The best way to begin something new—in love, work, and life.
Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
Posted June 23, 2026 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Horses are amazingly intelligent, highly emotional, sentient animals. The more I read about these fascinating beings, the more I realize how much I don’t know and how much I want to learn more. When I first heard about neuroscientist Dr. Janet Jones’s new book A Horse’s World: A Neuroscientist’s Journey into the Equine Mind, I couldn’t wait to read it, and hardly a day goes by that I don’t pick it up and flip through it.
Packed with science, stories, heart, and love, Jones’s work of art is a seminal and invaluable book about the cognitive and emotional lives of horses in which she offers a detailed exploration of these charismatic beings, whose beauty and service we have adored for millennia while ignoring their hearts and minds. All in all, Jones offers us a window into the animals themselves so we can appreciate who they are from the inside out.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you write A Horse’s World?
Janet Jones: Horses have been treated as objects, not subjects, for far too long. As the first animal cognition book about horses to be written for the general public, A Horse’s World is an exploration of equines themselves—not of their immense service as war machines, artistic muses, topics of natural history, human entertainment, or aids to civilization. We already have centuries of written matter that dissect the horse’s use, his human purpose, and how it changed with evolution, domestication, exploration, and military power. Horses are the most charismatic of animals, yet while we adore their beauty and value their service, we still ignore their hearts and minds. We need a window into the actual animal, and we can appreciate who he is aside from what he has done for us.
MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?
JJ: I’m a horse trainer, earned a Ph.D. in cognitive science from UCLA, and I worked as a college professor teaching perception, memory, language, and thought. In the early 2000s, I began to apply neuroscience to horsemanship and found that it improved horse and human safety, performance, connection, and welfare. My previous book, Horse Brain, Human Brain, is available in nine languages, won several awards, and topped the bestseller list for horse books from 2020 to 2026.
MB: Who do you hope to reach?
JJ: A Horse’s World is written for the general public. It assumes no prior knowledge of horses, yet offers research on equine minds that even most horse people will find surprising. Did you know, for example, that horses:
Such surprises are explained through the book’s narrative, which tells the true story of one horse’s development from a young naïve colt at age 2 to a mature adult teammate at age 8. Readers get to know this horse’s personality and see how he forms a bond of trust with his trainer. When connective energy between horse and human is captured, our link produces the equivalent of pure magic, but with a scientific foundation.
MB: What are some of the topics you consider, and what are some of your major messages?
JJ: Horses as prey, not predators
Popular animal cognition literature and most scientific research on animals focuses on predators: dogs, cats, snakes, whales, cougars, apes, bears, coyotes, owls, dolphins, octopuses, hawks, and so on. In contrast, very little attention is devoted to prey animals, whose brains differ from ours more dramatically than those of our predator classification. Horses evolved to flee from predators, yet today, through domestication and training, we can collaborate with them in feats of extreme athleticism that demand mutual communication.
Brain-to-brain communication between horse and rider
With years of daily training, horse-and-human teams can form what has been hailed as the “neurobiological miracle” of direct brain-to-brain communication. This is not a myth or metaphor—we are the only cross-species pair known to share neural activation between brains in real time. Together, we converse through imperceptible body signals that we and our mounts are sensitive enough to detect and have learned to interpret. Astonishingly, prey and predator brains can cooperate to such an extent.
Mutual sharing between neurons improves team performance and enhances equine welfare, but entering a prey animal’s mind also allows humans to understand life more deeply, to open ourselves to new ways of communicating, to respect those who differ from us, to learn humility and achieve depth, to stretch the edges of our minds.
Equine expression and interpretation of emotion
Horses can produce and interpret a greater variety of facial expressions than most other animals on the planet. Monitoring 17 facial locations that move in multiple directions at varying speeds, researchers have identified 805 expressions that horses use to convey their attitudes toward each other. That’s only a drop in the bucket, though—a rough calculation of potential combinations yields 355 trillion expressions that could appear on a horse’s face, excluding the rest of her enormous body. In addition to displaying and interpreting emotion among themselves, horses also detect human emotion. For example, they mirror human emotions like fear, avoid angry human faces, approach pleasant human faces, and match those faces with human voices that convey similar emotions.
MB: How does your work differ from others who are concerned with some of the same general topics?
JJ: Many books consider horses’ contributions to human life—how they aided human civilization, became the focus of our earliest art, evolved through natural history, and so on. And we have plenty of instruction manuals that explain how to train a horse for various purposes. But A Horse’s World is the first popular animal cognition book devoted to the animals themselves—how they think, how they communicate, what they feel, how and why they interact with humans.
MB: Are you hopeful that, as people learn more about these magnificent animals, they will come to treat them with more respect, dignity, and compassion?
JJ: Oh, yes! A Horse’s World shows my deep love for horses. Most people are fascinated by horses—even those who have never touched one and probably never will. I want them to understand who horses really are, beyond what they have done.
References
In conversation with Janet Jones, Ph.D. Jones won Japan’s Equine Culture Award in 2021, the first American author to receive that prize since Laura Hillenbrand won for Seabiscuit. She developed brain-based horsemanship and offers it to horse enthusiasts in Horse Brain, Human Brain. In her latest book, she broadens her perspective, inviting the general public to learn why some of us love horses so much.
1) To Connect With Horses, Blend Into Their Heads and Hearts; The Inner Lives of Horses: A Fun-Filled, Fact-Filled Guide; The Emotional Lives of Horses and What They Need From Us; Horses to the Rescue: Rewards of Equine-Assisted Services.
Share this post
There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.
By submitting your information you agree to the Psychology Today Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy
Marc Bekoff, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Get the help you need from a therapist near you–a FREE service from Psychology Today.
Psychology Today © 2026 Sussex Publishers, LLC
The best way to begin something new—in love, work, and life.
Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.