How is this horse feeling? New mobile brain wave reader could tell
Mar. 9, 2021 , 5:15 PM
The famed stallion Black Beauty felt joy, excitement, and even heartbreak or so he tells us in the 1877 novel that bears his name. Now, scientists say they’ve been able to detect feelings in living animals by getting them straight from the horse’s mouth or in this case, its head. Researchers have devised a new, mobile headband that detects brain waves in horses, which could eventually be used with other species.
“This is a real breakthrough,” says Katherine Houpt, a veterinary behaviorist at Cornell University who was not involved with the work. The device, she says, “gets into the animals’ minds” with objectivity and less guesswork.
Chronic Pain Can Be Detected In Equine EEGs Sponsored by:
A horse demonstrating what researchers have begun calling equine pain face
Chronic pain is difficult to assess as it involves subjective emotional and cognitive facets. There has been increasing interest in using electroencephalograms (EEGs), which measures brain waves, on resting horses to help determine if the horse is experiencing chronic pain. EEGs have been used as a tool in human medicine to help decipher chronic pain.
Riding horses are prone to chronic back pain; horses that experience this pain show lower levels of engagement and shorter attention spans. Drs. Mathilde Stomp, Serenella d Ingeo, Séverine Henry, Clémence Lesimple, Hugo Cousillas and Martine Hausberger hypothesized that horses with chronic back pain would have resting-state EEGs that differed from horses that were pain-free.
Horsetalk.co.nz
The brain waves of horses show telltale signs of chronic back pain, researchers in France report.
The assessment of pain, and in particular chronic pain, is a major challenge that remains difficult to solve since there is a subjective emotional and cognitive dimension to it, Mathilde Stomp and her colleagues at the University of Rennes 1 reported in the open-access journal,
PLOS ONE.
Since pain reflects neural activity in the brain, there has been a growing interest in exploring resting-state electroencephalograms (EEGs) for evidence of its presence. An EEG is a test that detects electrical activity in the brain using electrodes placed on the head.