Short Wave - Inside the mysterious minds of horses

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

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

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Horses. Maybe it's because I was born in the year of the horse, according to the Chinese zodiac, but I've always been a bit obsessed with them. Their strength, beauty, and high emotional intelligence, which makes horses perfect companions for a neuroscientist like Janet Jones. I love all the horses that I work with. No, I'll take that back.

I love most of the horses that I work with. Janet has been riding since childhood and is now a horse trainer who has her own horse. This one horse has become her forever horse, a Dutch warm blood from Minnesota. They've been together for years. He approaches you immediately. He wants to know who you are and what you smell like and why you're there. And he's just really very curious. And when they met, she noticed he had this bright white diamond in the center of his forehead.

They reminded her of the North Star. Horses in general are like my compass, and so I decided to name him True North. Or True, for short. Now, Janet's relationship to True, and really to all the horses she's trained, has changed her life. And it inspired her to write a book about the cognition and behavior of horses. It's called A Horse's World, and there just aren't that many books like it. It's like there's a huge animal. hiding in plain sight, one who has aided human civilization more than any other animal.

Horses experience the world in a totally different way than we do. And yet, we ride them, we work with them, and so horses are perhaps the best example of an animal that can broaden or stretch the edges of our minds. So today on the show, inside the mind of one of the most majestic animals on Earth. Janet Jones explores the neuroscience of horses' brains, the motivations that drive their behaviors, and the neural connection that horses share with humans. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Shortwave, before we keep going, remember to follow our show. a little follow button, and you'll get little science treats in your trough, just like a horse, on the regular. New episodes drop every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Okay, Janet, so your book is fascinating, and I want to talk about one of the many differences you highlight between horse and human brains, and that is something called categorical perception. So as I understand it, in humans, our brains automatically organize things into groups. So if you see your friend put on an oversized thing with a zipper down the front, your brain goes jacket. That's a jacket.

That goes in the jacket category. And even if the jacket is on the floor, you still know that's a jacket. It won't hurt me. But horses, by comparison, they don't have this same level of categorical perception skills. They do not automatically sort things into categories to the same extent. And you saw this firsthand with your horse, True, and some fence panels that you came across. What happened there? When True was, oh, roughly four or five years old, we used to, after we worked in an arena for a while to cool off, we used to just go and walk around the ranch. So one day we were walking along out there, and there was an arena that was being built. way kind of off in the distance. And there were a whole bunch of steel fence panels that were piled up

out there. They were just all stacked up there. And these things are pretty big. They're usually about 10 feet long and about 5 feet high. And they're made up these steel poles. True immediately like basically told me with his body language, what is that? The next day, we went out to do the same thing, except this time we approached the fence panels from a different direction. And the minute that I walked out the barn, True snorted, blue, actually. And when a horse blows, it's loud enough to break your eardrums.

Oh. And I thought, well, that's odd, because, you know, He just saw these yesterday. And he had been very curious about them and a little bit spooked by them, but not terrified the way he was on this second day. Yeah. So you have to wonder, well, what is it? The horse already saw these fence panels yesterday. And now he's even more frightened of them today.

That would not seem to make sense. Right. That is their lack of categorical perception at work. And it kind of reminds me of the concept of beginner's mind. Like, everything is new. It's almost like horses have beginner's mind always for every object. Sort of. That's sort of it, exactly.

And you can see why they need that because they're prey animals. They're in danger from any unknown object. We aren't. That's so interesting. And you write about how this difference plays out in the real world. Because people have strong categorical perception, you say it does create a proclivity towards stereotypes and prejudices that we humans have to reject consciously, be aware of our biases. We sort people into groups. We do.

And horses, you're saying, don't do that. They can't do it automatically. They would have to be taught those categories. Wow. Our brains sort items into, or people, into group membership automatically, without our control, without our permission. often without our realization. And so that's why that can be really dangerous, is that our brains are telling us maybe about a particular group of people

or class of people as if every individual in that group is exactly the same. Horses, because they don't have automatic categorical perception, will treat each individual on their own and not consider. or whether they are part of a group or not. I want to talk, too, about when it comes to horse brains and how they're evolved, they can complete memory tasks years after they've learned them without getting a refresher. What kinds of studies have researchers done to test their long-term memory? Oh, horses have fantastic memories.

They're often quicker to form and more lasting. than human memories are. And in fact, one of the big problems that horse trainers have is a horse's ability to learn a bad habit in one trial, something that we did not intend to teach them. Better teach them right for the first time then. Exactly. So you have to be pretty precise about what you teach and don't teach. There was one study that did a really good job of looking at long-term memory in horses.

These researchers taught horses to use a conceptual rule that would help them identify different geometric shapes. And when the experiment was over, the horses never used that rule again, or nor did they ever see the different shapes again. It had no relevance to their lives. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You write about this in the book that the experimenters, they went back 10 years later, and showed one of the horses those same shapes, and that horse was 100% accurate, even after a decade? 100% accuracy. Perfect.

They're like elephants. They hold memories really, really well. And then when asked to apply that same rule, but to new shapes never, ever seen before, the accuracy rate dropped a little. It dropped to 98%. Okay. then now let's just compare that to human memory. I don't know if I want to. Recall accuracy in human adults

for information or rules we do not use is very poor. After one hour, most people remember only about 50% of what they have just learned. After 24 hours, our recall drops to 30%. Oh, no. And after one week, you and I can eke out an embarrassing 10% accuracy rate. The horses, meanwhile, remember useless information for a minimum of 10 years.

Wow. Another fact I learned from your book is that horses have more than 355-trial. trillion different facial expressions? Yes. What is that kind of magnitude of facial expression suggest about horse emotions? And I know that a lot more research would need to be done, but what do you think? We need to do a lot more research, definitely. I agree with you on that.

But I think that this suggests that horses experience more emotions than they've ever been credited with, and they very likely do not experience those emotions the way we do, the way we humans do. But in some fashion, these facial expressions do seem to be matched to the emotion that an animal would be expected to produce, given some particular event that occurred in his life. Yeah, it's like you're saying they have a range of emotions and expressions. equal to ours, and we need to respect that also those emotions can be different than ours. Yes. We don't want to project human emotions onto horses.

Exactly. We want to understand the full range of horse emotions. Absolutely. Let's actually end there with the connection between horses and humans. You write that humans and horses are the only cross-species pair known to share neural activation between brains. What is the neural connection that's happening there? Horses and humans have very similar skin receptor systems.

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

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

Wow. Janet Jones is the author of the new book A Horses World, which is out now. Thank you so much for talking to us on the ShorWave. Thank you so much, Emily. I really appreciate it, and I enjoyed every minute. If you like this episode, check out our one about octopuses and what their minds may tell us about aliens. It's in the Shortwave archive. Check it out.

And follow Shortwave, wherever you get your podcast so you never miss a science moment, and we can gallop off into the sunset together. This masterpiece was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts, and Hannah Glovena was the audio engineer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.