Stillness, in a hunt, is not cowardice but a hack on another brain. A rabbit that freezes is not just hiding its body; it is forcing a predator’s visual system to ignore it. Many carnivores rely on motion-sensitive neurons in the retina and midbrain that fire most when contrast edges move across their field.
Predator vision, biased this way, becomes easy to exploit. When the rabbit bolts, retinal ganglion cells tuned to motion, then neurons in the superior colliculus and visual cortex, light up in rapid bursts. Hold perfectly still, and those same circuits undergo sensory adaptation: firing rates drop, synaptic transmission quiets, and the animal’s outline is demoted to background noise.
The effect is not magic; it is signal processing. Visual systems evolved to compress data, using feature detection and lateral inhibition to highlight change and suppress static input. By cutting its own movement to near zero, the rabbit edits its salience score inside the predator’s brain. The eyes may still receive the image, yet the neural story of the scene no longer includes the rabbit.
