Horses, Part Six

Having a horse, has taught me alot about human nature. Horses are amazingly long-remembering creatures. They have this fantastic long term memory. Not such a great short term memory, but they can remember things from so far back its unreal.

People, as well as horses, have a tendency to remember certain things. They don't remember all things - but then again, neither do horses. Thats a pretty interesting insight. Because Horses, really don't have much else to do other than play thoughts over and over again in their heads. They have no hands, so they're not going to be busy inventing anything. They don't have the ability to eat meat, so they're not going to be worried about predator/prey dynamics. A horse is purely a prey animal. Why would it only remember certain things?

The short answer is because if it didn't it would go quickly insane. The long answer is that its a part of its own survival mechanism. We really aren't made to remember all details. People who can, are usually going to display autistic symptoms. I think the best way to understand it is, if you could take the analogy of the mind working a bit like a big office building, with lots of different floors. The people all have offices on each floor, and the floors are connected with telephone, fax, and data cabling.

A person who processes only part of what he or she sees, and remembers only part of it, might be able to use VoIP phones and Data, run on the data cable. They wouldn't overwhelm the cabling. So they could IM another person on another floor, and get an instant response. They go through the fast switch.

But a person who tries to remember everything, must necessarily use all of that capacity - think of a 10 gig file copy going across the wire. When Lag occurs, alot of times, we opt to move to another form of communication. So, its likely that the office people (in this analogy) would move to fax lines. Now, if the only thing you can do to get a message from one place to another is to send a fax, you can imagine what it would be like. You would have to focus on one thing in particular, because its so time consuming to get the message out. You're running on the back office copper.

People who have autism are like this office building that can only communicate by fax. They focus on small details, and repeat them over and over. A story might be told a hundred times, its still interesting to them, because they simply don't have the global update yet. So to each new compartment of their brain, its a new thing. It would be like, wow - Look we got a fax. Can you read it? What does it say? - Or, alternately, since the fax arrives in one piece, they wait until its all there to read it.

The architecture has been described in a great book by Temple Grandin. Horses are like that. And so, they do things like - if there's a big silver belt buckle on you, they look at that. They fear easily. And the people who are around them usually are people who know how to make that work for them.

Saddle up. Or stay in the truck.