Pressing the Reset Button on Equestrianism
I recently attended the Horse Brain Science Clinic with Dr. Steve Peters (www.horsebrainscience.info). His perspective as a neuroscientist filled in a lot of detail for me and provided a few missing links. I’ve been asked to share a bit more about what I’ve learned which I attempt to do here, however, this is in no way a replacement for taking the class yourself if you can, reading his new book slated to come out this fall, and listening to the many interviews (on podcasts and otherwise) he has given. And if you are wondering, Dr. Peters came across not only as a brilliant scientist but a true horseman and generous teacher.
Please note:
It’s important to see my takeaways in the context of what I already do (which I described here.) Also, a disclaimer, I am not a neuroscientist and may have gotten a detail wrong here, if so, please do let me know and I will correct it.
Let’s start with the obvious. Spoiler alert: the horse’s brain is much bigger than a walnut. It’s close to 2 lbs, and their cerebellum, the brain’s center for fine motor movement, is, relatively speaking, larger than ours. So are, btw., their olfactory bulbs, which means their sense of smell is much, much better than ours. It’s also the only of the senses that doesn’t need to go through the thalamus to be processed.
But I suppose I need to start with what was for me the most startling and slightly haunting visual of the entire class.
You are *literally* either growing or shrinking your horse’s brain by how you and other humans in his life interact with him and by how he lives.
During the dissection, we were able to compare the healthy-looking brain of an approximately 5-yo horse to that of a somewhat atrophied-looking one of an approx. 15-yo horse. Dr. Peter’s explained that lack of stimulus, for example through spending a lot of time in a stall, could be a contributing factor. It’s one thing to abstractly know that dendrites grow when learning happens, but to see the difference in an actual brain in which they have grown and one in which they had been pruned back (or never developed) elicited a visceral response in me.
So when we work with the nervous system of the horse, we are looking to shape the horse’s brain in search of self-regulation which ultimately leads to adaptability. That’s a different approach than behavioralism which shapes behavior in search of compliance.
Which brings us to another phrase I find very helpful: internal locus of control. Warwick Schiller (and others) call that: You are not controlling the horse; the horse is controlling himself. Most of us, including myself, where initially taught some version of dominance horsemanship – in and out of the saddle. I remember my first clinic with Andrew Murphey. I was on a stiff little pony and trying very hard to keep the pony’s head down. What kind of dressage rider, let alone trainer, wants to be seen on a horse with their nose straight up… And Andrew said to me right away: “A rider as good as you does not need to pull the horse’s head down. They don’t learn if you force it with the reins.” (Now, I wasn’t a very good rider at the time, he just says that to butter you up so there’s a better chance you might listen to what he has to offer. It worked… ;)) But my path to dressage that’s worth the name began right there. Self-carriage ultimately is an internal locus of control. The same applies to your horse participating in all the joint activities. If they require chains over the nose, yanking, short lead ropes held by tightly clenched fists… that’s an external locus of control.
We need to slow the hell down. Waaaaaay down. So much that my clients have been asking me if they’re ever going to get that saddle on the horse. (Yes, fear not!) Slow is fast. Not because horses are slow or dumb, on the contrary! But so that we can wire in the stuff we want into their brains, not the stuff we inadvertently create by stressing them. We need to give them the opportunity to explore and make sense of things for their nervous system, not ours. We need to be present and let them know that we notice when they’re concerned.
And that was one of the missing links for me. I’m working with a horse who had before the age of 3 learned to pull away on the lunge by running straight out. He still does this several years and several trainers (including myself) later. I didn’t understand why. I went back to fill in all the steps that I could identify as missing, I set him up with a nice and balanced trot yet no change in behavior. Under saddle he canters quietly. I understand now that because he likely perceived something during the initial incident as threatening, he now has a neurochemical superhighway in his brain that he has no choice but defaulting to. And it gets reenforced every time it happens again. Now I know what I need to do for 150 times or so to create a new positive experience and thereby new neural pathway that can become the new default… But the old path will always be there; that’s why we need to be so much more careful and deliberate about the brains we want to shape in our horses.
Also, fun fact, up until about age 4-5 in horses, neural pathways that get used a lot get myelinated. Myelination is like an insulation wrapped around neurons that makes the transmission of information much faster: From 2 miles per hour on an unmyelinated neuron to 200 mph on a myelinated one.
Just like our own brain is asking us at all times: Am I safe? and responding with a nervous system state it deems appropriate, the horse is doing the same. He or she is constantly, especially in the beginning or in new situation asking us: Am I safe? Now we can say something like: you’re silly, that’s just fly spray, or that’s just the neighbor’s cow etc. Or. We can respond in a way that makes sense to them. Stop! Let them investigate on their terms. Notice the first little bit of concern. And wait for the lick and chew. This is not a cowboy thing. I repeat: wait for the lick and chew. If their brain answered the ”Am I safe?” question with “maybe” or “no,” they are experiencing sympathetic arousal (fight or flight, typically). If they are allowed to reset, i.e., let them come to the conclusion that they are safe after all, their heart rate will slow again, their arterial blood pressure will drop and parasympathetic projection from the 9th cranial nerve will activate their salivary gland again (amongst other things). That’s when the lick and chew occurs.
Horses do this all the time naturally, but in training situations, when they are stressed and have not been allowed to self-regulate due to additional stressors/asks being added too quickly, it can take a very, very long time for the first lick and chew. This will get faster and faster until it’s automatic even in more stressful or unknown situations.
In this context, Dr. Peter’s makes the distinction between pressure and release and pressure and relief. Release is when we give, relief is when they show us that they’ve received the release as a relief (i.e. lick and chew).
Dr. Peters spent a good amount of time talking about neurotransmitters, including dopamine, the one that’s associated with a feel-good reward (also known for keeping us hooked to social media for the likes). One that came up quite often that I was not familiar with is norepinephrine. This one is associated with arousal. A little bit is totally okay as for learning, we need three things: safety, attention, and motivation. If you’re too relaxed and sleepy or stressed about possibly getting killed, you’re not in a position to learn well. The sweet spot is in between.
Trigger-stacking occurs when a horse is not allowed to reset after each stressor, no matter how minor it may seem to us. This means that the horse’s little concern about the fly spay was ignored, then he raised his head a little when you put the saddle on, then the bridle, then there’s a male turkey strutting his stuff and the list goes on… initially it may seem that the horse is okay with everything, but if there is no reset, each trigger, or stressor, builds on top of the previous one until the horse “explodes out of nowhere.” Ask the client I helped with her perfect new horse who reared up and flipped over at the mounting block. Look up Warwick Schiller’s famous 13th rabbit story. Dr. Peter’s would think of it as more and more norepinephrine hitting its receptors in the horse’s brain, increasing the arousal chemically on a cellular level. But here’s the amazing thing: for horses who get to be super good at the reset, their norepinephrine receptors start dropping off. This means that even if they get aroused, it won’t affect them in the same way. Not only can they learn to reset quicker and more effectively, they don’t even get as aroused.
There is also research that shows that dwell time, time spent not practicing but letting the brain work on something new uninterrupted, is immensely important for learning. We’ve probably/hopefully all have had the experience that our horse had “practiced” during their days off, coming back offering a more skilled version of a particular task. The ratio of training session to time off is also going to be a hard sell for some folks. While it of course all depends on the particular horse and situation, Dr. Peters cited a human study. Medical students were asked whether they wanted to learn a particular brain surgery technique in 8 hours in one day or in 2 hours a week split over a month. They wanted it all in day (typical human.) They were split into two groups, and then tested on this surgery technique. The 8 hours in a day group barely remembered the technique and their work was sloppy even though they received it in the delivery method they preferred, whereas the 8 hours over one month group performed much better with better technique. You all can contemplate what that might mean for training our horses.
A study I had previously read about (not one Dr. Peters quoted) concluded that horses learned best if a new task was worked on for two minutes followed by a two-minute break. I’ve had clients getting legit anxiety attacks by the thought of just having to do nothing for two minutes in their precious lesson or ride (or life). Now think of the implications of suggesting giving the horse even more time.
Oh and also, if your horse is learning something new and has done it well, patting him really hard on the neck is interrupting the replay the brain is doing. He needs to be left alone for a bit. If you want to do something nice / reinforcing, you can scratch his withers.
Learning requires repetition but not drilling. (The Jane Pike Joyride program is very helpful if you want to learn/relearn anything related to your riding.) However, if a stimulus is traumatic, one time is enough to create a lasting neural pathway. Horses also have a place in the brain into which particularly threatening visual stimuli go directly and another one for auditory stimuli, bypassing the “relay station,” the thalamus. If you have ever been dislodged by (or barely hung onto) a spin and bolt, you’ve likely experienced your horse utilizing this special survival mechanism. Also, their amygdala (associated with fear) sits right next to the hippocampus (associated with memory). Not a bad set up for a prey animal’s survival.
I want to stress again that this is not a summary of the class. This is a summary of only some of things that stood out to me based on my experiences. There was so much more: from looking at learned helplessness to BDNF and neuroplasticity to the HPA axis. Overall, I realized very clearly that structurally, things need to drastically change. Now even owners and trainers who want to do things differently for their horses struggle to find the set up to do so, whether that’s old style barns with stalls (even if they have chandeliers) with limited, smallish turnouts for one horse only – preventing touch, only two or three feedings per day, or training fees by sessions that are expected to take up a certain pre-determined amount of time.
So if anyone wants to brainstorm system change, let’s have coffee and chat!
