The Power of the Herd (7 page)

In a 2009 article published in the
Veterinary Journal,
researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
performed a simple, elegant experiment designed to study the effect a nervous handler has on the heart rate of his or her mount. Twenty-seven horses of various breeds and ages were led or ridden at a walk by thirty-seven amateur equestrians. Wearing heart-rate monitors, each team traveled a thirty-meter distance between two cones a total of four times. Just before the final pass, however, the person was told that an
assistant, who had been standing next to the path the whole time, would open an umbrella as the horse went by.

Now, as someone who's worked with a number of flighty horses over the years, my own heart skipped a beat just reading about this minor institutionalized threat. I mean, even right now, sitting at my computer, I actually cringe at the thought of the sound an umbrella makes when it flies open, especially when I visualize this happening five feet away from my Arabian stallion. If mirror neurons are involved in these palpable physiological responses, they're bouncing off a projection screen in my head. And the effect of imagination, interestingly enough, is what the researchers were ultimately measuring. Those scientific pranksters didn't open the umbrella (as any equine-liability insurance company would be relieved to know). Even so, the heart rates of both human and horse rose significantly as they passed the now suspect, inclement-weather-savvy lab assistant. Even more remarkable, no behavioral differences were observed in either horse or handler when the animal was being led, though there was a tendency for riders to shorten their reins after the dreaded news was conveyed. So, especially in the case of people leading their equine companions, the mere human
thought
of the umbrella's spooking power was enough to raise the arousal of the
horse,
who I'm pretty sure would not have understood the experimenter's warning in Swedish or any other language.

Let's not mince words here. What we're talking about is a mild form of telepathy, which, I might add, comes from the same root as
empathy
and
sympathy. Telepathy
literally means “feeling at a distance.” Because we're methodically and relentlessly taught to dissociate from the environment and our own bodies, modern humans downplay rather than develop this ability, but the information still manages to leak through now and then in the form of “gut feelings” and other forms of intuition. While culturally conditioned minds work overtime to discount insights that bypass rational thought, the brain itself can't help but gather and process multifaceted somatic impressions with the split-second accuracy of a computer calculating a complex spreadsheet.

Logic, though useful at times, moves like a snail on quaaludes compared with the warp-speed conclusions coordinated by
spindle cells.
Four times larger than most brain cells, these neurons have an extralong branch allowing them to attach to other cells more easily, transmitting environmental impressions, memories, thoughts, and feelings at hyperspeed.
“This ultrarapid connection of emotions, beliefs, and judgments
creates what behavioral scientists call our social guidance system,” Goleman and Boyatzis emphasize. “Spindle cells trigger neural networks that come into play whenever we have to choose the best response among many — even for a task as routine as prioritizing a to-do list.
These cells also help us gauge whether someone is trustworthy and right (or wrong) for a job. Within one-twentieth of a second, our spindle cells fire with information about how we feel about that person; such ‘thin-slice' judgments can be very accurate, as follow-up metrics reveal. Therefore, leaders should not fear to act on those judgments, provided that they are also attuned to others' moods.” (And, I must emphasize, provided these leaders are also aware of their own projections and prejudices, a topic I explore in
chapter 12
.)

It works both ways, of course. Spindle cells, mirror neurons, and horse heart-rate responses to threats imagined by humans add to growing scientific evidence that everyone — from your employees to your kids, your spouse, your mother-in-law, and your dog — is
designed
to read your mind. Kind of levels the playing field, doesn't it?

Here's an even more intriguing, or disturbing, bit of news, depending on whether or not you like to hide your emotions and intentions from others. In
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships,
emotional-intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman cites studies showing that
not only does a person's blood pressure escalate
when he tries to suppress feeling but
the blood pressure of those interacting with him also rises.
Lie detector tests, of course, measure arousal fluctuations. However, you don't have to be hooked up to a machine to reveal a hidden state of mind. Living beings are hardwired to transmit and receive this information at a distance. Our culturally induced emphasis on verbal communication lessens awareness of this valuable information over time, but anyone who retains or reclaims use of this natural ability appears downright psychic compared to the rest of the population.

The volume of this little-understood “sixth sense” is turned way up in prey animals such as horses, who become noticeably agitated in the presence of people who are incongruent, who try to cover anger, fear, or sadness with an appearance of well-being. This is not an equine judgment of our tendency to lie about what we're really feeling; it appears to be a reflection of emotion's physiology — and its contagious nature. In well over a decade of working with horses to teach human-development skills, I have regularly seen these animals mirror the precise emotion being suppressed, then calm down the moment the handler openly acknowledges that feeling — even if the emotion is still there. Let me say it again: The emotion doesn't have to change in order for the horse to show some signs of relaxation. By making the fear or anger conscious, by becoming congruent, the handler effectively lowers his own blood pressure, even if only slightly. But it's enough to drop the horse's blood pressure in response, which the animal demonstrates by sighing, licking and chewing, and/or lowering his head.

Unless you're a sociopath (which we'll get to later in this chapter), your blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing intensify when you're frightened or angry, even when you're wearing your best poker face. It takes extra energy to hide these feelings, which adds to the anxiety radiating from your body through a complex process that scientists are only now beginning to uncover. (It's important to emphasize that horses can detect
hidden
emotions that I cannot see in the client. Sometimes this person doesn't realize what he or she is feeling until the horse acts it out, oddly enough. Yet sure enough, when the client acknowledges this previously suppressed emotion, the horse will relax, sigh, lick, and chew. Something operating beyond the scope of mirror neurons is at work in humans as well, or the blood pressure of someone who's suppressing emotion would not affect the arousal of the people he or she is interacting with.)

The good news is that positive feelings are contagious too. A person who truly feels peaceful in situations that unnerve others can have a calming effect on everyone around her. This is a key skill in becoming a great rider or a great leader. In fact, with more time in the saddle, our Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, might have just as easily become an accomplished horse whisperer. His ability to reassure and focus others during challenging situations had much less to do with words than most people would suspect.

In 1990, psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer
introduced the term
emotional intelligence,
defining it as “a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions to discriminate among them and
use this information to guide one's thinking and action
.” Five years later, Daniel Goleman's influential book
Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
expanded on this concept, spawning widespread interest in the topic. Since that time, numerous studies have shown that, even among scientists, high “EQ” is more important than raw IQ and training in predicting career success, not to mention in building and sustaining strong personal relationships.

The most exciting research illuminates intricate biological processes at work in the simplest human interactions, prompting Goleman to recognize that leaders in particular must both manage their own somatic responses and learn to modulate these emotional-physiological cues and reactions in others. In the
2002
bestseller
Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence,
Goleman teamed up with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee to unveil the neuroscientific links between organizational success or failure.
The authors
argued that “emotions are contagious,” a finding that “charges leaders with driving emotions in the right direction to have a positive impact on earnings or strategy.” As the authors emphasize,

Great leaders move us.
They ignite our passion and inspire the best in us. When we try to explain why they're so effective, we speak of strategy, vision, or powerful ideas. But the reality is much more primal: Great leadership works through the emotions….

In the modern organization, this primordial emotional task — though by now largely invisible — remains foremost among the many jobs of leadership: driving the collective emotions in a positive direction and clearing the smog created by toxic emotions….Quite simply, in any human group the leader has maximal power to sway everyone's emotions. If people's emotions are pushed toward the range of enthusiasm, performance can soar; if people are driven toward rancor and anxiety, they will be thrown off stride.

Goleman further elaborated on this phenomenon in his 2006 book
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.
In his subsequent
Harvard Business Review
collaboration with Boyatzis, he offered a brief history and definition of this groundbreaking concept:
“The notion that effective leadership is about
having powerful social circuits in the brain has prompted us to extend our concept of emotional intelligence, which we had previously grounded in theories of individual psychology. A more relationship-based construct for assessing leadership is
social intelligence,
which we define as a set of interpersonal competencies built on specific neural circuits (and related endocrine systems) that inspire others to be effective.”

Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, their own research and consulting endeavors, and studies associated with the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations,
Goleman and his colleagues continue to search
for ways “to translate newly acquired knowledge about mirror neurons, spindle cells” and other physiological findings “into practical, socially intelligent behavior that can reinforce the neural links between you and your followers.”

Which brings me to the “PhD level” of emotional and social intelligence: managing empathic insights. Back when I wrote my first book,
The Tao of Equus,
in the late 1990s (published in 2001), the contagious nature of emotion was a controversial notion completely ignored by most people and vehemently challenged by skeptics, who saw it as some kind of psychic mumbo jumbo. Yet after repeatedly witnessing horses accurately mirroring the
unconscious
emotions of my clients, I began searching for scientific corroboration of what I
called “shared emotion.” At that time, I could find only one term for the phenomenon outside mystical and New Age circles:
anthropologist E. Richard Sorensen's concept
of “sociosensual awareness.” In many ways, I still prefer this term because of the lilting, almost musical way it rolls off the tongue.
Sociosensual awareness
also has a decidedly positive connotation compared to
affect contagion,
a term I came across
in the
2001
book
Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain
by psychiatrist Elio Frattaroli. Not only did this phrase characterize how people sometimes feel victimized by others' emotions, but it also carried more weight with skeptics because of its medical connotation. Frattaroli's definition recognized that the hidden emotions of one person could infect another. While he framed this as something akin to a communicable disease, he recognized that it couldn't be explained away by conventional counseling principles like transference and countertransference. He subsequently learned to use affect contagion in his practice — in one case to accurately sense a patient's unspoken suicidal mood when standard psychological tests, and the opinions of respected colleagues, insisted the man had no self-destructive intent.

Frattaroli's realization that he could use his own body to sense his clients' emotions and Goleman's interest in capitalizing on neurological processes for the purpose of “driving emotions” of others “in the right direction” are two sides of the same empathic coin, one that equestrians have been tossing for centuries. If you specialize in training flighty, abused, or simply inexperienced horses, it's not just helpful to draw on these interrelated skills; it's essential to your survival.

Here's how it works. A second before your horse shies, bucks, or bolts, he sends what feels like an electrical charge pulsing through your body, causing your gut to clench and your heart rate to rise. Depending upon the severity of the situation, you might also feel your breath catching in your throat and the hair rising on the back of your neck as the information moves on up to your brain. When used effectively, this somatic alarm allows you to prepare for, and possibly avert, a troublesome spook. Remember, spindle cells can assess multiple inputs and choose the best response within
one-twentieth of a second,
giving you a brief window of time to modify the horse's reaction by consciously altering your own nervous system's response. Ultimately, how you handle this potent input determines whether you stay on his back (or in the case of leading a horse, whether or not he rears over you, kicks out, drags you to the ground, and/or leaves you with a painful case of rope burn as he breaks free and runs screaming around the farm working the rest of the herd into a frenzy, possibly setting in motion an even more unfortunate chain of events, including, but not limited to, unseating several unsuspecting riders in adjacent arenas).