An Optimum Range

By Brian Hale, Hale Broadcasting

When Howard was alive, I would always find books nearby. Howard loved to read. If you enjoy reading, you should pick up Nelseena Lehmann’s new book, Country Life Shenanigans. You can pick up the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or straight from her website at nelseena.com.

Learning is fascinating to some, especially to neuroscientists like Dr. Steve Peters. Here’s is just a snippet of a longer interview he did with the late Howard Hale.

Horses have an optimum range, just like humans do, of comfort in which they can learn.
Now if they’re too comfortable, they’re in a part of their nervous system where they’re
just not going to pay attention.

You know they’re going to look over the fence at their buddies, they’re going to graze,
they’re going to have their heads down. A little bit of arousal, what we call sympathetic
arousal, make them alert. But if you go beyond that, you’re going to start to kick in self-preservation
and they’ll tune you out.

Well I think for years what we did is that we didn’t pay much attention to that and as
the whole, like Granddad said, don’t let that horse win. Go back there and make them
do it. That horse just pretty much did it but it tuned you out and it really wasn’t
learning. You know? And so Martin got in the habit of really saying okay this horse is
not really where I want him right now and it seems like we’re reaching a point of diminishing
returns. Heck I’ll just pick this up in the morning.

Dr. Steve Peters