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Emily Kwong
You're listening to Short Wave 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.
Janet Jones
I love all the horses that I work with. No, I, I'll take that back. I love most of the horses that I work with.
Emily Kwong
Janet has been riding since childhood and is now a horse trainer who has her own horse. This one horse has become her forever horse, a Dutch warmblood from Minnesota. They've been together for years.
Janet Jones
He approaches you immediately. He wants to know, you know, who you are and what you smell like and why you're there. And he's, he's just really very curious.
Emily Kwong
And when they met, she noticed he had this bright white diamond in the center of his forehead. It reminded her of the North Star.
Janet Jones
Horses in general are like my compass. And so I decided to name him True north, or True for short.
Emily Kwong
Now, Janet's relationship to Tru 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.
Janet Jones
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.
Emily Kwong
So today on the show Inside the Mind of one of the most majestic animals on Earth, Janet Jones explores the neuroscience of horses brains, the motivations that drive their behaviors, and the neural connection that horses share with humans. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from npr.
Announcer
Support for NPR comes from IBM. On Smart talks with IBM, host Malcolm Gladwell speaks with leaders who are pushing the boundaries of AI and technology in partnership with IBM. Hello.
Janet Jones
Hello, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM I sat down with Alon Cohen, who leads research and development at ufc, to discuss the complexity of using technology to analyze fight data.
Alon Cohen
With kick to the head, it makes contact with the outside of my arm, which I brought up. In our world, that's a blocked strike. Yeah, but teaching a computer what exactly that means and when and how, like when my arm is up, that that's a block. When my arm is down and hits my shoulder, that's not. It's those nuances that proved incredibly difficult for machines to be able to handle for a very, very long time.
Janet Jones
That is, until IBM entered the octagon.
Announcer
Listen to Smart Talks with IBM wherever you get your podcasts.
Charlie Sultan
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Alon Cohen
Where someone really sees the value of complete is not necessarily when everything is going right, but is when things don't go right. Are you going to wait on hold for two hours? Or are you going to have someone who has the whole world of options at their FingerTips and an AI agent that made their lives easier?
Charlie Sultan
Visit concur.com complete to learn more.
Emily Kwong
Short Rivers before we keep going, remember to follow our show. Just hit the little follow button and you'll get little science treats in your trough. Just like a horse or 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.
Janet Jones
What happened there when True was, oh, roughly 4 or 5 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 10ft long and about 5ft high, and they're made of these steel poles. Drew 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.
Emily Kwong
Oh.
Janet Jones
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.
Announcer
Yeah.
Janet Jones
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.
Emily Kwong
Right. That is their lack of categorical perception at work.
Announcer
And it.
Emily Kwong
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.
Announcer
Sort of.
Janet Jones
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.
Emily Kwong
That's so interesting. And you write about how this difference plays out in the real world because people have strong categorical perception. You say it does create a proclivity towards stereotypes and prejudices that we humans have to reject consciously be aware of our biases. We sort people into groups.
Janet Jones
We do.
Emily Kwong
And horses, you're saying, don't do that.
Janet Jones
They can't do it automatically. They would have to be taught those categories.
Emily Kwong
Wow.
Janet Jones
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 whether they are part of a group or not.
Emily Kwong
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?
Janet Jones
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
Emily Kwong
them right the first time then.
Janet Jones
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.
Emily Kwong
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.
Janet Jones
100% accuracy, perfect.
Emily Kwong
They're like elephants.
Janet Jones
They hold memories really, really well. And then when asked to apply that same rule but to new shape 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.
Emily Kwong
I don't know if I want to recall.
Janet Jones
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%. 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.
Emily Kwong
Another fact I learned from your book is that horses have more than 355 trillion different facial expressions.
Janet Jones
Yes.
Emily Kwong
What does that kind of magnitude of facial expression suggest about horse emotions? And I know that a lot more research would need to be done, but what do you think?
Janet Jones
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.
Emily Kwong
It's like you're saying they have a range of emotions and expressions equal to ours, and we need to respect that. Also, those emotions are different than ours.
Janet Jones
Yes.
Emily Kwong
We don't want to project human emotions onto horses.
Janet Jones
Exactly.
Emily Kwong
We want to understand the full range of horse emotions.
Janet Jones
Absolutely.
Emily Kwong
Let's actually end there with the connection between horses and humans. You write that humans and horses are the only cross species pair known to share neural activation between brains. What is the the neural connection that's happening there?
Janet Jones
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.
Emily Kwong
Wow. Janet Jones is the author of the new book A Horse's World, which is out now. Thank you so much for talking to us on Short Wave.
Janet Jones
Thank you so much, Emily. I really appreciate it and I enjoyed every minute.
Emily Kwong
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 Short Rave 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 Glass was the audio engineer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from npr.
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Podcast: Short Wave (NPR)
Hosts: Emily Kwong, Regina Barber
Guest: Janet Jones (Neuroscientist, Horse Trainer, Author of A Horse’s World)
Date: June 22, 2026
Duration: ~15 minutes
This episode explores the inner workings of horse cognition, emotion, and the unique neural bond they share with humans. Neuroscientist and horse trainer Janet Jones shares insights from her years of research and riding, highlighting surprising science on horse memory, perception, and emotional life. The conversation is warm, curious, and laced with humor, making complex neuroscience accessible to all listeners.
This episode of Short Wave provides a captivating glimpse into the inner world of horses, highlighting how their perception, memory, emotions, and connection to humans challenge our assumptions about other animals. Janet Jones urges us to approach horses on their own terms—respecting their differences and the unique relationships we can share with them.
Further Exploration:
Emily encourages listeners to check out a related Short Wave episode on octopus intelligence ([15:40]), reinforcing the show’s mission to expand scientific curiosity.
Book Mentioned: A Horse's World by Janet Jones
Produced by: Rachel Carlson
Edited by: Rebecca Ramirez
Fact-checked by: Tyler Jones
Audio Engineer: Hannah Glass
Host: Emily Kwong