For almost a century, even since Pavlov’s work, scientific evidence seemed to show that once an emotional response pattern is consolidated (stored in the brain’s long-term memory circuits) it becomes indelible, permanent, for the rest of the animal’s or individual’s life.

Based on this presumption of indelibility, it seemed that the best thing to do to stop an entrenched “negative” response was to crush it and counter it with a preferable “positive” response, learned and built to compete with the undesirable one. A common equine example is the use of reward or desensitization to counteract anxiety or panic responses and cultivate behaviours that will counteract the undesirable ones being expressed.

As a result, widely used intervention and training techniques are some form of corrective approach*, such as non-associative learning (habituation, sensitization, immersion) and associative learning (conditioning with positive or negative reinforcement).

However, it is now well proven scientifically that unwanted implicit memory circuits remain fully intact even when successfully blocked by correction- or habituation-based methods. The old response can therefore return at any time, and vulnerability to relapse is an inherent weakness of all these approaches.

The intervention landscape is changing fundamentally with recent discoveries by neuroscientists of memory reconsolidation, a form of neuroplasticity that allows a schema, or problematic learning stored in long-term memory, to be erased, rewritten, and not just overwritten or overridden by learning a preferable response. For a review of the literature and an explanation of reconsolidation, please consult the reading list at the end of the page.

Equine Memory Rewriting uses the same processes that neuroscientists have identified for memory reconsolidation. How is this fundamentally different from the corrective approach? If an equine is guided to have experiences that dissolve and rewrite the learning or schemas that cause anxiety, for example, that anxiety simply won’t happen anymore. There’s nothing left to circumvent, correct or oppose, and no possibility of relapse. Anxiety ceases without the need for a corrective process whereby the equine will receive rewards, punishments or have to work around its anxious state to build a non-anxious state.

This is the kind of deep, lasting change that EMR © generates. The discovery of this reconsolidation provides a neurophysiological understanding of why such change can occur in interventions.

Many practitioners achieve such transformative changes from time to time, by chance. EMR © is designed to produce these profound changes on a regular and systematic basis in practitioners’ interventions.

*corrective approach: any intervention or method that aims to oppose, circumvent, inhibit, punish or reinforce a behaviour or psychological state. A term used to differentiate corrective methods and interventions (without the TRP) from transformative methods and interventions that use the TRP.

** Thanks to Services équins France Fortin for her visual contribution (horse and daughter looking at a book) in the EMR © video clip.