Have you ever seen a wheel in a video that looks like it’s spinning the wrong way?

In the forest we call it “the proud wheel”. You can see the cart moving forward down the path, but the wheel looks like it’s going backwards, like it just wants to disagree with the oxen. It’s not that the wheel has lost its marbles or that the driver accidentally threw it into reverse. It’s really a little trick your eyes and cameras fall for when they watch something spinning super fast.

What is the stroboscopic effect?

To get it, picture one of those tiny flipbooks where you draw a little doodle in the corner of every page. If you flick the pages fast, the drawing looks like it moves. Video cameras do the same thing, they take lots of pictures one after another, really quickly, then stitch them together. The glitch happens when the wheel spins at a speed that doesn’t line up with the camera’s rhythm. Imagine the camera snaps a frame when one point on the wheel is right at the top. If, by the next frame, the wheel has almost done a full turn but stops just a tiny bit before reaching the top again, your brain gets confused. It thinks the wheel moved a little backwards instead of making almost the whole turn forward. It’s like blinking super fast while someone is dancing. You only catch little slices of the movement and your brain fills in the rest the best it can.

This happens to us in the workshop too with fans, or with some lights that flicker so fast we don’t notice. They still change the way we see things that move. In the end, what we see depends completely on the rhythm we use to look at the world.

Magikita conclusion: sometimes the “unbelievable”, or what looks like it’s going backwards, isn’t out there in the world. It’s in the way we’re looking. If you change the rhythm you use to watch your problems, you might realize they’re not going backwards at all. They’re moving forward in a way you just hadn’t decoded yet.