When a fan spins really fast, why does it appear like it is spinning in the

opposite direction?

Ad by Amazon.in

Gifting Days starts today!

Gift your loved ones the latest electronics and accessories with Amazon Great Indian
festival.
Shop Now

33 Answers

Raj Arjit, It is all around us

Updated September 4, 2015 · Author has 221 answers and 4.1M answer views

A rotating wheel can appear to rotate faster, slower, reverse or even stationary to the human eye. Such
illusions happen in two forms.

1. While watching a video.

2. While seeing in real life.

The illusion while watching Video

Short answer

The rotation of the object (let's say a spoke-wheel) happens continuously while the camera records it as
"instances" in form of frames. Now humans perceive motion by, sort of, comparing the one frame with the
previous frame (very quickly). Depending on what gets recorded in the consecutive frames, different types of
illusions occur.

Long answer

Consider a wheel with 4 spokes at at equal angles from each other.

Consider the wheel to be rotating in clockwise direction. The wheel is rotating continuously but the camera
will be recording it in frames. Let's focus on the top most spoke. The current position of it is 12 o'clock.

Note: Frames refer to one of the many still images that make up the entire video.

After one frame, consider the top spoke to have rotated 3/4th of the circle (270 degrees) and is now at
position 9 o'clock. After another frame it will be at position 6, and then back to 3. So in reality the spoke
moves -

12 - (3) - (6) - 9 - (12) - (3) - 6 - (9) - (12) - 3 
in clockwise direction.

but when our eyes sees it in form of frames it is easier to relate it in counter-clockwise direction and it
appears the spoke to be moving in -

12 - 9 - 6 - 3 
in counter clockwise direction.

This creates the impression of wheel moving in reverse. Had after every frame the spoke was at 12 o'clock
position, it would had appeared to be stationary. If after each frame it had made slightly more than one
revolution then it will appear to be moving in right direction but slowly.

Another example is shown in figure below.

Image source: Sciencelet.com

The illusion in real life

This type of illusion also occurs while seeing the wheels of fast moving car or blades of a fan.

Now while the reason is quite similar considering that our eyes are also like camera. The actual reason is
debated since we do not know how exactly our eyes work (in frames?).

Neuroscientist Dave Purves and colleagues in a 1996 issue of  Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences , posits that humans perceive motion in a manner similar to a movie camera, just like frames.

But in 2004, researchers led by neuroscientist David Eagleman  demonstrated that test subjects shown two
identical wheels spinning adjacent to one another often perceived their rotation as switching direction 
independently  of one another . This observation is inconsistent with Purves' team's discrete-frame-
processing model of human perception, which, reason suggests, would result in both wheels' rotations
switching direction simultaneously.

A "better" explanation for motion-reversal, Eagleman and his team conclude, is a form of "perceptual rivalry,"
 the phenomenon by which the brain generates multiple (or flat-out wrong) interpretations of a visually
ambiguous scene.

Sources
1. IO9  
2. Wagon-wheel effect
3. Sciencelet.com

This article is a part of a Quora Book on the topic Bicycle - An Engineering Marvel.

You can download the entire book as a free pdf for offline reading - Bicycle - An Engineering
Marvel