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Re: [RC] Temple Grandin right brain/ left brain - Truman Prevatt

The inner communications between the sides of the brain vary with animal and they vary with the need of the sensor. For example in the human it is critical for the eyes to work as a stereo sensor. That is we cannot determine depth with only one eye. The brain needs to provide the sensor information from both sides to be processed by the brain. A horse on the other hand can estimate depth by the selective focus provide by his eye. He raises his head to focus at a different distance. The height and attitude of his head tell him the distance. He only needs one eye to do this. The horse's eyes are set on the side of his head because they are designed to operate separately. There needs to be little information concerning the optical sensors shared with both sides of the brain. Hence if a horse only sees something on the right side, it is in only one side of his brain - not both.

Our hearing is the same - to get direction it requires phase estimation by the brain of input from both ears hence communication between the sides is critical for this. Horses uses this some - they balance the phase of the sound by looking toward the sound. Both ears are involved in this. However, horses also have antenna that (the ears ) that can also be used to locate the direction of the sound. So I expect while there is more requirement for sharing the ear responses with both sides of the brain it is not near as much as in humans.

I suspect a lot of the training issues associated with a horse and each side has to do more with how they perceive the world through their array of sensors than any other single reason. I expect the whole business of "right brain"/"left brain" is a very simplistic try of an explanation of a fairly complex situation - maybe simplistic enough so someone can make some money off of giving clinic exposing it but probably to simplistic to be of much real use.

Truman

Christy H wrote:
The footing looks like some type of wood chips. i have NO idea. Someone from a Parelli site put the link out there.

A famous CSU professor, Dr. Temple Grandin, talks about "a whole new Walmart" when autistic people go from one Walmart location to the other, even though the stores are set up identical, it's like being in a totally different store. She says Same thing happens with both sides of the horse brain, that's why you have to do on the right, what you do on the left. I was in the audience for one of her conferences. If you google Temple Grandin, she's got all kinds of research out there! Very interesting. She wrote a paper on mustang handling:

http://www.grandin.com/references/handling.mustangs.html

Cheers,
Christy

From: Don Huston <donhuston@xxxxxxx>
To: ridecamp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [RC] right brain/ left brain and eyesight
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 11:21:41 -0700

Hello Christy,
Amazing article and thanks for the translation. I have always wondered why my horse generally spooks harder when encountering scary stuff on the left. I thought that maybe his right eye didn't work as well...duh. A question, I looked at the link and what is the footing in the ring? Wood chips or rocks or....?
Don Huston


At 10:47 AM 8/20/2007 Monday, you wrote:
Someone commented about Parelli's left brain/ right brain theory. This may help explain it and it includes recent research on equine eyesight.
Interesting research.........

After the last view posts about the horse's vision and eyes, I ran across
this article today. It made sense, so I decided to share. The article was in
German but I will try my best to translate it to the best of my
abilities:-). Their training method is nothing new, I've heard of it a
thousand times, but their explanation is really good - I think. Let me know
what you think about it!

The Situation:

Unlike the human brain, a horse's brain doesn't quite often exchange
information between left brain/right brains. This means, a horse has to
learn everything from the left side, as well as from the right side
separately.

When a horse sees something with his right eye, the information is saved in
its left brain. When the horse sees something with his left eye - it's
consequently saved to the right side of his brain and he doesn't recognize
the item, since the date transfer between left/right brains is poor or
doesn't function at all.

A horse see's things monocular (both eyes look in a completely different
direction) or binocular (both eyes are focused on one item). Horses are
equipped with a "safety eye" (mostly left eye) and is the one which looks
out for predators and is used more often then the "escape or flight eye"
(mostly right eye) which keeps the herd and possible escape routes in sight.

Consequently, a horses' left eye is more active than its right eye and
causes the information to be saved in its RIGHT BRAIN!!!! (I had to
capitalize this!), which causes the right half of the brain to become more
active as well. The right side of the brain is responsible for
intuitive/instinctive/reflex -like reactions => horses react without
thinking (fleeing all of a sudden, etc.) while the left brain is responsible
for the more controlled/thoughtful behavior and reactions.

This is the part of the website I wanted to share with you, the rest of the
website explains how to solve it using a method they call Dual Activation
Process, where they use blue and yellow poles in L-shapes and U-shapes, etc.
They claim that the latest discovery in horse vision was that horses can see
blue and yellow as very dominant colors and all other colors appear to them
in gray shades only. I've copied the website so you can look so you can see
a picture of what it is I'm so badly translating and I'm making their
article look VERY bad with poor translation but I did get the basics down so
I hope you can forgive me.

http://www.tb-trainingstable.de/Dual-Aktivierung.htm 

Don Huston at cox dot net
SanDiego, Calif



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Replies
[RC] Temple Grandin right brain/ left brain, Christy H