This effect is not restricted to the movies: people also report experiencing it in real life. If these observations proved to be reproducible, it would suggest that the brain naturally slices our visual perception into a succession of snapshots. So in 2006, Rufin VanRullen, a neuroscientist at the University of Toulouse in France, decided to recreate the illusion in his lab. Sure enough, when he span a wheel at certain speeds, all subjects reported seeing it turn the “wrong” way. “The continuity of our perception is an illusion,” he concludes.