A Horse's World

In one sentence: Neuroscientist and horse trainer Janet Jones' new book, distilling her first-hand experience training and researching horses into an account of how horses perceive the world, remember what they learn, and feel emotion — the data behind this episode's core findings.

Introduction

Host Emily Kwong opens by calling it a rarity: "there just aren't that many books like it." At least two datasets from the book anchor the episode directly: horses may have more than 355 trillion distinct facial expressions ("horses have more than 355 trillion different facial expressions"), suggesting horses may experience a richer emotional range than they've been credited with; and an experiment teaching horses a geometric-shape identification rule, where researchers retested one horse ten years later and found 100% accuracy on the original shapes. The book's throughline is that horse cognition differs fundamentally from human cognition — above all in horses' lack of the automatic "categorical perception" that shapes human thought.

Why It's Worth Reading

Jones is this episode's interview subject, and her own research and training experience is the direct source for nearly every finding discussed. Explaining why her horse True reacted with more fear to fence panels he'd already seen the day before, she lays out the underlying species logic:

"Sort of. That's sort of it, exactly. And you can need that because they're prey animals. They're in danger from any unknown object. We aren't."

On the cost that same shortcut imposes on humans, in the form of stereotyping, she says:

"Our brains sort items or people into group membership automatically, without our control, without our permission, often without our realization."

Kwong reacts to the book's memory-retention data with: "Another fact I learned from your book is that horses have more than 355 trillion different facial expressions" (the line follows the memory discussion in the transcript but references the book's facial-expression data). The book's account of shared neural activation between horse and rider is treated as one of the episode's most striking findings; Jones explains it this way:

"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... this creates a kind of loop in which horse and rider are sharing neural activation back and forth in real time... it's between a prey species and a predator species. Horses and humans are the only cross-species that fall into that category, that work at that level."

Source

NPR Short Wave's 马的心智 episode, throughout Janet Jones' interview; the 355-trillion facial-expression figure and the ten-year 100%-accuracy memory result are both credited to "Jones's book A Horse's World." Kwong formally introduces the book at the close: "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."