The latest take on an old adage is that 40% of the human brain is always busy, but the other 60% isn’t goofing off, but just performing functions we’re only starting to understand. The 40% keeps us alive and provides computing power when asked. Even “autonomous” functions require chemical email from the brain from time to time during the day.

Yoga, oriental martial arts, and PET scanners show how certain activities “light up” parts of both halves of the brain with certain activity. That “underused” 60% is not only mass storage of every second of our lives, but also serves as backup to damaged areas in the other half, plus provides a slow-but-effective facility for individuals to craft their own new “instincts”.

A brain scan of a “new” horse in the herd will look much different once it has been acclimated and accepted. Horses love pleasant relations in a tightly-knit herd as the next best thing to food itself.

Different breeds of horses (or dogs, or pods of dolphins) show specific distributions of all sorts of mental traits. Lippizans have been raised almost as a cloistered religious order with lots (relatively speaking) of chapter houses. They recognize even a strange new Lipp as a member of their order, even if some can’t stand each other until “Mother Superior” lead mare straightens them out. This is the goal of any herd of horses, but some breeds iron relations out faster, and with usually less permanent trauma.

That’s why Lippizans have “nodding” relations with some breeds that have a lot of Spanish warmblood, or Arabian in them. They’re seen as distant relatives who are aristocrats in their own homelands, but just dress in funny colors (anything not white), and have some odd, but no doubt meaningful customs of their own. Just a little out of place in pristine alpine meadows, but make for good guests.

Throw horses like that into a general field of random horses at a boarding stable (or misassign one among your own herds), and they separate out like oil and water in a salad dressing. The “cool horses” gravitate towards each other, and become even “cooler” once some mare assumes dominance. Individual horses of other breeds may become associate members if they behave politely. The “cool herd” and the “street herd” then come to a mutual understanding that ignoring each other is the most peaceful routine to be desired.

Not bad for a “dumb animal”. I’ll be the Asian horsepeople, living with horses the way we live with dogs, have lots of “amazing” stories that are ho-hum to them.

BTW, before I finish my ramble, I read a recent theory that humans and wolves mutually civilized each other about 300,000 yeas ago by recognizing a family-based structure, the ability to coexist unless in direct competition for apex herbivores on the food chain, and added benefits to both when they teamed up. Humans quickly decided it was easier to breed “domestic wolves” than to go through the painstaking diplomacy of dealing with sovereign wolf packs.

Who knows what we’ll have to show after another 280,000 years of daily domestic contact with horses? But it just shows we don’t know a lot about “intelligence”, even our own, than we guessed we did.

Thanks for these stories from the realm of the Phat White Ponies.

However, I do lose pens. I’m not sure I’d ever trust myself with a truly special one. If I lose one of my pens now, I think, well it lasted a couple of years before I lost it, that’s okay. I don’t think I could ever be so prosaic about something really valuable.

Should I say thankfully, now drinking dry reds?

But I’m still in a cheerful mood about tech today. When I bought the Kaypro II, it was the state the art personal computer.