KEEPING your horse’s Attention
Picture a horse with his hooves clapped over his ears, singing loudly to avoid the lesson you are trying to impart: “La, la, la, la, la!” Without his engagement, even the best training techniques go unheeded. Without yours, there is nothing he can teach you---and horses have a lot to teach. To foster learning on both sides, we must sustain focus within the horse/human team.
The previous installment on attention (“Capture Your Horse’s Attention,” EQUUS 490) explored brain processes that allow horses and humans to maintain vigilance, alert to warning signals, and orient to new events. Horses surpass humans at these skills. But humans are better at ignoring distractions and concentrating on one task for long periods. The article surveyed the action of five brain chemicals and the system-wide process of neural tuning. It also explained how the brain’s pathways sense a new event, react to it and think about it. Horses and humans use the same chemicals and tuning processes, but the equine brain contains more direct pathways from perception to action. These cause the horse to behave in sudden ways that humans do not expect. Using brain processes as our foundation, we then learned to capture a horse’s interest when he is distracted. Now we must maintain that interest over longer periods of time.
Why do we need to know about the brain processes used in attention? Because they can be shaped, sharpened, literally built to be better. When brains have been honed to a selected purpose, they work faster, more accurately and with less effort to orient and focus mental capacity on new tasks---like jumping, spinning, dressage movements or cutting maneuvers. Whatever your riding discipline, mutual attention will improve performance.
“EARTH TO HORSE”
Attention denotes the ability to focus mental capacity on one task, to concentrate. This is an accurate definition within brain science and one that will be used throughout this article. But it’s also important to weigh popular connotations of the word. A basic thesaurus provides these synonyms for attention: care, courtesy, consideration, kindness, devotion, helpfulness, thoughtfulness, responsiveness. Keep them in mind when asking
