How do you track what an animal's brain is doing when the animal itself is moving through space in complex ways? Neuroscientist Jonathan Whitlock from NTNU Trondheim describes the technical odyssey of building a markerless motion capture pipeline for rats, and explains why simplifying your behavioral paradigm can unlock deeper scientific insights. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Jonathan Whitlock, who studies neural representations of posture and movement in the posterior parietal cortex, joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the Convergent Science Network's Alicante Cognition, Brain and Technology Winter School. The conversation explores the practical challenges of tracking animal behavior with enough precision to decode neural signals, and how those challenges led Whitlock toward a radically simpler experimental approach: having rodents chase a visual target on a screen. The discussion opens with the technical hurdles of markerless motion capture. Whitlock's lab spent years trying different marking methods, from tattoos to retroreflective paint to infrared pigments, before settling on marker-based tracking. Synchronizing neural recordings with postural data proved equally difficult, with months of data initially unusable due to insufficient temporal alignment. The payoff was substantial: discovering that even primary sensory areas encode body posture, something invisible without precise 3D tracking. The conversation then pivots to Whitlock's new paradigm: a prey-chasing task where rodents pursue a moving dot on a screen, reinforced by medial forebrain stimulation. This approach collapses the behavioral problem to two variables, distance error and heading error, while tapping into innate predatory intelligence honed by evolution. Mice and rats learn the task rapidly with minimal training, demonstrating anticipatory behavior and strategic pursuit. The discussion draws connections to predation research using crickets, subcortical circuitry in the superior colliculus and amygdala, and the broader question of how to balance technical complexity against scientific clarity. Whitlock argues that the chasing paradigm opens access to forms of biological intelligence that have been optimized through natural selection, making it a goldmine for studying sensorimotor integration, prediction, and decision-making in freely behaving animals. Part of the Convergent Science Network podcast series from the BCBT Winter School.