All's Well That Ends Well

Talk with folks who train horses and they’ll tell you some interesting things about the way a horse’s brain works. First, a horse has a very short memory when it comes to connecting two events, or, rather, connecting cause and effect. Second, a horse tends to remember the way things end, but not much about the way they start.

Since I began working with horses about 15 years ago, I have tried to use these horse tendencies to my advantage. I always offer reinforcement immediately. My rule is a two-second rule. If the horse does something I want it to do, I offer positive reinforcement immediately. If it does something I don’t want it to do, I make sure that the horse knows within the count of two that the behavior is undesirable.

In training sessions, I always make sure that I end with something positive. If I am working on backing up, for example, and the horse has been refusing to do what I ask, I never, ever end the session with a refusal from the horse. I make sure that the horse gives me something. Even the smallest of steps in the right direction gives me a chance to reward the horse and end the session on a positive note. The horse is then prone to remember that training is good because it ended good, even though the majority of it was bad.

We have found that these techniques are helpful with other inhabitants of the farm as well, namely the dairy goats.

Like most livestock, goats require routine care that can be uncomfortable or even painful for them. Besides the twice-daily milking, they must occasionally receive medication and vaccines, have their hooves trimmed, or even be tattooed. We have employed a simple reward system that helps make the goats very easy to work with in all these instances. It is as follows:

When you are done you get a cookie.

I told you it was simple. Here’s how it works inside the goats brain:

Hey, that guy is coming to get me to take me into that white shed. Cool! I am going to get a cookie! I love cookies! Cookies! Cookies!

I proceed to take the goat to the shed for milking or trimming or vaccinations. It really doesn’t matter, because when I am done I give the goat a cookie. The goat returns to its pen:

I got a cooooookie? I got a cooooookie!

You get the idea.

“But wait,” you say. “I don’t train animals. I don’t even have a dog. What does this have to do with me?”

Imagine my amazement when I discovered that we, as humans, do the exact same thing as horses and goats when it comes to remembering events.

A study was performed in which volunteers were required to undergo two separate experiments in random order. In one experiment, they held their hand in a tub of water that was exactly 57° F for 60 seconds while continually recording with a dial their level of discomfort. In the other experiment, the same volunteers held their hand in the same tub of water for 90 seconds. For the first 60 seconds, the water was held at 57° F, but then secretly raised to 59° F over the last 30 seconds. In this experiment the volunteers also recorded their level of discomfort just as they had on the first.

What were the results? Well, the initial results were exactly as you would expect. In the 60 second experiment, participants recorded a level of discomfort that was moderately high. In the 90 second experiment, they recorded an almost identical level of discomfort, except it lasted for 90 seconds. So, in aggregate, the participants experienced 50% more net discomfort in the 90 second experiment than they did in the 60 second experiment.

But this is where it gets interesting.

Several weeks after the experiments were performed, the participants were told they would have to undergo one of the experiments again, but they could choose which one. When offered the choice, 69% of the participants chose to undergo the 90 second experiment. Why? They said they remembered that the longer experiment was less painful. The fact that the 90 second experiment had ended slightly less uncomfortably than the 60 second experiment made a large majority of the participants remember the entire event as less painful.

So if perception is in fact reality, we humans have brains that at least in some ways work just like our animal companions'. Kissing a booboo makes it go away, a lollipop from the doctor makes a shot hurt less, and all is well that ends well.