several of the horses seemed overanxious to get home. “Charger started jigging, pulling at the bit,” Stephanie remembers, “but he wasn’t the only one. It was exhausting trying to hold the horses back, so we all started trotting — but, my God, Charger had a rough trot. I was bouncing all over the place, trying to rein him in at the same time. Then we rounded the next bend, and this herd of deer came out of nowhere. Charger shot forward. I grabbed his mane and held on as best I could.
“The next thing I remember I’m on the ground and my sister’s asking me if I know who the president of the United States is. Apparently, my horse ran all the way home before any of the other riders could catch up with him. Marie and I walked back because I refused to get on her mare, or anyone else’s horse, for that matter.”
Stephanie’s helmet was cracked. She was bruised and confused. But the fact that she couldn’t bring herself to get right back on a horse that day was, in her mind, “the most demoralizing part of all.”
At the barbecue later that afternoon, Stephanie heard all kinds of gracious, ego-mending explanations for her fall, the most common theme involving the “fact” that, as prey animals, horses exist in a perpetual state of fearful anticipation. In their pea-sized brains, plastic bags blowing in the breeze are cackling, soul-stealing ghosts. Deer are fleet-footed, flesh-eating zombies. And jackrabbits, well, they’re just plain mutant. Rider beware!
This all-too-common explanation gives way too much credit to the horse’s imagination, a bizarre attribute to afford an animal you’ve just cited as mentally deficient. In truth, there’s no scientific evidence for sinister B-movie plots rolling around in the equine brain — not that I would consider this mutant feature of the human storytelling instinct a sign of advanced intelligence. There is, however, a much better case for observing a finely tuned, empathic nervous system in action. When a horse spooks, he shows us something remarkable, and the latest research points to some surprising conclusions about our own hidden potential.
Having seen, and experienced, numerous close calls over the years, I can tell you exactly what set Charger off. Stephanie’s tension, posture, and breathing (or her lack of breathing), her inexperience with the landscape, her rusty riding skills — and her own natural, unrecognized empathic talents — all conspired to catapult her off that horse, leaving her wincing in the dust and walking into the sunset on her own two feet. At the same time, I suspect her early equestrian experiences contributed to her success in business. Reawakening this nonverbal wisdom, bringing it to full consciousness, would give her an even more significant edge. Stephanie was thrilled to learn that the nonverbal fear-management skills she practiced with me that day would be useful in calming and focusing staff, clients, and family members once she returned home. (See Guiding Principle 7, chapter 19.)
Emotions Are Contagious!
Italian neuroscientists, studying the effects of movement on the brain, stumbled upon a strange and unexpected feature of the mammalian nervous system, one that quickly led to all kinds of research into the physiology of empathy. Not only are we hardwired to share experience; it turns out that sensations and emotions are more contagious than the common cold!
In the 1980s, researchers at the University of Parma placed electrodes in the premotor cortex of a macaque, hoping to figure out which neurons were activated by hand and mouth actions. They soon isolated a particular cell that fired only when the monkey lifted his arm. Apparently they did this over and over again just to make sure, as scientists are prone to do. But I would love to have seen the looks on their faces when a lab assistant lifted an ice cream cone to his own mouth during one of those sessions and triggered a reaction in the monkey’s cell. Subsequent studies suggest that our brains are peppered with tiny mirror neurons that mimic what another being does, ultimately allowing us to detect someone else’s emotions through his or her actions.
In their September 2008 Harvard Business Review article, “Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership,” Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis summarize the implications for those of us hired to motivate, inspire and basically move large numbers of people around in a coordinated fashion: “Mirror neurons have a particular importance in organizations, because leaders’ emotions and actions prompt followers to mirror those feelings and deeds. The effects of activating neural circuitry in followers’ brains can be very powerful.”
In one intriguing study cited by Goleman and Boyatzis, researcher Marie Dasborough observed the effects of two management approaches. The first group of employees received negative performance feedback supported by positive emotional signals — ample smiles and nods. The other group experienced positive feedback couched in negative body language — frowns and narrowed eyes. As it turns out, those who emerged from good-natured negative feedback sessions felt more optimistic than those who received praise from cranky supervisors. “In effect,” Goleman and Boyatzis conclude, “the delivery was more important than the message itself. And everybody knows that when people feel better, they perform better. So if leaders hope to get the best out of their people, they should continue to be demanding but in ways that foster a positive mood in their teams. The old carrot-and-stick approach alone doesn’t make neural sense.”
Like horses, who are keenly aware of nonverbal cues, people respond to the emotional atmosphere behind our words more profoundly than they do to the actual content and meaning. But vocal tone, body language, and mirror neurons are just the tip of the iceberg. Research into the human-equine relationship continues to uncover even more subtle interpersonal dynamics, and while no one understands the mechanism yet, it turns out that horses and riders don’t have to see any evidence of movement or gesture to affect each other physiologically. While this may seem obvious when you’re riding a horse — you can feel what’s going on in his body and vice versa — emotions and sensations are contagious even when you appear to be walking calmly beside each other.
In a 2009 article published in the Veterinary Journal, researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences performed a simple, elegant experiment designed to study the effect a nervous handler has on the heart rate of his or her mount. Twenty-seven horses of various breeds and ages were led or ridden at a walk by thirty-seven amateur equestrians. Wearing heart-rate monitors, each team traveled a thirty-meter distance between two cones a total of four times. Just before the final pass, however, the person was told that an assistant, who had been standing next to the path the whole time, would open an umbrella as the horse went by.
Now, as someone who’s worked with a number of flighty horses over the years, my own heart skipped a beat just reading about this minor institutionalized threat. I mean, even right now, sitting at my computer, I actually cringe at the thought of the sound an umbrella makes when it flies open, especially when I visualize this happening five feet away from my Arabian stallion. If mirror neurons are involved in these palpable physiological responses, they’re bouncing off a projection screen in my head. And the effect of imagination, interestingly enough, is what the researchers were ultimately measuring. Those scientific pranksters didn’t open the umbrella (as any equine-liability insurance company would be relieved to know). Even so, the heart rates of both human and horse rose significantly as they passed the now suspect, inclement-weather-savvy lab assistant. Even more remarkable, no behavioral differences were observed in either horse or handler when the animal was being led, though there was a tendency for riders to shorten their reins after the dreaded news was conveyed. So, especially in the case of people leading their equine companions, the mere human thought of the umbrella’s spooking power was enough to raise the arousal of the horse, who I’m pretty sure would not have understood the experimenter’s warning in Swedish or any other language.
Let’s not mince words here. What we’re talking about is a mild form of telepathy, which, I might add, comes from the same root as empathy and sympathy. Telepathy literally means “feeling at a distance.” Because we’re methodically and relentlessly taught to dissociate from the environment and our own bodies, modern humans downplay rather than develop this ability, but the information still manages to leak through now and then in the form of “gut feelings” and other forms of intuition. While culturally conditioned minds work overtime to discount insights that bypass rational thought, the brain itself can’t help but gather and process multifaceted somatic impressions