The Predator movies1 present a rare (and to me, at least, enjoyable) thing in popular science fiction:
a coherent portrait of an intelligent and techologically advanced species hunting for ritualistic and cultural reasons, fulfilling a truly alien social ritual (and not simply biological needs and drives by hunting prey to be eaten).
I’m planning something new - a new agenda and new thinking:
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I love the Predator movies! So, let's watch them from the pov of psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, and not as popcorn spectacle. This will let us build a fairly plausible account of predator neurobiology, psychology, evolutionary history, and culture: we know that Predators have brains and bodies built for thermal perception, disciplined aggression, and long lives lived under a deep ritual constraint generated and supported by a guild-like, almost monastic, culture. (For some reason, they remind me of the various rarefied participants in The Glass Bead Game, by Hesse2).
The resulting picture is an interesting contrast with we humans - we survive our struggles with them, and in the end we defeat them, because our biology and culture favours rapid turnover, improvisation, social learning, shared memory, and coalitional action against a shared threat.
what the films tell us
We occasionally inhabit the predator’s perceptual world in Predator and Predator 2: finding infrared vision is their default, but with spectrum switching and filtering when the bio-mask is worn. The mask is much more than a protective helmet or visor: it is an integral cognitive scaffold which records, translates, stabilises prey targeting, and integrates weapon control with perception and action (much like an FPV drone does on the battlefield).
The Predators show remarkable technological continuity across long epochs of time- at least over several centuries. The invisibility cloak, tri-laser caster, med-kit, and spaceship architecture look like refinements of older designs, not technological revolutions, appearing across the differing movie eras:- ranging across the Viking era to Shogun-era Japan, the Great Plains in the to-be-USA of the 1700s, all the way to the present day.
constraints for a plausible predator brain
Our anchor points:
First, a perceptual ecology strongly tuned to heat: the predator’s default view is infrared; the bio-mask adds spectrum switching and filtering to clarify targets and suppress ambient noise.
Second, technology that supports cognition. The bio-mask augments vision, translation, recording, and targeting; the tri-laser and plasma-caster couple perception to action. The Predator is also capable of vocal mimicry and tactical learning.
Third, Prey establishes an earlier technological phenotype and a different morphological feel: the “feral predator” is leaner, with a bone mask and greater reliance on their baseline senses and simpler tools relative to later urban or off-world variants.
Finally, the franchise has turned historical and animated: Predator: Killer of Killers (think about that title - the Predators hunt killers) places Predator hunts in Viking Scandinavia, feudal Japan, and WW2 Florida.
The point: repeated encounters with these very diverse earth ecologies implies a generalist cognitive architecture shaped for rapid, adaptive learning oriented toward specific cultural ends: ritualistic hunts as a rite of passage within an ordered and hierarchical, guild-like, society. There is also a constant honour code separating worthy from unworthy prey, restraining who the Predator targets and attacks, or indeed spares from death.
umwelt: a thermal-first world
A predator’s “natural” scene segmentation uses heat gradients, not the edges and shapes and colours we humans use. A brain evolved for such a world would have to devote heavy resources to registering and stabilising thermal structures across time and space (more on umwelt here).
They seem to detect motion only when movement disturbs hot air or because our bodies are themselves surfaces of convection - so fresh footprints leave heat, then fade: edge detection is replaced by temperature contrast detection. A human in deep shade almost vanishes, but a hot lamp or discharged gun becomes a target.
In humans, the superior colliculus and pulvinar help couple sensory input to orienting and attention. In predators, a homologous midbrain pathway would plausibly be enlarged and tuned specifically for multi-spectral registration. Occipital regions would extract something like thermal flow, the analogue of optic flow, useful for predicting a prey trail through smoke, brush, or rain.
Prediction: the midbrain and posterior cortical systems should be hypertrophic for multispectral registration: there must be an enlarged optic tectum–pulvinar complex integrating infrared and short-wave inputs, coupled to fast head–eye orienting circuits. Predator neocortex would devote serious territory to “thermal flow” processing: the equivalent of optic flow but for shifting heat fields, useful for tracking prey through brush or smoke.
One thing I don’t quite get: they have two forward-facing, mobile, eyes, so Predators can potentially see the world in stereoscopic 3d - but they don’t seem to. Instead, when we see what the Predator sees, we encounter a visual world of thermal gradients, not at all like the world that we see.
heat–brain coupling: thermoregulation as a cognitive variable
Heat is sensed by Predators and humans, but using very different sensory channels; heat is dangerous and must be managed, because heat gain disturbs and damages biological systems unless they are specifically adapted to it.
The heavy exertion of the Predator in hot, humid environments creates the classic problem: maintaining cognitive, neural, and behavioural precision under thermal load. This is something humans struggle with - our biological fix is sweating and surface vasodilation, and our tech fix is air conditioning.
Cortical temperature must be held in a narrow band: the physiology we glimpse suggests a (neuro-)vascular system built for heat exchange and rapid metabolic heat clearance.
I expect Predators have a two-tier solution: peripheral heat shedding via biological and technological adaptations. The neck and scalp protects cortical temperature by allowing heat loss; and central adaptations widen the operating window: bodily enzymes with higher heat tolerances; synaptic kinetics which tolerate elevated temperatures; a blood vasculature that shunts blood rapidly to and from brain regions during combat.
I don’t know enough to say much about their green, flourescent blood, but there is on our world green, flourescent protein which is found in jellyfish and e. coli ( and which is used as a marker for gene expression in lab experiments). So green blood is not an outlandish idea.
The behavioural corollary is that Predators prefer brief, explosive cobat tussles, with cooling afterwards, meaning they are sprinters, not marathon runners - but they can sprint very quickly indeed (don’t try and outrun one!). Remember: tigers are sprinters, not long-distance marathon runners - but they catch gazelles (and they’ll catch you)!
body plan and motor intelligence: quiet strength, elastic force
Predator motor control blends feline stealth and primate planning; they move quickly, explosively, precisely, and most of all, lethally. The silent locomotion of the Predator requires a compliant foot design with co-contraction patterns absorbing heel-strikes and foot placement noise.
Predators are, of course, (humanoid) bipedal walkers: with alternating action between lower extremities, with one leg in touch with the ground for restraining, supporting and propulsion, while the other leg is in the swing phase, creating a new step forward.
Predator gait, like human gait, results from rhythmic alternating movement of arms, legs, and trunk, creating forward movement of the body.
Predator power delivery during locomotion suggests long-tendon elastic recoil; jumps are brief; landings are controlled to avoid noisy ground friction.
But there’s something else: they jump down from a considerable height and can absorb the compression shock from jumping and landing, so their bone structure must be adapted to kinetic loads far exceeding those of humans.
reward, ritual, and restraint: the cognitive economy of the hunt
The “fun” of the hunt is gated by very specific social norms: they do not take unarmed prey; Predators seek worthy contests with adversaries, taking trophies as memory tokens for museum display, rather than caloric value - we often see them striping and cleaning skulls and spinal columns, but we never see them eating.
Adolescents likely undergo rite-of-passage hunts where success feeds back onto hierarchical status, and failure triggers corrective training, not simple exclusion.
A Predator advances through successive cycles of hypothesis, probe, and update, because, with thermal vision, there is a lot of ambiguity in thermally homogeneous scenes. So they test: throwing a decoy to perturb someone lying in wait; using laser traces to elicit flinch; mimicry calls to test the target.
I expect prefrontal cortical systems excelling at counterfactual simulation: “if the target is here, then the heat plume will do this; if cloaked, my own movement wake will do that.”
interiority: what it might feel like to be one
Subjectively, what is it like to be a predator? I imagine a subjective world suffused with heat-related colour gradients; faces that convey specific heat convection signatures; emotion displays showing as little flares in the cheeks, throat, in a suddenly pulsing heart. If faces provide convection signatures, then trust will feel like thermal constancy and deceit like a flicker in the heat grammar of a body.
Pride will feel like warmth spreading through the thorax and mandibles. Shame will feel like cooling at the skin, a retreat of warmth to the core. Grief will feel like absence, the missing signature of a companion in the social surround. Memory will be replay of heat paths across terrain, anchored by the sounds and impacts that carried the hunt from hypothesis to execution.
Predator language must be coupled closely to action: short, information-dense utterances, layered with clicks and timed exhalations using mask microphones. Narrative memory is tactile-thermal: a hunt is remembered as a path of heat flows through terrain, annotated with sounds and impacts.
the mask as cognitive exoskeleton
When the jungle hunter removes its mask to face Dutch at the end of Predator, the moment reads as ritual and revelation. The mask is a memory prosthesis, a spectral stabiliser, a translator, and a control interface that collapses weapon guidance into the animal’s body schema. In cognitive terms it functions like language and writing do for us: the mask externalises memory, compresses streaming experience into teachable episodes, and allows cumulative culture to persist beyond any single lifespan. A maskless predator is lethal, but partly disembodied, lacking something necessary, as if a human were thinking without notes, tools, archives, weapons, or maps.
emotion, restraint, and reward
Predators signal irritation, surprise, even a cold pride, but rarely if ever uncontrolled rage. That fits both their ecology and biological theory. Rage wastes energy, blow their thermal cover, and invites flanking attacks by dangerous prey.
A species selected for ritualised precision attacks would evolve strong prefrontal control coupled to a reward system integrated combat to compliance with their honour code.
In Predator the mask is taken off, the plasma caster put aside to equalise the final fight; in Prey the feral hunter is visibly wrong-footed and frustrated, yet remains tactical until the end.
diet, metabolism, and the cultural separation of food and hunt
Their size, musculature, and performance implies a high protein, high fat metabolism. On their homeworld, fuel is other large, dangerous animals. Organ preference would make sense, since brain, liver, and marrow carry dense calories and trace metals needed for metabolic function.
what predators eat: the fuel of an alien hunter
Remember, though, humans are trophies, not meals. Feasting appears within the clan rather than on the battlefield. Food is fuel and social glue for humans and predators alike.
The films never really explore the most basic biological question: what do predators actually eat?
If we think ecologically and physiologically, a plausible picture emerges:
Predators are large (over two metres tall), massively muscled, and capable of explosive bursts of exertion - that physiology demands dense fuel high protein and fat, and lesser reliance on sugars (think tigers, lions).
On their homeworld, predators are almost certainly hypercarnivores:
large dangerous prey: their ecology is predator-rich and thermally hostile. survival means eating other formidable creatures.
organ preference: brains, liver, marrow (the most calorie- and micronutrient-dense parts).
plant use: limited, but not absent. plants may provide medicine, thermoregulation, or wound healing rather than calories.
humans are not food: human bones are trophies, not meals.
humans: omnivorous generalists, dependent on fire to unlock calories from starch and fibre, and turning food into culture, art, and identity.
predators: obligate carnivores, focused on dense protein–fat prey. Cooking is minimal: food is fuel and a reminder of danger overcome, not aesthetic creation.
we ritualise food; they ritualise the hunt…
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sex, parenting, and life history
Life history theory explains a great deal. Low fecundity, long gestation, and precocial young who can move and sense from birth fit a dangerous ecology. Training must take decades: so there is probably biparental care, apprenticeship, and rite-of-passage hunts taking juveniles into adulthood.
Subtle ornamentation differences, including mandible patterning and pigmentation, could carry status and sex signals without obvious human-visible dimorphism.
Body plan: all the hunters are large, heavily muscled, and bipedal; we do not see any obvious dimorphisms like in humans or gorillas. That suggests either (a) low dimorphism overall, with both sexes participating in hunting, or (b) male hunters only, with females less often shown because they remain in non-hunting contexts.
Prediction: subtle dimorphism, more like wolves than lions. both sexes are hunters, but elite ritual hunting (shown on-screen) seems disproportionately male, while females engage in other hunts and social roles.
reproductive system
A plausible architecture is a reptile–mammal intermediate (live birth vs. egg-laying): their physiology (green phosphorescent blood, endothermic-like activity) suggests high metabolic costs; so gestation in vivo is more likely than external eggs, unless incubation is communal.
gestation: a long, energy-intensive gestation (perhaps 18–24 months), producing few offspring, fits with their long lifespan and heavy investment in training.
offspring development: young likely emerge precocial: teeth, muscle tone, and sensory systems functional at or soon after birth.
demography and civilisation
A species with very low fertility and very long life will experience slow generational turnover -that has very predictable consequences for culture: apprenticeships are narrow bottlenecks; elders hold authority for many decades and perhaps even centuries; archives preserve continuity, binding practice to precedent.
In such a system, innovation is not impossible, but expensive to socialise, and easy to punish. The technology we see across Predator, Predator 2, and Prey looks like a refined tech plateau to support ritual hunting; this is not a civilisation committed to open-ended discovery for its own sake.
technology without science
Predators clearly once did science: there is no other route to interstellar transport, advanced materials, surgical kits to close wounds in the field, or light-bending camo. BUT: the films do not show a living epistemic culture:- they show a guild that perfects tools toward an unchanging goal. In human terms, their culture resembles a monastic or aristocratic order that refines practice over centuries while forbidding disruptive novelty (yes, The Glass Bead Game!).
Low fertility and long life are the demographic ground for this innovation stasis, and an honour culture supplies the normative trap. Taken together, they explain why a species that can cross the stars can still be surprised by mud, mist, and a trap line.
political organisation: clans, not states
clan-based: predators seem to organise into extended kinship or hunting clans rather than centralised nation-states. Each clan is semi-autonomous, but bound by shared codes of honour and ritual.
council or conclave: the sporadic glimpses of elders imply a tier of senior hunters who arbitrate disputes and bestow honours (resembling a gerontocracy, not a democracy).
expansion without empire: their repeated interventions across planets (earth at multiple historical epochs) suggest a political order oriented around hunting grounds, not territorial colonisation.
status economy: prestige is gained not through wealth accumulation but through trophies, scars, and successful hunts.
elder role: elders function as judges, archivists, and law-givers; their authority rests on long life and accumulated memory.
challenge system: younger hunters may rise through ritual challenge or by undertaking especially difficult prey, and thus the social hierarchy is fluid, achievement-based, but tightly regulated by honour norms.
punishment: dishonour or rule-breaking leads to ostracism, confiscation of trophies, or even ritual execution. this ensures coherence of norms across clans.
legitimacy: authority is rooted in demonstration of competence, not abstract ideology.
comparative evolution: parallel minds, different niches
It is tempting to make the predators a sort of ‘anti-human’, but that would be a mistake, a category error. Phylogenetically, they are best seen as a parallel species to us - complex, intelligent, technologically-sophisticated, with large, metabolically costly brains that pay for themselves by turning information into survival.
Both rely on external memory systems extending personal recall into cumulative culture. Both teach, both ritualise (they bury their dead), both carry norms that stabilise cooperation among aggressive individuals.
The divergence arises from niche and life history. Predators come from a hot, predator-rich world where dangerous prey are the main resource and where solitary precision pays. Humans come from savannah and woodland where cooperation, language, and opportunism pay. Predators specialise in depth in an honour-bound game, whereas we humans specialise in breadth, uncommitted to a particular strategy.
why humans eventually win
In the jungle, Dutch survives because he refuses the terms of a duel, using mud to hide his thermal signature, and uses simple but effective traps as a low tech, surprising, and unexpected fight back.
In Los Angeles, Harrigan survives because he keeps moving and keeps learning, even as the technology outclasses him.
In the Great Plains, Naru survives because she builds a cognitive model of the hunter’s blind spots and operationalises it with local knowledge of herbals, tracks, and rivers, and especially a deep mud trap.
Our human advantage is not individual strength or courage: it is applying cumulative culture and social learning under acute time pressure and stress. We share information with each other quickly and easily, we are happy with improvisation, and are indifferent to ritual fairness when survival is at stake.
Working memory is finite in a person, but it is large in a group that speaks, gestures, tell stories, and remembers. Humans are good at this because neural circuits for joint attention and mentalising make it easy for us to align attention and focus together on a joint problem, and we seek novelty and exploration when problem-solving.
Conclusions
For humans and predators alike, cognition is ecological and cultural, sitting inside a brain and body that must regulate heat and noise and force and threat. Cognition also sits inside a life history strategy setting the pace of learning and the rate of generational change. Cognition also sits inside institutions rewarding either open-ended search (humans) or perfected repetition (predators).
Predators are a case study of what happens when biology favours continuity and culture sanctifies it, whereas humans are what happens when biology forces rapid turnover and culture exploits it.
One gives you elite hunters who never lose their composure under stress and threat; the other gives you fragile primates who love novelty, learn, and who share their learning with others, and win through the collective, not the individual - it doesn’t matter who dies, one of us, or a few of us, will learn from the Predators, and eventually kill them.
Humans have shorter lives, messy social groups with constant information sharing between each other, and we can turn this into a cumulative memory supporting flexible action. And against a solitary Predator, that is enough.
However, Predators feel like they’re at a scientific and technological dead-end, because their long lives and low fertility slow the tempo of social and technological change.
Humans do not, it is because our constant restless churn, adaptation, and learning from each other drives us - and this is the reason Dutch, Harrigan, and Naru survive.
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From Predator (1987) through Predator 2, Prey (2022), Predator: Killer of Killers (2025; the animated science fiction action horror, and not forgetting the crossover Alien/Predator movies: here’s a list)
“The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date centuries in the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book’s narrator writing around the start of the 25th century.[5] The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools, and to cultivate and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school in Castalia known as Waldzell. The rules of the game are only alluded to—they are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. The game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics.” I know it’s fanciful, but this is a world where the pursuit of a single object - the Game - is the only thing that matters. For Predators - the hunt is the only thing that matters!