Ireally wanted to be all along.
Uh, I was a Navy officer, uh, because mydad was a Navy pilot, so, and the, the
military lifestyle was one I was really.
(01:27):
Comfortable with.
So, um, for five years I was aNavy officer, but I had been dating
my wife Fat's time before shewas my wife during that period.
And I knew that I would spend a lot oftime at sea and that probably wasn't
gonna be healthy for, uh, for a marriage.
(01:50):
So she's a New Yorker, a city woman.
And, um, I interviewed time and timeagain because there's a quite a process at
Goldman Sachs Investment Bank, and I wentto work there, um, for about two years.
(02:12):
My dad, during this time, uh, beganto have seizures and we found out
that he had a, a brain tumor that wasterminal, actually a glioblastoma.
That just continued to grow.
And so I became really fascinatedwith the brain and sort of off track.
(02:32):
Even from that is I'm on the autisticspectrum, so when I lock into
something, it's with a laser focus.
Mm-hmm.
And it's, it's sort of.
Crazy because I'm, I can be easilydistracted, but at the same time,
if I'm focused, then I can justhone in and I just could not get
(02:53):
this idea about brain tumors andhow brains function outta my mind.
So after a lot of discussion with mythen wife, even though I knew I was
gonna spend at least the next decade.
Learning about brains.
It was a passion for me.
(03:14):
It was, uh, pretty easy choice.
And so that's what drove me into schooland practicums and internships and
residency and post-doctoral fellowships.
Um, and my history from therewas I became a clinical.
(03:34):
Um, neuroscientist and I'd see patientsall the time and assess brain functioning
human patients.
Human patients.
Mm-hmm.
Human patients.
But nonetheless, that was the lensthat I looked at horses through,
through, through their nervous system.
And I could, I saw patterns pretty easily,and I began to see patterns in horses
(03:59):
that were related to their nervous system.
I. From there I thought, you know,but I don't have empirical data.
I have seven horses.
Whatever I do with these sevenhorses is not gonna generalize
out to the the horse world.
And when I would ask people, you know,why do you think your horse did this?
(04:20):
They would say.
Well, they're a right brainintroverted Sagittarius.
You know, I'd hear all kinds ofreasons for why horses did things.
Mm-hmm.
So I began to read all the peerreviewed literature and veterinary
science, animal cognition.
I began dissecting out horsebrains, but the piece missing was
the observation of large numbers.
(04:42):
So I found this guy, this cowboy, a fifthgeneration cowboy, Martin Black, and um.
We began interacting, and it wasfascinating to both of us because
what he was seeing based on thousandsand thousands of observations I
could support with the science.
And I would say, Martin,do you ever see this?
(05:03):
He'd say, how do you know that?
Well, I would say.
Because I know how the brain works.
And he said it took me like a thousandhorses, but I saw the see the same thing.
And I might say, you see how thatfacial nerve there gets activated
and just sort of sticks out?
And he said, oh yeah, you mean thatguitar string thing that in their
face, our, our language was different,but our observations were identical.
(05:28):
Wow.
And when the puzzle pieces started to fittogether, that's when Martin said, you
know, we, we can't keep this to ourselves.
We wrote a small book,Evidence-Based Horsemanship,
the Scientist and the Cowboy.
Um, and the reason it's a smaller book.
I had all these citations andMartin said, what is this?
(05:50):
And I said, well, this isall the research to back up.
It's evidence-based.
I'm not saying anything.
That's my opinion unless Ican support it with evidence.
You said, well, who, who caresabout all these, these citations?
I said, well, the scientists do say,are we writing this for scientists?
You know, do we want this to end upin some academic library somewhere?
(06:12):
Read by 20 scientists whomay not even see a horse.
He said, let's just trim all that away.
I want this.
Book to fit in somebody's Saddleback.
Oh, I love that.
Yeah.
And you know, that's a smart
one for mer.
I
like
that.
Yeah, that was great.
What we've done since that timewas we were, we've now written our
(06:37):
new book, the Science and Practiceof Evidence-Based Horsemanship.
That's got all kinds of citations in it.
So anybody who wasn't satisfied withthe evidence to support all that
information, it is chockfull of science.
You can deep dive as deep as you want,and the practical side, the application.
(07:03):
Martin's still not done with that, butthe book's still coming out in the fall.
He, in fact, as I was driving here, hetexted me, he said, I got one more story.
I'm just about done with this,but it's gotta be in the book.
Yes,
he wants to put the kitchensink in the book, everything.
So, uh, this is probably fivetimes as thick as the book that
we, we first did, but this isgonna be more of our, our legacy.
(07:28):
And these are where things have evolved.
Two, it took me three and a halfyears to gather the evidence and
fine tune it for this, this book.
So that's where we are now.
And we are, uh, I give clinics.
You do.
We just finished one.
Exactly.
It's
groundbreaking work.
It's unbelievable.
Every horse person on theplanet should take this course.
(07:52):
The first and the secondone, in my humble opinion.
Yeah.
And it's not to do away with tradition,you know, if some people are threatened
by that, it's just evolution beyondthat because if you keep doing the
same thing again and again, you'resaying it could never be any better.
And for me it's, it becomesreally evident when.
(08:16):
We're working with the nervous systemin the brain and when we're working
against and when we work against,that's not good for the rider.
It's not in the horse's best interestand will create tremendous stress when
it really doesn't have to be there.
And you can get so much farther.
And I, I think, I think I telleveryone that if you're just willing
(08:40):
to peek through a different lens.
You know, it can be so enlightening andgive you so much more in your toolbox.
And even if you know the, howyou can get what you want out
of your horse no matter what.
You know, Warwick Schiller toldme that, you know, I could make
horses do anything I wanted to.
(09:02):
I didn't have a relationshipwith any of those horses.
I didn't have a connection.
And I got depressed and got aclinical depression because I felt
like my horses didn't like me.
And I went to the, you know, thereigning warmup pens and it, after a
while, it looked like every horse waslooking at me and making me feel guilty.
Get me outta here, Warwick.
(09:22):
And sometimes I feel the, the same waywe can make horses do whatever we want.
But at a cost.
And if we're able to work withthem, that's where the horse
really shows us what's possible.
(09:43):
So first off thing I wanna ask you is,you've brought up the nervous system,
and I know that there's gonna be quite afew listeners or people who are watching
this episode who are asking, well, Dr.
Peters, what does the nervoussystem have to do with the brain?
It's all a system.
Actually, the brain is part of the nervoussystem all the way down the spinal cord.
But I would say this, there's noperception, no sensation, no reaction.
(10:11):
Everything that your horse does,every movement your horse makes
has to go through the brain.
So if you're saying that the braindoesn't have relevance, that's
the command and control center foreverything that's ever gonna happen
in your horse and every memory.
And you may say, well, I'vedone something, something's
(10:33):
wrong with my horse.
And now it's a little embarrassingto, to acknowledge that we all do,
you know, until we know better.
And then we, we do better.
And the cool thing about it is.
With a brain, you get a second chance.
You can rewire the brain if you knowhow, if you understand how the brain
(10:53):
functions, you can actually makeanatomical changes in your horse's brain.
Or you can keep guessingor you can become dominant.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and enforce those things or.
You can work with your horse in a, ina dialogue, which versus a monologue,
(11:15):
a dialogue in which you can fine tunethose, those connections and it's
amazing where you can get with your horsein terms of speaking their language.
Yes, I think that's what reallyresonated with me doing the
course equine neuroscience.
(11:37):
You know, the, be the introductorycourse and then this advanced
course that we just finished.
What I, what really landed forme is that every single person in
the horse world wants to be ableto speak to their horse, right?
Everyone says, I wanna, I wanna havethis, I unspoken language with my horse.
I want them to understand me and I want,you know, me to understand them, to
(12:02):
understand how their brain works, is.
I've come to understand isa vital component to this.
We actually, our horses, our horses'brains are different to our brains,
and I really, I'm excited foryou to explain that to everybody.
How are our brains as humans,different to horses' brains?
First of all, I, I, I prefacethis by saying in many ways
(12:26):
they're remarkably similar.
And even when you look at themin dissection, you know, you.
If you're not used to seeing brains.
Yeah.
Uh, you know, you could befooled by just their size.
Uh, you may think that ahorse myth, a human size.
So that's a myth.
That's a myth that the horse'sbrain is like a size of a walnut.
(12:46):
Right.
You've held a brain in your hand.
I have.
It's not the size of a walnut, everybody.
Yeah.
But the, the differences are.
There's some sort of, uh, misnomergoing around out there that the
horse doesn't have a frontal lobe.
The all horses have frontal lobes.
All mammals have frontal lobes.
(13:08):
It's just that that frontal lobe hasevolved to make, meet the niche that
the horse falls into evolutionarily.
Mm-hmm.
So that it's works bestfor their survival.
It's true they don't have a largemass of tissue dedicated to frontal
(13:30):
brain, frontal lobe type functions.
The front, our frontal lobes makeup about one third of our brain.
Wow.
Right.
Where theirs is much, much smaller.
Mm-hmm.
They use their.
Frontal lobe.
Some of it's motor, uh,cortex that just leaks over.
So those are motor neurons in the, inthe frontal regions, but many of those,
(13:54):
uh, connections are related to attention.
So the horse's attentionis a frontal lobe focus.
How important is that inyour work with horses?
You can't learn anythingwithout attention,
and I really want you to speak to.
How horses' attentiondevelops as per their age.
(14:16):
That really blew my mind.
Horses are born needing, if you think ofwhat sense does a horse need to survive
immediately when they pop into the world?
Mm-hmm.
They've gotta get on theirfeet and they've gotta move.
Yes.
And so the cerebellum, which is relatedto balance sequencing, fine motor
(14:37):
movement, that's starting to get.
Myelinated and I'll talk in a minute aboutmyelination, um, and the motor cortex.
So you'll see fos stretchingin crazy positions.
You'll watch 'em leap in theair and they don't know where
they're going thought wise.
When they reach the ground again, thenthey pogo stick off somewhere else, but it
(14:58):
doesn't take long until they're smoothlymoving right along in step with their mom.
That's because every time a motor neuronfires, it creates excitement in the brain
and these other cells arrive and start towrap this fatty wrapping this insulation
called myelin around that neuron,making them more efficient and faster.
(15:23):
A naked neuron sends messages about twomiles an hour, and some of that leaks off.
But when you get myelinated, we'retalking about on the, on the,
uh, impact of 200 miles an hour.
And the message is not, doesn'tbecome diffuse over time.
So these are clear messages, fastmessages, and that's where the
(15:46):
horse myelinates, but the horse'sfrontal lobe that they use for
attention, that area's not really.
Even beginning to be addresseduntil they're 2, 3, 4 years old.
So if they're using that area of the brainfor attention, we often are asking horses.
(16:08):
Horses before they're two horsesat two horses in maturities.
Mm-hmm.
We, we de demand attention in ourtraining, and especially if we do
this over long periods of time.
We wouldn't dream of taking a 8-year-oldkid and sticking them in a three
hour college lecture and telling'em not to fidget and pay attention.
(16:28):
But that's what we're doing when we ask
year old horses exactly what we're doing.
And if you see some horses can,can do that, they're the freaks,
right?
They're the, they're the,they're this abnormal.
From a neuroscience pointof view, they're abnormal.
Right?
And really their emotional andpsychological being has to be able to do
(16:51):
that to pay attention in those situations.
And so that makes that ratio of horsesto those that can do it even smaller.
What happens to those other horses?
That's kind of wastage that's kind ofthought of is, well, that's the price
you pay to get to the top of the.
(17:11):
Top of the pyramid,
that was eight year olds thatcan sit in college lectures.
Yes.
Mm. Exactly.
So for everyone who's listening andwatching, you got a lot of people who
listen to this podcast who are startingtheir own horses or who are part of the
starting of their own horses and acrossdifferent disciplines In the horse world,
everyone has a different age benchmark.
Right?
So.
(17:32):
More show jumping and moreof the Olympic disciplines.
We start them later.
We don't, we don't do futurities at thatlevel, but then you look at the race horse
industry, those horses are racing big, bigindustry races at very, very young ages.
So can you give some.
Could you give some benchmarksto everybody about when,
when is that frontal lobe?
When when can we expect to have a healthylevel of attention from a young horse?
(17:56):
Right?
So this doesn't mean you don't handleyour horse when they're a 2-year-old.
Mm-hmm.
But what we need to dois then realize that.
Their attention has a limitedcapacity, so you work with that.
So you could do very small,short, brief periods, which
(18:17):
actually works better mm-hmm.
Than long, drawn out repetitions.
But that long, drawn out repetitionthat requires long periods of attention.
We are often dealing with a brainthat's not capable of doing that
yet we're asking it and, and whenwe don't get it, we become more.
Controlling to try to force it.
(18:40):
And what happens is you make changesin the neurochemistry and you become,
the horses become more sympatheticallyaroused, and they'll either check out
on you, they can become aggravatedor worse, yet they get confused,
more sympathetically aroused.
Now you're seeing behaviors that you don'tnecessarily want, and so why would you.
(19:00):
Push the horse into that positionto behave in that way when you can
work with the nervous system mm-hmm.
And, and avoid that altogether becausethat you're just gonna have to go back
and fix those fights that you put inthere, uh, in the, in the long run.
(19:24):
Or you're gonna end up inthis back and forth contest.
The horse, I think it was Ray Hunt thatsaid, you don't wanna contest your horse.
Yes.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Ray also said the slower yougo, the faster you learn.
Well, he had a a pretty good handle on
Yeah.
On this.
So when you talk about, 'causeI'm picturing in my mind.
(19:46):
Okay, so you're asking a young horse.
To go beyond their, theirneurological capacity.
Right.
And then they have either in thosesituations where maybe that person's
not neuro like this, they're not, theirtraining is not neuroscience informed.
Right?
They don't understand how the brain works.
So they're expectingthat three-year-old to
(20:08):
give them a long training session.
So that horse has acouple of options, right?
They can either, theycan either fight back.
Because they'll become moresympathetically aroused.
So Fight or flight.
Fight or flight.
So, yeah.
So fight is an option.
Most, all the time the horseis gonna take flight, right?
That's their choice.
That's their number onechoice for the most part.
(20:30):
Yeah.
Or they'll fight back, or, this isfrom the sounds of it, this is the
birth of, or what I would call the,the makings of learned helplessness.
Yeah.
I, if you try something and you can'tescape the pain, so you might wanna go to.
Flight first, and this canbe, uh, emotional pain.
(20:50):
This could be psychological pain.
It doesn't have to be physical pain.
Uh, but if we take flight away fromyou, then the horse may turn to fight.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
If the horse doesn't turn to those twooptions, oftentimes what they'll do is,
is what's called a parasympathetic crash.
They'll just check out totally.
(21:13):
And they can go to a freeze response.
Um, a true freeze responseis humans feel it too.
You know, if somebody assaults you andyou, they're too big for you to fight.
Mm-hmm.
And you can't run away,they're holding onto you.
Oftentimes you say something horrendousis gonna happen to me so horrendous
(21:33):
that I don't want to be there for it.
And you check out, right.
You disassociate
right.
So disassociation is somethingwe see in people and in horses.
Absolutely.
It's the way we protect ourselves.
So can you make a horse smarterand can you make a horse dumber?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
(21:54):
With any mammal, I could take them andput them in an environment, one where
they feel safe, uh, where they're, um.
Able to get motivated, getdopamine on their own with
an internal locus of control.
They may run a maze, they may havetreadmills, um, but they're with
(22:15):
other animals of their species.
And if after six months I were to lookat those brains, I would find all kinds
of axonal connections and growth likea tree arbor rising growing limbs.
I could take the same animals.
And I could isolate them fromother animals, just put them
(22:37):
in their own pen without any.
Other stimuli and they'refed, they're taken care of.
They're fed.
Their primary needs are,quote, are met, met.
But if I look at those brainsafter six months, I'll find
none of that arborization.
It's like I've gone in withshears and trimmed off limbs
(22:59):
and branch, I've done pruning.
Mm-hmm.
In fact, the they, it'sreferred to as axonal pruning.
And I can end up with a brain thatdoesn't have those same connections,
and I could do even worse.
I could totally isolate theanimal like in a cinder block.
Um, enclosure, no other animals around.
(23:22):
This would be a sensory deprivation box.
And we, we have those in the horse world,they're called box stalls, where the
nature is to be able to use your sensesto see onto the horizon at long distances.
Well, I'll become nearsighted if theonly messages my eyes are receiving
are the sides of the, of the stall.
(23:44):
If I'm not moving around, then my motorstrip's not gonna function the same way.
If somebody shaves myvibra, which are tactile.
Sensors.
We know all those whiskers, right?
Right.
Mayors shouldn't have whiskers, right?
So that's a cosmetic,you know, human deal.
(24:05):
But if you're not, over time, notreceiving messages down those vibra
and into your brain, which tellyou where you are in space, then.
Once the brain doesn't receiveinformation, it becomes
less effective once it does.
So when those hairs grow back, ifyou've cut them for a long period of
(24:27):
time, you've sort of silenced a sense.
I mean, think about that.
Here's a sense that needs to get theirbrain, and you've made it silent.
They use those to explore with, ifI chopped off your fingers, right?
Yeah.
Chopped off the fingersof a blind pianist, right?
Oh
yeah.
So they are sensory creatures.
(24:48):
That's the way to think of thehorse is that they're sensing things
that you absolutely cannot imagine.
You as humans, we use our own brainas sort of, uh, uh, comparison,
and that makes sense because that'sthe only kind of brain you have.
You have a human brain, you know,you haven't been studying brains
(25:09):
all along, and so you use that.
But if you stop and think of your worldand think of, uh, their world, they
have almost a 340 degree panoramic view.
They see the world out there, andthose eyes are sensitive to motion.
So any little motion outthere gets picked up quickly.
(25:32):
And a predator shouldbe designed like that.
When it gets dark, they can seewhen you're looking, trying to look
in the dark 'cause they have rods.
And rods bring in morelight, we have more cones.
So color and clarity for us is,is, and if we look straight ahead,
(25:55):
that's what we'll see for them.
The world's blurry and it doesn'thave the same colors in it.
Yep.
Um, and they're seeing thingsthat you can't see because they're
seeing back behind their head.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Um, and you can go over it each andevery sense, their sense of smell.
(26:17):
You took a look at thegiant olfactory bulbs
Yes.
Of horses and saw how large those are.
And, and you can tell how importantsomething is in a brain by either
its its location or its size.
Mm-hmm.
Big things are a cerebellumand olfactory bulbs.
(26:37):
Olfactory bulbs are smell, so whenthey're sniffing that saddle pad,
they're not sniffing the saddle pad.
They could smell that far away.
They're likely rubbing their vibra on it.
Then using those prehensile lips.
To investigate and maybe evenholding it in their teeth a little
bit to, to investigate, but they'recertainly not smelling it that
(27:01):
they had, that they had thaton lockdown way before you even
put the saddle pad near them.
Absolutely.
Something that you said to me thatreally blew my mind was when we put
horses in box dolls and we, we deprivethem of the natural sensory information
that they need, that their sp thattheir species has evolved from, that
they can actually become nearsighted.
(27:21):
And that makes sense.
You can do this with.
Cats, they've done thiswith all kinds of mammals.
When you take away a s sense and itdoesn't register in the brain anymore,
those neurons don't necessarily go fallow.
Just other areas of the brain start touse them, so they're no longer available.
So when we take, so, I mean, andour regulatory bodies have now
(27:43):
made it, I, you know, illegal forus to, to clip the Vibra, but I
grew up clipping Whiskers or Vibra.
Like all throughout my junior yearsas a rider, so it now I think, oh
well we started to see, you know,horses bump into things or they go,
oh, you know, so and so horse likecut their face again in the stall.
(28:05):
Well, it's because we've taken away.
It's like not giving someonewho can't, like not giving,
taking someone's glasses away.
Right.
There's
fii are in blind spots.
Right.
So that nail in the manger thatthey may have sensed previously.
Now we get increased liptrauma or eye trauma.
And you're right, you put 'emin a unfamiliar round pen and
(28:25):
they're banging their face.
Watch 'em use those vibrawith an electric fence.
They know exactly how closethey can, they do, they can get.
So those are such fascinating structures.
The military uses, uh, something similarfor robots where they use sensors to tell
(28:46):
the robot where they are in space and.
Technology is built on our horses.
Incredible sense.
That's the model.
Yeah.
We decide we're gonna trim it offbecause we don't think it looked,
we don't like way cosmetically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So something that happened yesterday andit was a, it was so fascinating because
(29:07):
throughout this studying with you.
I've learned a lot about how horsessee and how they register and gain
information from the depth andlike the dimensions of things.
And because their is are not like ours,they don't collect that data through
their, is the same way that we do.
So yesterday when I was crossingbridges with my mare, I had this.
(29:31):
Light bulb moment because she actuallyas an appaloosa, she actually has,
you know, she's, she's always gonna,well, in her case back, um, supported
by Dr. Dennis Brooks, who we love.
We would do a shout outfor Dr. Dennis Brooks.
He's helped me understand how lady seesand how her eyesight as an appaloosa
(29:51):
has a few more challenges to it.
So she's had some uveitisflareups, she's had some ulcers.
So she actually has to work harder.
And I've now, you and Dennis havebrought this together for me to
understand that she moves a lot, soshe'll move her head around a lot.
And I used to interpret that as notdefiance, but she's quite an opinionated
(30:14):
horse and so she'll often act quite.
Strongly if she doesn't feel safe.
And yesterday I noticed thatwe would come to a bridge.
She needs to look at it.
Not only does she need to drop herhead down, which some of us think our
horses are smelling the ground, but nowthat I understand the way that horses
smell, they're not smelling the ground.
(30:34):
They smelled it from when youwere walking up to the trailer.
What they're doing is they'reunderstanding where the ledge
of that, you know, the, thegradient of that, of that ramp.
But what she was doing yesterdaytotally clicked for me.
She was actually looking likeshe was looking behind, but
actually knowing that she has.
(30:54):
She doesn't have perfectvision, but she doesn't have
completely compromised vision.
I actually think that what she wastrying to do is she was trying to
really take in all of the dimensionsof that bridge because she needs extra
information because she doesn't seeas well as maybe my other horse guano.
Absolutely.
You know, the Cary muscles in their,in their eyes are, are weaker and
(31:16):
it takes them a while to adjustright in front, uh, where the.
The vision from the two eyesmeet, they have binocular vision.
That's their depth perception.
So oftentimes they'll put their head downto fall within that range of binocular
vision, where are you likely to see it?
Crossing a stream, going over a bridge.
(31:38):
Sometimes we take that away from 'em.
You know, if you're in a steeple chaseand you hold their head in a position,
they're not able to put their head in.
In a way that keeps it within binocularvision, you go to the back of the
trailer, oftentimes they'll put theirhead down, especially if it's one of
those step up trailers, because theywanna see how high they need to step.
If we don't want their head down and weyank it up and take vision away from them,
(32:01):
they're blindly going onto that trailer.
They bang their legs becausethey don't know how high to step.
And now, where did this trailerloading problem come from?
Well, we took away a sense whenthey would've helped us to.
To climb a board, they totallyrelied on us, and I think we
need to take responsibilityfor the times that we cause.
(32:26):
Our horses difficulty when we ask themto do things they're not capable of
when we remove one of their senses.
Yes.
Yes.
So it made me think of blinders ina completely new way when I thought
about horses, because horses actually,and the more and more I observe
lady, the more and more I realizethat she really has to work to like
(32:47):
take in a lot of visual information.
And she might takelonger to do that, right?
She's older and she doeshave compromised vision, so.
If I yank her head up becauseI think that she's not paying
attention to what I want her to do.
And what, what reallysolidified that after?
'cause I was, I had some dwell timeafter my ride yesterday was, and we're
(33:09):
gonna talk about dwell time was um.
When I was at Craig Cameron's and shedid her first Cowboy Challenge course,
he had us, and this is again wherethe Cowboy Wisdom meets the science.
He was like, I want you to walk bothsides, circles around every obstacle.
I don't want you to go over it.
I just want you to circle aroundit and really let your horses get.
(33:30):
Like get a look at every aspect, everycorner of that bridge or that pedestal
or whatever it was that we were doing.
He had us circle once, circle acouple times around one way and
then the other, and then leave,and then go look at another, go
look another part of the course.
So then when we went and actually didthe course, the horses had no problem.
(33:52):
Because he had, he had really set us upto like introduce each of the obstacles.
And I thought that was fascinating,understanding the science now, because
what he's doing is he's allowingthe horse to take in information on
the height, the depth, the dimensionof everything that we're doing.
And then I think, how many timeshave I jumped courses on horses?
How many times have I, you know,gone into new environments?
(34:14):
And the horses don't get anychance to take in any information.
They're just asked to go straight.
Which is actually not, and theirhead has to be straight, but that's
not necessarily how they see.
Providing them with informationand giving them time to process
the information is so important.
You know, you looked at it.
And making the assumption thatinformation's being processed.
(34:38):
But if they're onto the next thing, nowyou have more competing information coming
into the brain before the brain has timeto process what they've been exposed to.
And then we do it again, and then we doit again, and the the horse is left with
fragments to put together themselvesbecause they haven't had the opportunity
to consolidate that and start to lockthat information away accurately.
(35:04):
When we say neurons that fire together,wire together, can you explain what
that means and the science behind it?
Absolutely.
Uh, without getting too sciencey.
Mm-hmm.
Because really, uh, that'snot what I, I ever want to do.
I want to give information thathas real world application.
(35:25):
You can learn some bigwords, but, uh, I want to.
Share information that peoplecan take back to their horse.
And I always say, you know, I'm notmaking this up, just ask your horse.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
So this is how this works.
You have, you and your horse have a,a neurotransmitter called glutamate.
(35:48):
It's the major excitatory neurotransmitterin your system and in your horses.
So if you move your right arm,you're firing glutamate neurons
all the way up to your left motor.
Cortex.
So if we do something new, thenwe are firing a new pattern.
(36:08):
Glu glutamatergic neurons will fire in anew pattern if we're doing something new.
If we do it a second time,then we're sending information
down that same new pathway.
We do it, uh, quite a few times.
What happens is, and here's your $10word for the day, oligodendrocytes
(36:29):
will arrive on the scene.
They get excited by this firingand will begin to wrap that.
As we had discussed earlier,that neuron in myelin.
So by firing neurons that firetogether get wired together and
that starts out like a little feederroad and then you keep working that.
(36:52):
And I don't mean by rote.
Drilling, and we'll talkabout why that doesn't work.
But over time you keep firing thatnew pattern of neurons and you're
essentially paving a highway.
You start out like a, a footpath and thena small country road, and then you get
the mile in and now it becomes a highway.
(37:12):
And information very easily, rapidly,quickly follows that new highway.
So getting back to what you had asked.
Way back in the, in this podcast was, youknow, can you make your horse smarter?
You can certainly wire the brain.
Mm-hmm.
And you can rewire these pathwaysand you can take existing neuro
(37:37):
networks and wire them together.
So it's amazing how.
Smart your horse can get andhow much they want to learn.
If we provide them with a foundation andwe provide them with the architecture
in their brain, and that's, that'syou learning to almost like a welder,
(37:59):
learning to go in and wire thoseconnections that you, that you want.
But if you have your horse in thewrong state, then those messages are
not gonna take your new feeder road.
They're gonna go to areas of the brain.
Like the amygdala, an area ofthe brain associated with fear.
So if you are forcing things tohappen, you're sending more of
(38:21):
those messages, not down the,the highway that you're creating.
You're sending them to another area ofthe brain that's relates to fear, and
now you're gonna get fear responsesand there's no way that pattern of
neurons is gonna fire when they're.
Under the influence of cortisoland NN neurotransmitters we
(38:43):
haven't talked about yet.
Norepinephrine, uh, that willsend them a different way.
And if they're afraid and youkeep training, you're gonna train
that fear right into the task thatyou're, you're trying to accomplish.
And there's not a lot oflearning that's gonna take place.
You're gonna deal withemotional side effects.
(39:04):
Yes.
And you put 'em in there.
You put 'em in there.
Not your horse.
Your your horse is really prettymuch your, your construction project
when we're talking about the brain.
So something that I learnedfrom you is that the amygdala
is also attached to memory.
(39:26):
So fear, and this makes sense froman evolutionary point of view.
The fear part of the brain is attachedto the memory part of the brain.
So if we train, like we, you can seehow quickly we get into trouble if
we use fear-based training becausethose horses, those we, we wire or
we pave the wrong highways, right?
(39:48):
That we want to be paving highways thathave positive association that have.
The right chemicals associated with them.
I want you to explain the sciencebehind repaving 'cause this is something
that I've had, that I've done withmy mare, and your work helped me
understand this a hundred to one ratio.
(40:11):
That when you have a horse that has beentraumatized or you have a horse that's
experienced a lot of fear-based trainingor you have a, you have a horse that's
been in a state of self preservationfor a large part of their life, you have
highways that you have to very slowly,and the one of the only things that
you really have to work with is time.
(40:32):
'cause time.
Is it like the only way to do101 if you're also honoring
the neuroscience of learning?
Dwell time.
The only thing that's gonna repairthat those, those maybe less supportive
highways in their brain is time.
Right.
So can you explain how we rewireand this a hundred to one ratio and
(40:55):
the a hundred to one ratio isnot always a hundred to one.
Right?
But what you're talkingabout is a rehab horse.
Mm-hmm.
Basically, and to rehab that horse, wemay need a hundred good experiences to
make up for the one bad, the one bad.
So first of all, let's talk about thearchitecture in the brain where the
(41:16):
amygdala, which is, uh, Latin for almond,because early neuroanatomist thought it
looked like an alman, and it, it actually.
Is at the tip of the hippocampus Greekfor seahorse because it looks like that.
So our almond is attached to ourseahorse and our seahorse iss memory.
(41:37):
The hippocampus is memory.
So if I'm a Vietnam veteran and I feelI'm gonna die and I see some horrendous
things, then my amygdala is gonnasupercharge my memory by hippocampus.
Now it.
When it works efficiently,things that are gonna harm us.
We remember those, so we don'tput ourself in harm's way.
(42:00):
But if I supercharge that amygdala,I'm ending up with a memory,
I can now no longer forget.
Mm. So if I'm the Vietnam vet walkingon the beach in the hot sand and
the palm fronds are blowing in thewind and the news helicopter flies
over, now I am right back in Vietnam.
(42:21):
Mm.
You know, not somethinglike it somatically.
My system is responding as if I were okay.
Now let me use the example of,of my horse comet that I needed
a lot of good experiences.
To get, to be able to make progress.
(42:42):
So Comet was a, a beautiful painthorse running around in a herd with a
lot of other horses on a big acreage.
Comet's owner could not catch her.
So he and his friends d devised a a shoot.
And so they put up panelsto, to create a shoot.
(43:02):
They ran around till she was tired.
Finally, she chose the, the shoot.
They, they ran her to the end of theshoot and closed her in a small pen.
What we've got going on now is, is fighthas been, uh, flight has been removed.
That was her first choice.
Just run away.
Mm-hmm.
But now she can't.
She's in a small pen.
He went in and she started to rear up.
(43:23):
He got frightened, so he got a whip, andas she reared up, he would whip at her.
So she began to paw athim and it scared him.
Um, he got out of the, the pen andhe, on his way out, he punched her.
And I said, what, what wereyou teaching her there?
That's for all the times I'vetried to catch her and for all
(43:44):
this, the crap that she's given me.
So in terms.
Punishment plays no role.
There's no study out therethat shows punishment as an
effective learning strategy.
Um, so I bought Cometand got her out of there.
And whenever a human came closeto her, she would rear and paw.
(44:06):
So she was flooded withuh, a neurochemical called
norepinephrine, highly aroused.
She was immediately in fight or flight.
Immediately and, and fight.
She couldn't help this becausethose neurons wired together.
So any sense that she was in dangersent the messages down that pathway.
(44:28):
I like to call this thesignal to noise ratio, right?
The signal is our relevant informationand our noise is irrelevant
information, and if she's so fearful,she can never hear my signal.
She's just too concernedwith all the noise around.
So my job is not necessarily to train.
(44:52):
It's to start those good experiences.
So it took me a long time to creeptowards her, her pen, to creep towards
the round pen, and she'd start to getaroused and start to move and start to to
run and then get in the back of the pen.
And I knew she was ready togo up and start this rearing.
This is built in.
(45:12):
This is not a conscious decision.
This is not a bad horsedeciding to do this.
This is where the messages are gonna gowhen we're in that emotional s. State.
Mm-hmm.
So over time, I was able to developsome bit of a, of a relationship, but
I still had to approach her from theside, not head on, because that's the
(45:36):
trigger that would cause this problem.
Now I have to change the camera chemistry.
I'm, I'm draining off thenorepinephrine and I have to find a way.
We need motivation for learning,attention, safety, and motivation.
So I needed her feeling safe.
I needed her attention.
That was no problem.
She was really focused onanything that was a threat.
(45:59):
But I had to find dopamine.
And to get dopamine, oftentimesyou have to move towards something.
Dopamine is the motivating.
Dopamine
is the neurotransmitter that'srelated to reward and movement.
Nature may have set it up that way.
You have to move to a new pasture.
You have to move and look overthe hill so you can see if there
(46:19):
are other mares over there.
What, whatever.
So, and people with Parkinson'sdisease who have less dopamine, it's
a neurodegenerative disease wherethey have less dopamine on board.
Their movement's affected, they shuffle.
Right,
right.
So movement and rewardare, are closely tied.
(46:40):
So if I were to introduce somethingto Calmed that came from the out
side externally and caused herto just stand and tolerate what I
was presenting, she would rear, Iknew that that pathway would fire.
I had to develop some curiosity,so I held things away from her,
(47:01):
so she would have to investigate.
Now she's moving toward, and then whenshe's able to say, okay, that's safe.
She gets more serotonin, she gets less.
No epinephrine, serotoninis emotional balance, right?
Serotonin is, is related to all of,most of all of our antidepressants.
When you get low serotonin,you get selective.
(47:24):
Serotonin reuptake inhibitorslike, like, uh, Prozac.
Mm-hmm.
So she was becoming moreemotionally balanced.
I was reducing the noise and she startedto become curious once that was happening
and she felt safe enough to explore.
She came out of her shell,but I had to give her small
successes, small uh, releases.
(47:48):
And I want to be, uh, clear on this point.
A release is when you take the cueoff, when you take the pressure off.
Mm-hmm.
Relief is when yourhorse actually feels it.
Sometimes you can release, butif your horse doesn't feel it,
they're not getting the reward,
(48:09):
they're not getting thechemicals they need.
Right.
To learn.
Right.
So the three, this is so important,I wanna really reinforce this.
The three.
Fundamental ingredientsfor horses to learn.
And humans.
And humans to learn.
Yes.
And this is important for everybody.
There's a lot of examples, and I evenhave a few myself of when I didn't
(48:30):
have these three in my learningin, in my horsemanship journey and
I didn't learn, and then I get, mytrainers would get frustrated with me.
But if we don't feel safe,if we don't have motivation.
And the third one is attention,if we don't have our attention.
So attention is norepinephrine.
Yes.
Okay.
Well actually, uh, attentionis acetylcholine, right?
(48:54):
Right.
Uh, but norepinephrine isour neurochemical of arousal.
Right?
And this is a, this is a key point,is if we are afraid of norepinephrine
and we start to see our horse getsympathetically aroused, and we say,
oh, they're out of their comfort zone.
You know, I, this is not a good thing.
(49:16):
I don't want you to think thata horse has to just stay in that
comfortable homeostatic rangebecause learning's not optimum there.
Right.
You need to be challenged.
Right.
Kids with their head down on theback of the, the desk may feel safe
in the classroom sleeping right.
Uh, and they may have foundsomething else motivating.
(49:37):
Mm-hmm.
But, but you don't havetheir, their attention, so you
need that level of arousal.
People I think, have tended to lookat the autonomic nervous system.
Sympathetic nervous system.
Parasympathetic nervous system.
Sympathetic nervoussystem, fight or flight.
(49:58):
Fight.
Parasympathetic.
Parasympathetic is rest anddigest, but there's a balance.
One's not good.
One's not bad.
Mm. We need the sympatheticnervous system to learn.
We have to be aroused enough to focus ourattention and we get our biggest dopamine
hits with that high level of arousal.
Yes.
(50:19):
If you go too far, the idea isyou have to let the horse reset
and come back down before yougo back and apply more pressure.
Vital.
Well, and this learning from you hasmade me realize, I used to think,
and I think a lot of the way that.
The sympathetic and this parasympatheticnervous systems, or on and autonom nervous
system has been presented visually.
(50:40):
It's like a bubble overhere and a bubble over here.
But in actual fact, it's more likea Venn diagram where there's a
crossover and there's this beautiful,optimal, um, area of learning.
Also there could be, like we talkedabout already, the parasympathetic crash.
So when a horse freezes orgoes into learned helplessness,
(51:01):
that is parasympathetic crash.
That is not there.
That's, that's not sympathetic.
That's full parasympathetic crash.
So there are bad stages there.
There's also like a, there's a toofar in the parasympathetic as well.
Wow.
Which is so important.
So, right.
So freeze.
Right.
The freeze response is aparasympathetic response.
(51:21):
Your heart rate decreases.
You feel like you're gonna faintwhen it happens with humans.
It's a vasal, vagal type of response.
So you can't look.
Sex is sympathetic.
Play is sympathetic.
Yeah.
A lot of good stuff happens up there
in the sympathetic nervous system, right?
So we can't think of itas like good and bad.
We have to think about it aswhat are you trying to achieve?
(51:45):
And we.
Homeostasis is where we spend,where we hopefully spend a lot
of time because that's, uh, thefundamentally a resting state, right?
Homeostasis is your, your biologicalbalance, where your heart rate is normal,
your respiratory rate is normal, andhomeostasis is really, this is a key
(52:09):
operative work term, self-regulationof your biological balance.
So when you come out of that with changingcircumstances, your ability to come back
down to, to homeostasis, self-regulating.
So it's up to us to optimize that system.
(52:31):
So when we take our horse outof homeostasis, we wanna show
them that there's a way downand it's highly rewarding.
To come back down into that homeostaticstate and they'll be hunting for it.
So this is what we'll use.
We get high arousal fora short amount of time.
(52:52):
That's where we get the optimum attention.
Acetylcholine.
That's where we have theright level of norepinephrine.
Yeah.
Right.
And all horses are different.
So you'd
be like, kind of like an orange.
'cause like if you were to think ofhomeostasis, homeostasis as green
and sympathetic or hyper arousal.
As red, right?
That it's kind of like this orange zone.
They're gradients, and the more timeyou spend in that middle gradient where
(53:17):
you kind of have a mix of hot waterand cold water, the more time you spend
there, the, it becomes harder to becomethreatened because that window opens and
you're used to swimming in those waters.
For example, if I never take my horseout of the arena, right then there.
(53:37):
Sort of window of what they willtolerate is very small, very narrow
homeostasis is I'm in the arena, soif I just come out one step, I may
now become sympathetically aroused.
So let's play with that.
Let's go a little bit down the trail.
Let see here.
A little worked up.
Let's make a couple circlesand maybe we'll come back.
(53:59):
Because if you say it's too windy,I can't do it with other horses, um,
you know, the leaves are blowing.
Whatever reason you start avoiding things.
Then once you're exposed to those,I mean, if you've never cantered and
your horse is never cantered withsomebody on their back, and then once
(54:21):
that happens, if they don't have.
Neuro exercises to help them becomecomfortable with that and put that
within their window of tolerance.
Then the, the potential for comingapart, it came out of nowhere.
Well, if we put you in the deepend and you've never swam in
the deep end, you'll panic.
So.
(54:42):
This actually.
So neuroscience can actually explainas we make the optimal window of
learning wider because we offer moreopportunities to learning new things.
Horses learn and they build apattern recognition that they
become sympathetically aroused, butthey have just the right amount of
norepinephrine and acetylcholine.
(55:03):
Right, which is attention and focus.
Yes.
Then they can come back down andreceive serotonin in homeostasis,
which is why we give them a rest.
We ask, we challenge, and then wecome back down to a place of rest
because serotonin is, is the emotionalbalance chemical, and they get that.
Homeostasis.
Right.
(55:23):
Got it.
So this is how neurosciencecan explain that.
When someone says, oh, they have a schoolmaster, or they have a, you know, that
really experienced ranch horse or whatI've experienced with my horses crossing
the country, having all these differentchallenges, they, they learn something
new, but they come back to homeostasis.
So they receive their serotonin andthen that window, that orange window.
(55:47):
Becomes bigger and bigger, wider
and wider and wider.
So their optimal learningbracket increases over time.
The importance of letting them comeback, the homeostasis when they're
at that high level, uh, when theyhave sympathetic arousal enough,
they're optimizing attention.
Acetylcholine, dopamine reward,uh, norepinephrine arousal.
(56:14):
That's where they're focusedin on the information.
Mm.
We need to come back to homeostasisbecause it's in the homeostatic
state that it gets consolidated,so they have to come back there.
That's their dwell time.
That's we're leaving them alonewith no external distractions.
(56:35):
Even when you go over ata boy and you slap on him.
The brain is having competingsignals coming in when it's
trying to consolidate information.
Basically, you wanna back away, giveyour horse space, get that licking
and chewing, and we know that thebrain is replaying that information.
How do we know that?
(56:56):
Well, we take a human being and we put'em in a functional MRI uh, tube, and,
and we are a functional MRI, by the way.
Is a neuroimaging device thatlooks at the brain in real time.
So if we put somebody in an MRIscanner and they do a task, maybe
(57:18):
it's a motor task, so they're usingtheir, let's say, if they're right
handed, they're like your horse.
It's, it's wired the same way.
They're using their right hand.
So their left motorstrip is, is lit up now.
They just lie after the task.
Still in that neuroimagingdevice, but we're still imaging.
(57:38):
What we'll see is the hippocampuswill light up memory and replay that
same pattern of neuronal firing,although the person's just laying flat.
Mm-hmm.
But the brain is stillreplaying that whole pathway.
If I leave them alone even longer,they start to associate with other
things that are related to that.
(57:59):
Oh, I've done something likethis before, or, yeah, this
reminds me of such and such.
Now we're creating a combining ofprevious information into our network.
Wow.
But I can ruin all this.
I could walk over to that scannerand say, how you doing in there?
And pat them on the leg and it goes blank.
So the idea is once you're exposed toinformation, you need that reflection.
(58:25):
You need that dwell time.
I mean, old time wa used to know that,you know, you, you hear it called dwell
time, but you need that to consolidatethe information when then your horse
starts blinking and licking and chewy.
That's why Martin says, let'sgo let him soak on that.
Absolutely.
Old cowboys had terms for it, right?
(58:46):
They did, but they had developedtheir understanding of the science
throughout, through just repetition.
Tons and thousands andthousands of horse horses.
But I've, I've literally heardMartin say, okay, let's let 'em
go soak on that for a minute.
And they leave them alone.
No stimulus.
We're not touching them.
They're not fussing overthem, they're not constrained.
Those horses just get to go literallysoak in all those chemicals.
(59:07):
You cannot the, if the hippocampusreplays something 20 times.
20 times faster and, and is replayingthe, the best that you can do at that.
If you kept drilling, you could notdo it as well as the hippocampus
because what'll happen is.
Dear Horse World, it's Dr. Steven Peters.
Well, Steve, welcome to theDear Horse World Podcast.
Well, I'm glad to be here.
I am so excited.
I am trying, I'm like, can barely containmy excitement about everything that
we're gonna talk about in this episode.
I want you.
To share with everybody a little bit ofyour origin story, because before we press
(00:24):
record, you shared some parts of your lifethat I actually was completely unaware
of, and I think it's really remarkablefor you to share a little bit of like,
what did life look like before you werean like a neuro practice, neuro practice.
Probably what people don't know about me.
I come from a military family,so when people ask me, well,
(00:44):
where do you come from?
I've lived in Japan.
I've lived in England.
We've been all over with amove, uh, every few years.
I was born in Hawaii when it wasstill a territory, even had a horse
strawberry in Hawaii because likeevery kid, uh, who's looking at
that black and white TV with rabbit.
(01:05):
You know, ear antennas, uh, Iwatched a steady diet of raw
hide and wagon train, et cetera.
And so that's what I thought Ireally wanted to be all along.
Uh, I was a Navy officer, uh, because mydad was a Navy pilot, so, and the, the
military lifestyle was one I was really.
(01:27):
Comfortable with.
So, um, for five years I was aNavy officer, but I had been dating
my wife Fat's time before shewas my wife during that period.
And I knew that I would spend a lot oftime at sea and that probably wasn't
gonna be healthy for, uh, for a marriage.
(01:50):
So she's a New Yorker, a city woman.
And, um, I interviewed time and timeagain because there's a quite a process at
Goldman Sachs Investment Bank, and I wentto work there, um, for about two years.
(02:12):
My dad, during this time, uh, beganto have seizures and we found out
that he had a, a brain tumor that wasterminal, actually a glioblastoma.
That just continued to grow.
And so I became really fascinatedwith the brain and sort of off track.
(02:32):
Even from that is I'm on the autisticspectrum, so when I lock into
something, it's with a laser focus.
Mm-hmm.
And it's, it's sort of.
Crazy because I'm, I can be easilydistracted, but at the same time,
if I'm focused, then I can justhone in and I just could not get
(02:53):
this idea about brain tumors andhow brains function outta my mind.
So after a lot of discussion with mythen wife, even though I knew I was
gonna spend at least the next decade.
Learning about brains.
It was a passion for me.
(03:14):
It was, uh, pretty easy choice.
And so that's what drove me into schooland practicums and internships and
residency and post-doctoral fellowships.
Um, and my history from therewas I became a clinical.
(03:34):
Um, neuroscientist and I'd see patientsall the time and assess brain functioning
human patients.
Human patients.
Mm-hmm.
Human patients.
But nonetheless, that was the lensthat I looked at horses through,
through, through their nervous system.
And I could, I saw patterns pretty easily,and I began to see patterns in horses
(03:59):
that were related to their nervous system.
I. From there I thought, you know,but I don't have empirical data.
I have seven horses.
Whatever I do with these sevenhorses is not gonna generalize
out to the the horse world.
And when I would ask people, you know,why do you think your horse did this?
(04:20):
They would say.
Well, they're a right brainintroverted Sagittarius.
You know, I'd hear all kinds ofreasons for why horses did things.
Mm-hmm.
So I began to read all the peerreviewed literature and veterinary
science, animal cognition.
I began dissecting out horsebrains, but the piece missing was
the observation of large numbers.
(04:42):
So I found this guy, this cowboy, a fifthgeneration cowboy, Martin Black, and um.
We began interacting, and it wasfascinating to both of us because
what he was seeing based on thousandsand thousands of observations I
could support with the science.
And I would say, Martin,do you ever see this?
(05:03):
He'd say, how do you know that?
Well, I would say.
Because I know how the brain works.
And he said it took me like a thousandhorses, but I saw the see the same thing.
And I might say, you see how thatfacial nerve there gets activated
and just sort of sticks out?
And he said, oh yeah, you mean thatguitar string thing that in their
face, our, our language was different,but our observations were identical.
(05:28):
Wow.
And when the puzzle pieces started to fittogether, that's when Martin said, you
know, we, we can't keep this to ourselves.
We wrote a small book,Evidence-Based Horsemanship,
the Scientist and the Cowboy.
Um, and the reason it's a smaller book.
I had all these citations andMartin said, what is this?
(05:50):
And I said, well, this isall the research to back up.
It's evidence-based.
I'm not saying anything.
That's my opinion unless Ican support it with evidence.
You said, well, who, who caresabout all these, these citations?
I said, well, the scientists do say,are we writing this for scientists?
You know, do we want this to end upin some academic library somewhere?
(06:12):
Read by 20 scientists whomay not even see a horse.
He said, let's just trim all that away.
I want this.
Book to fit in somebody's Saddleback.
Oh, I love that.
Yeah.
And you know, that's a smart
one for mer.
I
like
that.
Yeah, that was great.
What we've done since that timewas we were, we've now written our
(06:37):
new book, the Science and Practiceof Evidence-Based Horsemanship.
That's got all kinds of citations in it.
So anybody who wasn't satisfied withthe evidence to support all that
information, it is chockfull of science.
You can deep dive as deep as you want,and the practical side, the application.
(07:03):
Martin's still not done with that, butthe book's still coming out in the fall.
He, in fact, as I was driving here, hetexted me, he said, I got one more story.
I'm just about done with this,but it's gotta be in the book.
Yes,
he wants to put the kitchensink in the book, everything.
So, uh, this is probably fivetimes as thick as the book that
we, we first did, but this isgonna be more of our, our legacy.
(07:28):
And these are where things have evolved.
Two, it took me three and a halfyears to gather the evidence and
fine tune it for this, this book.
So that's where we are now.
And we are, uh, I give clinics.
You do.
We just finished one.
Exactly.
It's
groundbreaking work.
It's unbelievable.
Every horse person on theplanet should take this course.
(07:52):
The first and the secondone, in my humble opinion.
Yeah.
And it's not to do away with tradition,you know, if some people are threatened
by that, it's just evolution beyondthat because if you keep doing the
same thing again and again, you'resaying it could never be any better.
And for me it's, it becomesreally evident when.
(08:16):
We're working with the nervous systemin the brain and when we're working
against and when we work against,that's not good for the rider.
It's not in the horse's best interestand will create tremendous stress when
it really doesn't have to be there.
And you can get so much farther.
And I, I think, I think I telleveryone that if you're just willing
(08:40):
to peek through a different lens.
You know, it can be so enlightening andgive you so much more in your toolbox.
And even if you know the, howyou can get what you want out
of your horse no matter what.
You know, Warwick Schiller toldme that, you know, I could make
horses do anything I wanted to.
(09:02):
I didn't have a relationshipwith any of those horses.
I didn't have a connection.
And I got depressed and got aclinical depression because I felt
like my horses didn't like me.
And I went to the, you know, thereigning warmup pens and it, after a
while, it looked like every horse waslooking at me and making me feel guilty.
Get me outta here, Warwick.
(09:22):
And sometimes I feel the, the same waywe can make horses do whatever we want.
But at a cost.
And if we're able to work withthem, that's where the horse
really shows us what's possible.
(09:43):
So first off thing I wanna ask you is,you've brought up the nervous system,
and I know that there's gonna be quite afew listeners or people who are watching
this episode who are asking, well, Dr.
Peters, what does the nervoussystem have to do with the brain?
It's all a system.
Actually, the brain is part of the nervoussystem all the way down the spinal cord.
But I would say this, there's noperception, no sensation, no reaction.
(10:11):
Everything that your horse does,every movement your horse makes
has to go through the brain.
So if you're saying that the braindoesn't have relevance, that's
the command and control center foreverything that's ever gonna happen
in your horse and every memory.
And you may say, well, I'vedone something, something's
(10:33):
wrong with my horse.
And now it's a little embarrassingto, to acknowledge that we all do,
you know, until we know better.
And then we, we do better.
And the cool thing about it is.
With a brain, you get a second chance.
You can rewire the brain if you knowhow, if you understand how the brain
(10:53):
functions, you can actually makeanatomical changes in your horse's brain.
Or you can keep guessingor you can become dominant.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and enforce those things or.
You can work with your horse in a, ina dialogue, which versus a monologue,
(11:15):
a dialogue in which you can fine tunethose, those connections and it's
amazing where you can get with your horsein terms of speaking their language.
Yes, I think that's what reallyresonated with me doing the
course equine neuroscience.
(11:37):
You know, the, be the introductorycourse and then this advanced
course that we just finished.
What I, what really landed forme is that every single person in
the horse world wants to be ableto speak to their horse, right?
Everyone says, I wanna, I wanna havethis, I unspoken language with my horse.
I want them to understand me and I want,you know, me to understand them, to
(12:02):
understand how their brain works, is.
I've come to understand isa vital component to this.
We actually, our horses, our horses'brains are different to our brains,
and I really, I'm excited foryou to explain that to everybody.
How are our brains as humans,different to horses' brains?
First of all, I, I, I prefacethis by saying in many ways
(12:26):
they're remarkably similar.
And even when you look at themin dissection, you know, you.
If you're not used to seeing brains.
Yeah.
Uh, you know, you could befooled by just their size.
Uh, you may think that ahorse myth, a human size.
So that's a myth.
That's a myth that the horse'sbrain is like a size of a walnut.
(12:46):
Right.
You've held a brain in your hand.
I have.
It's not the size of a walnut, everybody.
Yeah.
But the, the differences are.
There's some sort of, uh, misnomergoing around out there that the
horse doesn't have a frontal lobe.
The all horses have frontal lobes.
All mammals have frontal lobes.
(13:08):
It's just that that frontal lobe hasevolved to make, meet the niche that
the horse falls into evolutionarily.
Mm-hmm.
So that it's works bestfor their survival.
It's true they don't have a largemass of tissue dedicated to frontal
(13:30):
brain, frontal lobe type functions.
The front, our frontal lobes makeup about one third of our brain.
Wow.
Right.
Where theirs is much, much smaller.
Mm-hmm.
They use their.
Frontal lobe.
Some of it's motor, uh,cortex that just leaks over.
So those are motor neurons in the, inthe frontal regions, but many of those,
(13:54):
uh, connections are related to attention.
So the horse's attentionis a frontal lobe focus.
How important is that inyour work with horses?
You can't learn anythingwithout attention,
and I really want you to speak to.
How horses' attentiondevelops as per their age.
(14:16):
That really blew my mind.
Horses are born needing, if you think ofwhat sense does a horse need to survive
immediately when they pop into the world?
Mm-hmm.
They've gotta get on theirfeet and they've gotta move.
Yes.
And so the cerebellum, which is relatedto balance sequencing, fine motor
(14:37):
movement, that's starting to get.
Myelinated and I'll talk in a minute aboutmyelination, um, and the motor cortex.
So you'll see fos stretchingin crazy positions.
You'll watch 'em leap in theair and they don't know where
they're going thought wise.
When they reach the ground again, thenthey pogo stick off somewhere else, but it
(14:58):
doesn't take long until they're smoothlymoving right along in step with their mom.
That's because every time a motor neuronfires, it creates excitement in the brain
and these other cells arrive and start towrap this fatty wrapping this insulation
called myelin around that neuron,making them more efficient and faster.
(15:23):
A naked neuron sends messages about twomiles an hour, and some of that leaks off.
But when you get myelinated, we'retalking about on the, on the,
uh, impact of 200 miles an hour.
And the message is not, doesn'tbecome diffuse over time.
So these are clear messages, fastmessages, and that's where the
(15:46):
horse myelinates, but the horse'sfrontal lobe that they use for
attention, that area's not really.
Even beginning to be addresseduntil they're 2, 3, 4 years old.
So if they're using that area of the brainfor attention, we often are asking horses.
(16:08):
Horses before they're two horsesat two horses in maturities.
Mm-hmm.
We, we de demand attention in ourtraining, and especially if we do
this over long periods of time.
We wouldn't dream of taking a 8-year-oldkid and sticking them in a three
hour college lecture and telling'em not to fidget and pay attention.
(16:28):
But that's what we're doing when we ask
year old horses exactly what we're doing.
And if you see some horses can,can do that, they're the freaks,
right?
They're the, they're the,they're this abnormal.
From a neuroscience pointof view, they're abnormal.
Right?
And really their emotional andpsychological being has to be able to do
(16:51):
that to pay attention in those situations.
And so that makes that ratio of horsesto those that can do it even smaller.
What happens to those other horses?
That's kind of wastage that's kind ofthought of is, well, that's the price
you pay to get to the top of the.
(17:11):
Top of the pyramid,
that was eight year olds thatcan sit in college lectures.
Yes.
Mm. Exactly.
So for everyone who's listening andwatching, you got a lot of people who
listen to this podcast who are startingtheir own horses or who are part of the
starting of their own horses and acrossdifferent disciplines In the horse world,
everyone has a different age benchmark.
Right?
So.
(17:32):
More show jumping and moreof the Olympic disciplines.
We start them later.
We don't, we don't do futurities at thatlevel, but then you look at the race horse
industry, those horses are racing big, bigindustry races at very, very young ages.
So can you give some.
Could you give some benchmarksto everybody about when,
when is that frontal lobe?
When when can we expect to have a healthylevel of attention from a young horse?
(17:56):
Right?
So this doesn't mean you don't handleyour horse when they're a 2-year-old.
Mm-hmm.
But what we need to dois then realize that.
Their attention has a limitedcapacity, so you work with that.
So you could do very small,short, brief periods, which
(18:17):
actually works better mm-hmm.
Than long, drawn out repetitions.
But that long, drawn out repetitionthat requires long periods of attention.
We are often dealing with a brainthat's not capable of doing that
yet we're asking it and, and whenwe don't get it, we become more.
Controlling to try to force it.
(18:40):
And what happens is you make changesin the neurochemistry and you become,
the horses become more sympatheticallyaroused, and they'll either check out
on you, they can become aggravatedor worse, yet they get confused,
more sympathetically aroused.
Now you're seeing behaviors that you don'tnecessarily want, and so why would you.
(19:00):
Push the horse into that positionto behave in that way when you can
work with the nervous system mm-hmm.
And, and avoid that altogether becausethat you're just gonna have to go back
and fix those fights that you put inthere, uh, in the, in the long run.
(19:24):
Or you're gonna end up inthis back and forth contest.
The horse, I think it was Ray Hunt thatsaid, you don't wanna contest your horse.
Yes.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Ray also said the slower yougo, the faster you learn.
Well, he had a a pretty good handle on
Yeah.
On this.
So when you talk about, 'causeI'm picturing in my mind.
(19:46):
Okay, so you're asking a young horse.
To go beyond their, theirneurological capacity.
Right.
And then they have either in thosesituations where maybe that person's
not neuro like this, they're not, theirtraining is not neuroscience informed.
Right?
They don't understand how the brain works.
So they're expectingthat three-year-old to
(20:08):
give them a long training session.
So that horse has acouple of options, right?
They can either, theycan either fight back.
Because they'll become moresympathetically aroused.
So Fight or flight.
Fight or flight.
So, yeah.
So fight is an option.
Most, all the time the horseis gonna take flight, right?
That's their choice.
That's their number onechoice for the most part.
(20:30):
Yeah.
Or they'll fight back, or, this isfrom the sounds of it, this is the
birth of, or what I would call the,the makings of learned helplessness.
Yeah.
I, if you try something and you can'tescape the pain, so you might wanna go to.
Flight first, and this canbe, uh, emotional pain.
(20:50):
This could be psychological pain.
It doesn't have to be physical pain.
Uh, but if we take flight away fromyou, then the horse may turn to fight.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
If the horse doesn't turn to those twooptions, oftentimes what they'll do is,
is what's called a parasympathetic crash.
They'll just check out totally.
(21:13):
And they can go to a freeze response.
Um, a true freeze responseis humans feel it too.
You know, if somebody assaults you andyou, they're too big for you to fight.
Mm-hmm.
And you can't run away,they're holding onto you.
Oftentimes you say something horrendousis gonna happen to me so horrendous
(21:33):
that I don't want to be there for it.
And you check out, right.
You disassociate
right.
So disassociation is somethingwe see in people and in horses.
Absolutely.
It's the way we protect ourselves.
So can you make a horse smarterand can you make a horse dumber?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
(21:54):
With any mammal, I could take them andput them in an environment, one where
they feel safe, uh, where they're, um.
Able to get motivated, getdopamine on their own with
an internal locus of control.
They may run a maze, they may havetreadmills, um, but they're with
(22:15):
other animals of their species.
And if after six months I were to lookat those brains, I would find all kinds
of axonal connections and growth likea tree arbor rising growing limbs.
I could take the same animals.
And I could isolate them fromother animals, just put them
(22:37):
in their own pen without any.
Other stimuli and they'refed, they're taken care of.
They're fed.
Their primary needs are,quote, are met, met.
But if I look at those brainsafter six months, I'll find
none of that arborization.
It's like I've gone in withshears and trimmed off limbs
(22:59):
and branch, I've done pruning.
Mm-hmm.
In fact, the they, it'sreferred to as axonal pruning.
And I can end up with a brain thatdoesn't have those same connections,
and I could do even worse.
I could totally isolate theanimal like in a cinder block.
Um, enclosure, no other animals around.
(23:22):
This would be a sensory deprivation box.
And we, we have those in the horse world,they're called box stalls, where the
nature is to be able to use your sensesto see onto the horizon at long distances.
Well, I'll become nearsighted if theonly messages my eyes are receiving
are the sides of the, of the stall.
(23:44):
If I'm not moving around, then my motorstrip's not gonna function the same way.
If somebody shaves myvibra, which are tactile.
Sensors.
We know all those whiskers, right?
Right.
Mayors shouldn't have whiskers, right?
So that's a cosmetic,you know, human deal.
(24:05):
But if you're not, over time, notreceiving messages down those vibra
and into your brain, which tellyou where you are in space, then.
Once the brain doesn't receiveinformation, it becomes
less effective once it does.
So when those hairs grow back, ifyou've cut them for a long period of
(24:27):
time, you've sort of silenced a sense.
I mean, think about that.
Here's a sense that needs to get theirbrain, and you've made it silent.
They use those to explore with, ifI chopped off your fingers, right?
Yeah.
Chopped off the fingersof a blind pianist, right?
Oh
yeah.
So they are sensory creatures.
(24:48):
That's the way to think of thehorse is that they're sensing things
that you absolutely cannot imagine.
You as humans, we use our own brainas sort of, uh, uh, comparison,
and that makes sense because that'sthe only kind of brain you have.
You have a human brain, you know,you haven't been studying brains
(25:09):
all along, and so you use that.
But if you stop and think of your worldand think of, uh, their world, they
have almost a 340 degree panoramic view.
They see the world out there, andthose eyes are sensitive to motion.
So any little motion outthere gets picked up quickly.
(25:32):
And a predator shouldbe designed like that.
When it gets dark, they can seewhen you're looking, trying to look
in the dark 'cause they have rods.
And rods bring in morelight, we have more cones.
So color and clarity for us is,is, and if we look straight ahead,
(25:55):
that's what we'll see for them.
The world's blurry and it doesn'thave the same colors in it.
Yep.
Um, and they're seeing thingsthat you can't see because they're
seeing back behind their head.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Um, and you can go over it each andevery sense, their sense of smell.
(26:17):
You took a look at thegiant olfactory bulbs
Yes.
Of horses and saw how large those are.
And, and you can tell how importantsomething is in a brain by either
its its location or its size.
Mm-hmm.
Big things are a cerebellumand olfactory bulbs.
(26:37):
Olfactory bulbs are smell, so whenthey're sniffing that saddle pad,
they're not sniffing the saddle pad.
They could smell that far away.
They're likely rubbing their vibra on it.
Then using those prehensile lips.
To investigate and maybe evenholding it in their teeth a little
bit to, to investigate, but they'recertainly not smelling it that
(27:01):
they had, that they had thaton lockdown way before you even
put the saddle pad near them.
Absolutely.
Something that you said to me thatreally blew my mind was when we put
horses in box dolls and we, we deprivethem of the natural sensory information
that they need, that their sp thattheir species has evolved from, that
they can actually become nearsighted.
(27:21):
And that makes sense.
You can do this with.
Cats, they've done thiswith all kinds of mammals.
When you take away a s sense and itdoesn't register in the brain anymore,
those neurons don't necessarily go fallow.
Just other areas of the brain start touse them, so they're no longer available.
So when we take, so, I mean, andour regulatory bodies have now
(27:43):
made it, I, you know, illegal forus to, to clip the Vibra, but I
grew up clipping Whiskers or Vibra.
Like all throughout my junior yearsas a rider, so it now I think, oh
well we started to see, you know,horses bump into things or they go,
oh, you know, so and so horse likecut their face again in the stall.
(28:05):
Well, it's because we've taken away.
It's like not giving someonewho can't, like not giving,
taking someone's glasses away.
Right.
There's
fii are in blind spots.
Right.
So that nail in the manger thatthey may have sensed previously.
Now we get increased liptrauma or eye trauma.
And you're right, you put 'emin a unfamiliar round pen and
(28:25):
they're banging their face.
Watch 'em use those vibrawith an electric fence.
They know exactly how closethey can, they do, they can get.
So those are such fascinating structures.
The military uses, uh, something similarfor robots where they use sensors to tell
(28:46):
the robot where they are in space and.
Technology is built on our horses.
Incredible sense.
That's the model.
Yeah.
We decide we're gonna trim it offbecause we don't think it looked,
we don't like way cosmetically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So something that happened yesterday andit was a, it was so fascinating because
(29:07):
throughout this studying with you.
I've learned a lot about how horsessee and how they register and gain
information from the depth andlike the dimensions of things.
And because their is are not like ours,they don't collect that data through
their, is the same way that we do.
So yesterday when I was crossingbridges with my mare, I had this.
(29:31):
Light bulb moment because she actuallyas an appaloosa, she actually has,
you know, she's, she's always gonna,well, in her case back, um, supported
by Dr. Dennis Brooks, who we love.
We would do a shout outfor Dr. Dennis Brooks.
He's helped me understand how lady seesand how her eyesight as an appaloosa
(29:51):
has a few more challenges to it.
So she's had some uveitisflareups, she's had some ulcers.
So she actually has to work harder.
And I've now, you and Dennis havebrought this together for me to
understand that she moves a lot, soshe'll move her head around a lot.
And I used to interpret that as notdefiance, but she's quite an opinionated
(30:14):
horse and so she'll often act quite.
Strongly if she doesn't feel safe.
And yesterday I noticed thatwe would come to a bridge.
She needs to look at it.
Not only does she need to drop herhead down, which some of us think our
horses are smelling the ground, but nowthat I understand the way that horses
smell, they're not smelling the ground.
(30:34):
They smelled it from when youwere walking up to the trailer.
What they're doing is they'reunderstanding where the ledge
of that, you know, the, thegradient of that, of that ramp.
But what she was doing yesterdaytotally clicked for me.
She was actually looking likeshe was looking behind, but
actually knowing that she has.
(30:54):
She doesn't have perfectvision, but she doesn't have
completely compromised vision.
I actually think that what she wastrying to do is she was trying to
really take in all of the dimensionsof that bridge because she needs extra
information because she doesn't seeas well as maybe my other horse guano.
Absolutely.
You know, the Cary muscles in their,in their eyes are, are weaker and
(31:16):
it takes them a while to adjustright in front, uh, where the.
The vision from the two eyesmeet, they have binocular vision.
That's their depth perception.
So oftentimes they'll put their head downto fall within that range of binocular
vision, where are you likely to see it?
Crossing a stream, going over a bridge.
(31:38):
Sometimes we take that away from 'em.
You know, if you're in a steeple chaseand you hold their head in a position,
they're not able to put their head in.
In a way that keeps it within binocularvision, you go to the back of the
trailer, oftentimes they'll put theirhead down, especially if it's one of
those step up trailers, because theywanna see how high they need to step.
If we don't want their head down and weyank it up and take vision away from them,
(32:01):
they're blindly going onto that trailer.
They bang their legs becausethey don't know how high to step.
And now, where did this trailerloading problem come from?
Well, we took away a sense whenthey would've helped us to.
To climb a board, they totallyrelied on us, and I think we
need to take responsibilityfor the times that we cause.
(32:26):
Our horses difficulty when we ask themto do things they're not capable of
when we remove one of their senses.
Yes.
Yes.
So it made me think of blinders ina completely new way when I thought
about horses, because horses actually,and the more and more I observe
lady, the more and more I realizethat she really has to work to like
(32:47):
take in a lot of visual information.
And she might takelonger to do that, right?
She's older and she doeshave compromised vision, so.
If I yank her head up becauseI think that she's not paying
attention to what I want her to do.
And what, what reallysolidified that after?
'cause I was, I had some dwell timeafter my ride yesterday was, and we're
(33:09):
gonna talk about dwell time was um.
When I was at Craig Cameron's and shedid her first Cowboy Challenge course,
he had us, and this is again wherethe Cowboy Wisdom meets the science.
He was like, I want you to walk bothsides, circles around every obstacle.
I don't want you to go over it.
I just want you to circle aroundit and really let your horses get.
(33:30):
Like get a look at every aspect, everycorner of that bridge or that pedestal
or whatever it was that we were doing.
He had us circle once, circle acouple times around one way and
then the other, and then leave,and then go look at another, go
look another part of the course.
So then when we went and actually didthe course, the horses had no problem.
(33:52):
Because he had, he had really set us upto like introduce each of the obstacles.
And I thought that was fascinating,understanding the science now, because
what he's doing is he's allowingthe horse to take in information on
the height, the depth, the dimensionof everything that we're doing.
And then I think, how many timeshave I jumped courses on horses?
How many times have I, you know,gone into new environments?
(34:14):
And the horses don't get anychance to take in any information.
They're just asked to go straight.
Which is actually not, and theirhead has to be straight, but that's
not necessarily how they see.
Providing them with informationand giving them time to process
the information is so important.
You know, you looked at it.
And making the assumption thatinformation's being processed.
(34:38):
But if they're onto the next thing, nowyou have more competing information coming
into the brain before the brain has timeto process what they've been exposed to.
And then we do it again, and then we doit again, and the the horse is left with
fragments to put together themselvesbecause they haven't had the opportunity
to consolidate that and start to lockthat information away accurately.
(35:04):
When we say neurons that fire together,wire together, can you explain what
that means and the science behind it?
Absolutely.
Uh, without getting too sciencey.
Mm-hmm.
Because really, uh, that'snot what I, I ever want to do.
I want to give information thathas real world application.
(35:25):
You can learn some bigwords, but, uh, I want to.
Share information that peoplecan take back to their horse.
And I always say, you know, I'm notmaking this up, just ask your horse.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
So this is how this works.
You have, you and your horse have a,a neurotransmitter called glutamate.
(35:48):
It's the major excitatory neurotransmitterin your system and in your horses.
So if you move your right arm,you're firing glutamate neurons
all the way up to your left motor.
Cortex.
So if we do something new, thenwe are firing a new pattern.
(36:08):
Glu glutamatergic neurons will fire in anew pattern if we're doing something new.
If we do it a second time,then we're sending information
down that same new pathway.
We do it, uh, quite a few times.
What happens is, and here's your $10word for the day, oligodendrocytes
(36:29):
will arrive on the scene.
They get excited by this firingand will begin to wrap that.
As we had discussed earlier,that neuron in myelin.
So by firing neurons that firetogether get wired together and
that starts out like a little feederroad and then you keep working that.
(36:52):
And I don't mean by rote.
Drilling, and we'll talkabout why that doesn't work.
But over time you keep firing thatnew pattern of neurons and you're
essentially paving a highway.
You start out like a, a footpath and thena small country road, and then you get
the mile in and now it becomes a highway.
(37:12):
And information very easily, rapidly,quickly follows that new highway.
So getting back to what you had asked.
Way back in the, in this podcast was, youknow, can you make your horse smarter?
You can certainly wire the brain.
Mm-hmm.
And you can rewire these pathwaysand you can take existing neuro
(37:37):
networks and wire them together.
So it's amazing how.
Smart your horse can get andhow much they want to learn.
If we provide them with a foundation andwe provide them with the architecture
in their brain, and that's, that'syou learning to almost like a welder,
(37:59):
learning to go in and wire thoseconnections that you, that you want.
But if you have your horse in thewrong state, then those messages are
not gonna take your new feeder road.
They're gonna go to areas of the brain.
Like the amygdala, an area ofthe brain associated with fear.
So if you are forcing things tohappen, you're sending more of
(38:21):
those messages, not down the,the highway that you're creating.
You're sending them to another area ofthe brain that's relates to fear, and
now you're gonna get fear responsesand there's no way that pattern of
neurons is gonna fire when they're.
Under the influence of cortisoland NN neurotransmitters we
(38:43):
haven't talked about yet.
Norepinephrine, uh, that willsend them a different way.
And if they're afraid and youkeep training, you're gonna train
that fear right into the task thatyou're, you're trying to accomplish.
And there's not a lot oflearning that's gonna take place.
You're gonna deal withemotional side effects.
(39:04):
Yes.
And you put 'em in there.
You put 'em in there.
Not your horse.
Your your horse is really prettymuch your, your construction project
when we're talking about the brain.
So something that I learnedfrom you is that the amygdala
is also attached to memory.
(39:26):
So fear, and this makes sense froman evolutionary point of view.
The fear part of the brain is attachedto the memory part of the brain.
So if we train, like we, you can seehow quickly we get into trouble if
we use fear-based training becausethose horses, those we, we wire or
we pave the wrong highways, right?
(39:48):
That we want to be paving highways thathave positive association that have.
The right chemicals associated with them.
I want you to explain the sciencebehind repaving 'cause this is something
that I've had, that I've done withmy mare, and your work helped me
understand this a hundred to one ratio.
(40:11):
That when you have a horse that has beentraumatized or you have a horse that's
experienced a lot of fear-based trainingor you have a, you have a horse that's
been in a state of self preservationfor a large part of their life, you have
highways that you have to very slowly,and the one of the only things that
you really have to work with is time.
(40:32):
'cause time.
Is it like the only way to do101 if you're also honoring
the neuroscience of learning?
Dwell time.
The only thing that's gonna repairthat those, those maybe less supportive
highways in their brain is time.
Right.
So can you explain how we rewireand this a hundred to one ratio and
(40:55):
the a hundred to one ratio isnot always a hundred to one.
Right?
But what you're talkingabout is a rehab horse.
Mm-hmm.
Basically, and to rehab that horse, wemay need a hundred good experiences to
make up for the one bad, the one bad.
So first of all, let's talk about thearchitecture in the brain where the
(41:16):
amygdala, which is, uh, Latin for almond,because early neuroanatomist thought it
looked like an alman, and it, it actually.
Is at the tip of the hippocampus Greekfor seahorse because it looks like that.
So our almond is attached to ourseahorse and our seahorse iss memory.
(41:37):
The hippocampus is memory.
So if I'm a Vietnam veteran and I feelI'm gonna die and I see some horrendous
things, then my amygdala is gonnasupercharge my memory by hippocampus.
Now it.
When it works efficiently,things that are gonna harm us.
We remember those, so we don'tput ourself in harm's way.
(42:00):
But if I supercharge that amygdala,I'm ending up with a memory,
I can now no longer forget.
Mm. So if I'm the Vietnam vet walkingon the beach in the hot sand and
the palm fronds are blowing in thewind and the news helicopter flies
over, now I am right back in Vietnam.
(42:21):
Mm.
You know, not somethinglike it somatically.
My system is responding as if I were okay.
Now let me use the example of,of my horse comet that I needed
a lot of good experiences.
To get, to be able to make progress.
(42:42):
So Comet was a, a beautiful painthorse running around in a herd with a
lot of other horses on a big acreage.
Comet's owner could not catch her.
So he and his friends d devised a a shoot.
And so they put up panelsto, to create a shoot.
(43:02):
They ran around till she was tired.
Finally, she chose the, the shoot.
They, they ran her to the end of theshoot and closed her in a small pen.
What we've got going on now is, is fighthas been, uh, flight has been removed.
That was her first choice.
Just run away.
Mm-hmm.
But now she can't.
She's in a small pen.
He went in and she started to rear up.
(43:23):
He got frightened, so he got a whip, andas she reared up, he would whip at her.
So she began to paw athim and it scared him.
Um, he got out of the, the pen andhe, on his way out, he punched her.
And I said, what, what wereyou teaching her there?
That's for all the times I'vetried to catch her and for all
(43:44):
this, the crap that she's given me.
So in terms.
Punishment plays no role.
There's no study out therethat shows punishment as an
effective learning strategy.
Um, so I bought Cometand got her out of there.
And whenever a human came closeto her, she would rear and paw.
(44:06):
So she was flooded withuh, a neurochemical called
norepinephrine, highly aroused.
She was immediately in fight or flight.
Immediately and, and fight.
She couldn't help this becausethose neurons wired together.
So any sense that she was in dangersent the messages down that pathway.
(44:28):
I like to call this thesignal to noise ratio, right?
The signal is our relevant informationand our noise is irrelevant
information, and if she's so fearful,she can never hear my signal.
She's just too concernedwith all the noise around.
So my job is not necessarily to train.
(44:52):
It's to start those good experiences.
So it took me a long time to creeptowards her, her pen, to creep towards
the round pen, and she'd start to getaroused and start to move and start to to
run and then get in the back of the pen.
And I knew she was ready togo up and start this rearing.
This is built in.
(45:12):
This is not a conscious decision.
This is not a bad horsedeciding to do this.
This is where the messages are gonna gowhen we're in that emotional s. State.
Mm-hmm.
So over time, I was able to developsome bit of a, of a relationship, but
I still had to approach her from theside, not head on, because that's the
(45:36):
trigger that would cause this problem.
Now I have to change the camera chemistry.
I'm, I'm draining off thenorepinephrine and I have to find a way.
We need motivation for learning,attention, safety, and motivation.
So I needed her feeling safe.
I needed her attention.
That was no problem.
She was really focused onanything that was a threat.
(45:59):
But I had to find dopamine.
And to get dopamine, oftentimesyou have to move towards something.
Dopamine is the motivating.
Dopamine
is the neurotransmitter that'srelated to reward and movement.
Nature may have set it up that way.
You have to move to a new pasture.
You have to move and look overthe hill so you can see if there
(46:19):
are other mares over there.
What, whatever.
So, and people with Parkinson'sdisease who have less dopamine, it's
a neurodegenerative disease wherethey have less dopamine on board.
Their movement's affected, they shuffle.
Right,
right.
So movement and rewardare, are closely tied.
(46:40):
So if I were to introduce somethingto Calmed that came from the out
side externally and caused herto just stand and tolerate what I
was presenting, she would rear, Iknew that that pathway would fire.
I had to develop some curiosity,so I held things away from her,
(47:01):
so she would have to investigate.
Now she's moving toward, and then whenshe's able to say, okay, that's safe.
She gets more serotonin, she gets less.
No epinephrine, serotoninis emotional balance, right?
Serotonin is, is related to all of,most of all of our antidepressants.
When you get low serotonin,you get selective.
(47:24):
Serotonin reuptake inhibitorslike, like, uh, Prozac.
Mm-hmm.
So she was becoming moreemotionally balanced.
I was reducing the noise and she startedto become curious once that was happening
and she felt safe enough to explore.
She came out of her shell,but I had to give her small
successes, small uh, releases.
(47:48):
And I want to be, uh, clear on this point.
A release is when you take the cueoff, when you take the pressure off.
Mm-hmm.
Relief is when yourhorse actually feels it.
Sometimes you can release, butif your horse doesn't feel it,
they're not getting the reward,
(48:09):
they're not getting thechemicals they need.
Right.
To learn.
Right.
So the three, this is so important,I wanna really reinforce this.
The three.
Fundamental ingredientsfor horses to learn.
And humans.
And humans to learn.
Yes.
And this is important for everybody.
There's a lot of examples, and I evenhave a few myself of when I didn't
(48:30):
have these three in my learningin, in my horsemanship journey and
I didn't learn, and then I get, mytrainers would get frustrated with me.
But if we don't feel safe,if we don't have motivation.
And the third one is attention,if we don't have our attention.
So attention is norepinephrine.
Yes.
Okay.
Well actually, uh, attentionis acetylcholine, right?
(48:54):
Right.
Uh, but norepinephrine isour neurochemical of arousal.
Right?
And this is a, this is a key point,is if we are afraid of norepinephrine
and we start to see our horse getsympathetically aroused, and we say,
oh, they're out of their comfort zone.
You know, I, this is not a good thing.
(49:16):
I don't want you to think thata horse has to just stay in that
comfortable homeostatic rangebecause learning's not optimum there.
Right.
You need to be challenged.
Right.
Kids with their head down on theback of the, the desk may feel safe
in the classroom sleeping right.
Uh, and they may have foundsomething else motivating.
(49:37):
Mm-hmm.
But, but you don't havetheir, their attention, so you
need that level of arousal.
People I think, have tended to lookat the autonomic nervous system.
Sympathetic nervous system.
Parasympathetic nervous system.
Sympathetic nervoussystem, fight or flight.
(49:58):
Fight.
Parasympathetic.
Parasympathetic is rest anddigest, but there's a balance.
One's not good.
One's not bad.
Mm. We need the sympatheticnervous system to learn.
We have to be aroused enough to focus ourattention and we get our biggest dopamine
hits with that high level of arousal.
Yes.
(50:19):
If you go too far, the idea isyou have to let the horse reset
and come back down before yougo back and apply more pressure.
Vital.
Well, and this learning from you hasmade me realize, I used to think,
and I think a lot of the way that.
The sympathetic and this parasympatheticnervous systems, or on and autonom nervous
system has been presented visually.
(50:40):
It's like a bubble overhere and a bubble over here.
But in actual fact, it's more likea Venn diagram where there's a
crossover and there's this beautiful,optimal, um, area of learning.
Also there could be, like we talkedabout already, the parasympathetic crash.
So when a horse freezes orgoes into learned helplessness,
(51:01):
that is parasympathetic crash.
That is not there.
That's, that's not sympathetic.
That's full parasympathetic crash.
So there are bad stages there.
There's also like a, there's a toofar in the parasympathetic as well.
Wow.
Which is so important.
So, right.
So freeze.
Right.
The freeze response is aparasympathetic response.
(51:21):
Your heart rate decreases.
You feel like you're gonna faintwhen it happens with humans.
It's a vasal, vagal type of response.
So you can't look.
Sex is sympathetic.
Play is sympathetic.
Yeah.
A lot of good stuff happens up there
in the sympathetic nervous system, right?
So we can't think of itas like good and bad.
We have to think about it aswhat are you trying to achieve?
(51:45):
And we.
Homeostasis is where we spend,where we hopefully spend a lot
of time because that's, uh, thefundamentally a resting state, right?
Homeostasis is your, your biologicalbalance, where your heart rate is normal,
your respiratory rate is normal, andhomeostasis is really, this is a key
(52:09):
operative work term, self-regulationof your biological balance.
So when you come out of that with changingcircumstances, your ability to come back
down to, to homeostasis, self-regulating.
So it's up to us to optimize that system.
(52:31):
So when we take our horse outof homeostasis, we wanna show
them that there's a way downand it's highly rewarding.
To come back down into that homeostaticstate and they'll be hunting for it.
So this is what we'll use.
We get high arousal fora short amount of time.
(52:52):
That's where we get the optimum attention.
Acetylcholine.
That's where we have theright level of norepinephrine.
Yeah.
Right.
And all horses are different.
So you'd
be like, kind of like an orange.
'cause like if you were to think ofhomeostasis, homeostasis as green
and sympathetic or hyper arousal.
As red, right?
That it's kind of like this orange zone.
They're gradients, and the more timeyou spend in that middle gradient where
(53:17):
you kind of have a mix of hot waterand cold water, the more time you spend
there, the, it becomes harder to becomethreatened because that window opens and
you're used to swimming in those waters.
For example, if I never take my horseout of the arena, right then there.
(53:37):
Sort of window of what they willtolerate is very small, very narrow
homeostasis is I'm in the arena, soif I just come out one step, I may
now become sympathetically aroused.
So let's play with that.
Let's go a little bit down the trail.
Let see here.
A little worked up.
Let's make a couple circlesand maybe we'll come back.
(53:59):
Because if you say it's too windy,I can't do it with other horses, um,
you know, the leaves are blowing.
Whatever reason you start avoiding things.
Then once you're exposed to those,I mean, if you've never cantered and
your horse is never cantered withsomebody on their back, and then once
(54:21):
that happens, if they don't have.
Neuro exercises to help them becomecomfortable with that and put that
within their window of tolerance.
Then the, the potential for comingapart, it came out of nowhere.
Well, if we put you in the deepend and you've never swam in
the deep end, you'll panic.
So.
(54:42):
This actually.
So neuroscience can actually explainas we make the optimal window of
learning wider because we offer moreopportunities to learning new things.
Horses learn and they build apattern recognition that they
become sympathetically aroused, butthey have just the right amount of
norepinephrine and acetylcholine.
(55:03):
Right, which is attention and focus.
Yes.
Then they can come back down andreceive serotonin in homeostasis,
which is why we give them a rest.
We ask, we challenge, and then wecome back down to a place of rest
because serotonin is, is the emotionalbalance chemical, and they get that.
Homeostasis.
Right.
(55:23):
Got it.
So this is how neurosciencecan explain that.
When someone says, oh, they have a schoolmaster, or they have a, you know, that
really experienced ranch horse or whatI've experienced with my horses crossing
the country, having all these differentchallenges, they, they learn something
new, but they come back to homeostasis.
So they receive their serotonin andthen that window, that orange window.
(55:47):
Becomes bigger and bigger, wider
and wider and wider.
So their optimal learningbracket increases over time.
The importance of letting them comeback, the homeostasis when they're
at that high level, uh, when theyhave sympathetic arousal enough,
they're optimizing attention.
Acetylcholine, dopamine reward,uh, norepinephrine arousal.
(56:14):
That's where they're focusedin on the information.
Mm.
We need to come back to homeostasisbecause it's in the homeostatic
state that it gets consolidated,so they have to come back there.
That's their dwell time.
That's we're leaving them alonewith no external distractions.
(56:35):
Even when you go over ata boy and you slap on him.
The brain is having competingsignals coming in when it's
trying to consolidate information.
Basically, you wanna back away, giveyour horse space, get that licking
and chewing, and we know that thebrain is replaying that information.
How do we know that?
(56:56):
Well, we take a human being and we put'em in a functional MRI uh, tube, and,
and we are a functional MRI, by the way.
Is a neuroimaging device thatlooks at the brain in real time.
So if we put somebody in an MRIscanner and they do a task, maybe
(57:18):
it's a motor task, so they're usingtheir, let's say, if they're right
handed, they're like your horse.
It's, it's wired the same way.
They're using their right hand.
So their left motorstrip is, is lit up now.
They just lie after the task.
Still in that neuroimagingdevice, but we're still imaging.
(57:38):
What we'll see is the hippocampuswill light up memory and replay that
same pattern of neuronal firing,although the person's just laying flat.
Mm-hmm.
But the brain is stillreplaying that whole pathway.
If I leave them alone even longer,they start to associate with other
things that are related to that.
(57:59):
Oh, I've done something likethis before, or, yeah, this
reminds me of such and such.
Now we're creating a combining ofprevious information into our network.
Wow.
But I can ruin all this.
I could walk over to that scannerand say, how you doing in there?
And pat them on the leg and it goes blank.
So the idea is once you're exposed toinformation, you need that reflection.
(58:25):
You need that dwell time.
I mean, old time wa used to know that,you know, you, you hear it called dwell
time, but you need that to consolidatethe information when then your horse
starts blinking and licking and chewy.
That's why Martin says, let'sgo let him soak on that.
Absolutely.
Old cowboys had terms for it, right?
(58:46):
They did, but they had developedtheir understanding of the science
throughout, through just repetition.
Tons and thousands andthousands of horse horses.
But I've, I've literally heardMartin say, okay, let's let 'em
go soak on that for a minute.
And they leave them alone.
No stimulus.
We're not touching them.
They're not fussing overthem, they're not constrained.
Those horses just get to go literallysoak in all those chemicals.
(59:07):
You cannot the, if the hippocampusreplays something 20 times.
20 times faster and, and is replayingthe, the best that you can do at that.
If you kept drilling, you could notdo it as well as the hippocampus
because what'll happen is.
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