Laura Dickerson asked me to discuss primary and secondary thoughts in horses, and since I always do what Laura tells me, here goes.

First, a bit of basic neurology (you can skip this part if science is not your thing).

The brain is a sponge for information. It takes in so much information per second (sounds, smells, sights, touch) that it needs to find a way to organize it or experience burn out and chaos. I can’t imagine how my sanity would have survived if my brain was not able to filter the noise and activity at my parent’s house during Christmas lunch when 10 people were all talking at once.

The part of the brain whose job it is to organize the information sits at the base of the brain and just above the spinal column and is called the reticular activating system (RAS). It acts like a bouncer at a nightclub deciding who it will let into the consciousness VIP room and who it will filter out to wait outside on the kerb.

The brain only has a finite room for conscious thought, so it categories consciousness into levels of priorities. The most important bits of information are the ones that attract the most attention of our consciousness - our main focus. I call this our primary thought or focus. It’s the one that preoccupies our brain the most and consumes most of our thinking power. But there is still room for less important pieces of information to reside in our brain in coach class. These I call secondary thoughts.

There can be dozens of secondary thoughts, but only one primary thought.

The categorisation of an idea or focus in the brain to primary or secondary status is determined by how important that piece of information is to the horse’s safety and comfort. So information that is recognised to be most closely linked to safety/comfort is given primary thought status. Information that is perceived as less likely to threaten safety and comfort is relegated to secondary thought class.

It is important to realise that even though secondary thoughts are not at the top of the brain’s priority pile, they are always lurking close by, easily accessed, and can replace the present primary thought in a split second. It is normal that a horse’s focus constantly changes. Primary and secondary focus can swap back and forth many times in a second. It’s a sort of constant scanning of the world to keep the brain aware of dangers. Gate, food, kangaroos, human, rope, sound, kangaroo, horse, rope, horse, food, gate, human - all can pass from primary to secondary and back to primary status in a fraction of a second. The horse has an amazing ability to be aware of its surroundings because of the RAS. This is a strategy that evolution concocted to ensure a horse’s greater chance of survival in the wild.

Now that you know what primary and secondary thoughts are and how the brain organizes them, why does it matter?

A horse invests the most mental effort into understanding and working with the primary thought. It is the favoured child. This is because the horse sees that thought as the one that will determine life and death decisions. A horse devotes much less mental effort to understanding secondary thought - they are secondary and not as important.

Knowing that, it’s logical that in training the horse’s ability to learn a task has the greatest chance of success if the primary focus is on us and the task. This is why I harp on at my clinics about a horse’s focus and being able to direct their thought. Where their focus and primary thought is directed is where the most learning will occur. So we need to make sure their primary focus is with us and our idea.

For example, if we want to teach our horse to pick up a foot or lunge on a circle we need their primary focus to be on us and where our feel directs them. However, if while we are training on these tasks but the horse is thinking “where are my friends?” or “this is too scary and I need to be gone” or “when can I get a bite of grass?”, there will be almost no learning. Each time we ask the horse to lunge or pick up its feet, it will always seem like it is no better than the last time we tried to teach these things.

When the conversation between us and our horse is a secondary focus and not a primary one, we are at a significant disadvantage in getting along together.

You are probably asking, “how do I become my horse’s primary focus”?

The answer is of course, it depends

In essence, you need to be the most important idea in the pyramid of ideas in a horse’s brain. That means you need to tap into what a horse considers to be a safety and/or comfort issue. You need to make yourself and the conversation feel like it is the path to safety and comfort. Part of that might mean when you are not the primary focus life feels slightly less safe and less comfortable to your horse. But even if you do that, you MUST make you and the conversation you have with your horse the safest and most comfortable alternative it could think of.

So the reason we need to know what a horse’s primary and secondary thoughts are is that it lets us know how available a horse is to learning. We should always be trying to have the conversation we are having with our horse be the primary focus. It’s a non-stop battle because we are constantly competing with the rest of the world for our horse’s attention. This also means that while other things occupy a horse’s primary thoughts, we will never help our horse find softness and willingness. Our horse’s responses will be purely from obedience and ill feelings.

Did I do good, Laura?