Inside the mysterious minds of horses

Summary

Summary: Short Wave - "Inside the Mysterious Minds of Horses"

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

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Episode Overview

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.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Janet's Relationship with Horses

• Emily’s Personal Fascination: Emily Kwong opens with her lifelong love of horses, noting their strength, beauty, and emotional intelligence ([00:25]).
• Janet’s Experience: Janet Jones, a lifelong rider and neuroscientist, describes her Dutch Warmblood horse “True North” (“True”) as her "forever horse" due to his inquisitive nature and their deep bond ([00:55]-[01:33]).
• The Inspiration: Janet’s experiences inspired her to write A Horse’s World to showcase how horses see the world differently from humans ([01:33]-[01:50]).
  • Quote: "It's like there's a huge animal hiding in plain sight... 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." — Janet Jones [01:50]

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How Horses Perceive the World: Categorical Perception

• What Is Categorical Perception?
  • Emily explains how humans automatically categorize objects (e.g., instantly recognizing a jacket), a process horses do not do to the same extent ([05:12]).
• Janet’s Story:
  • Janet recounts an incident where “True” reacted with fear to the same stack of steel fence panels approached from a different direction, highlighting his lack of categorical perception ([06:14]-[07:47]).
    • Quote: "When a horse blows, it's loud enough to break your eardrums." — Janet Jones [07:28]
    • Despite seeing the panels the day before, True was "even more frightened" when approached from a new angle ([07:29]).
  • Reason: Horses, as prey animals, treat each new encounter or perspective as unique and potentially threatening—a form of “beginner’s mind” ([08:01]-[08:13]).
    • Quote: "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." — Janet Jones [08:51]

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Human vs. Horse: Bias and Social Grouping

• Human Bias: Emily and Janet discuss how our tendency to categorize leads to biases and stereotypes ([08:26]-[08:51]).
  • Quote: "Our brains sort items 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..." — Janet Jones [08:51]
• Horse Individuality: Horses do not have this automatic group sorting, emphasizing individual interactions.

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Horse Memory: Astonishing Longevity

• Exceptional Memory: Horses can retain information for years, sometimes after a single exposure ([09:34]-[09:53]).
  • Quote: "Horses have fantastic memories. They're often quicker to form and more lasting than human memories are." — Janet Jones [09:53]
• Scientific Study:
  • In one experiment, horses trained to identify geometric shapes retained the skill with 100% accuracy a decade later ([10:57]-[11:08]).
  • When challenged with new shapes and the same rule, they were 98% accurate ([11:13]).
  • Janet contrasts this with humans, who forget most new information rapidly ([11:34]-[12:20]).

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Emotional Expression: 355 Trillion Facial Expressions

• Magnitude of Expression: Horses possess more than 355 trillion unique facial expressions ([12:20]-[12:30]).
  • Quote: "Horses experience more emotions than they've ever been credited with, and they very likely do not experience those emotions the way we do." — Janet Jones [12:42]
• Respecting Differences: Janet and Emily caution against projecting human emotions onto horses, emphasizing the need to recognize their unique emotional landscape ([13:22]-[13:33]).
  • Quote: "We don't want to project human emotions onto horses." — Emily Kwong [13:34]

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The Unique Human-Horse Neural Connection

• Neural Feedback Loop:
  • Janet explains the unique phenomenon where a horse and rider share real-time neural activation through skin receptors, exemplified in activities like riding or racing ([13:42]-[15:25]).
  • Quote: "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." — Janet Jones [15:13]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "It's like there's a huge animal hiding in plain sight, one who has aided human civilization more than any other animal." — Janet Jones [01:50]
• "When a horse blows, it's loud enough to break your eardrums." — Janet Jones [07:28]
• "Horses experience more emotions than they've ever been credited with... but in some fashion, these facial expressions do seem to be matched to the emotion that an animal would be expected to produce..." — Janet Jones [12:42]
• "We don't want to project human emotions onto horses." — Emily Kwong [13:34]
• "Horses and humans are the only cross species pair known to share neural activation between brains." — Janet Jones [13:56]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:25] Host intro and Janet’s background
• [01:33] Janet discusses her relationship with "True North"
• [05:12] Exploring categorical perception in humans vs. horses
• [06:14] Story of True and the fence panels
• [08:26] Human bias vs. horse individuality
• [09:34] Horse memory studies and comparison with human memory
• [12:20] Horses' vast number of facial expressions and implications
• [13:42] Neural connection between humans and horses
• [15:25] Closing and book information

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Conclusion

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.

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Book Mentioned: A Horse's World by Janet Jones

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Produced by: Rachel Carlson
Edited by: Rebecca Ramirez
Fact-checked by: Tyler Jones
Audio Engineer: Hannah Glass

Host: Emily Kwong

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Transcript

[Announcer]

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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]

Support for this podcast and the following message come from E Trade from Morgan Stanley Simplify your finances and discover the convenience of investing in banking all in one place. Plus get up to 1500 dollars when you open a brokera with a qualifying deposit today. Learn [e-mail] offer banking products and services are provided by Morgan Stanley Private Bank national association member FDIC Terms and other fees apply. Investing involves risks. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, LLC Member SIPIC this message comes from SAP Concur President of Concur Travel Charlie Sultan shares How Complete by SAP Concur and MXGBT is delivering AI powered travel solutions designed to help travelers when they need it most.

[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.

[Announcer]

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