Is there a name for this phenomena? Or maybe its just me...

[drad_dog]

@Dale_Sams

You see an animal you’ve never seen before, or not in a long time and your brain makes it look like something you are familiar with.

Then as you realize it isn’t what you thought…theres a slight moment of nausea as it transforms into its real form.

ex: Once I saw a possum at a distance, my brain made it look like a cat…but its movements were nothing like that…so when it stopped being a cat and turned into a posssum, i got dizzy and nauseous. Just for a split second.

Same thing happened to me with a fox at a distance on a street.

Slightly related, i’ve seen PEOPLE i thought were people i knew…and let me tell you the second you start talking to them as if they are the person you know and you realize its someone you dont know…is very unsettling. Not nauseous, but weird for sure,

It might be possums. I had an urban possum encounter and I got confused. They look like a cross between other animals and a first encounter makes you do some thinking.

[K2500]

@Darren_Garrison

I don’t know a term for it but it isn’t especially unusual–we don’t really “see” what we see so much as our brain interpreting internally-learned models. If we see something completely new or something familiar in an unexpected context from a distance, our brains may “fill in” the image one way before suddenly switching to another, sort of like the switching of a Necker cube. There have been a number of times that I’ve seen something but couldn’t actually “see” it until I reasoned out what it was. Most recently was just a couple of days ago–I was sitting outside and noticed a small red box around 10 feet in front of me. I had to stare at it for several seconds before my brain saw it for what it was–half of one of those small red bricks, which I had recently used to pound a stake into the ground. Not a solid one, but one that had three small round holes, so the broken side was very bumpy. But I saw it as a perfect cube until my brain interpreted otherwise.

While viewing the necker cube and “willing” it to switch orientation back and forth I did get a slight, momentary feeling similar to nausea. It was odd.

[TSBG]

Could it be fear related? Maybe the visual confusion is triggering a fight or flight kind of reaction, only there’s nothing to fight or flee? I know I get stomach problems when stressed or scared. Although I also have unrelated stomach problems even when not stressed or scared so maybe my experience isn’t even a good anecdatum.

ETA, I too have had the experience of mis-identifying something–“Holy shit that’s a huge cockroach oh wait it’s just a piece of bark.” But it’s not accompanied by nausea as far as I remember.

[Chronos]

Quoth mbh:

That’s a weird-looking cat, with a bushy tail and a white stripe . . . oh, sh#%.

Yeah, I’ve had that one, too. Twice. Once with a “cat” and once with a “squirrel”. Fortunately, both times, both I and the other mammal minded our own business and kept our distance.

EDIT: And while I wouldn’t describe the sensation as “nausea”, it is a bit like dizziness. Sort of all of the parts of dizziness other than nausea.

[araminty]

@Qadgop_the_Mercotan

Saw a sandhill crane, my brain saw an ostrich.

Similarly, I saw a big male wild turkey and my brain screamed “cassowary!” True, I had recently moved from Australia to California…

[Andy_L]

I’m reminded of the story of the “red spade” experiment (asking people to identify playing cards and slipping a few weird ones into the mix): https://bornintocolour.wordpress.com/basics-of-culture/perception/playing-cards/

Sometimes this happens:

“And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!””

[Dale_Sams]

@Andy_L

I’m reminded of the story of the “red spade” experiment (asking people to identify playing cards and slipping a few weird ones into the mix): https://bornintocolour.wordpress.com/basics-of-culture/perception/playing-cards/

Sometimes this happens:

“And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!””

That happens to me when im expediting the food line too long at a restaurant.

The words stop making sense, i can’t read them and associate them with the food until after I’ve taken a break.

[Kimstu]

I think what the OP is talking about may be related to something called “visual vertigo” or “visual vestibular mismatch”, “an inappropriate response to motion of the visual environment due to overreliance or misinterpretation of visual cues”. This is also called “visual dependence” or “see sick [not “sea sick”] syndrome”.

More specifically, there are optical illusions called “anomalous motion illusions” that are well-known for making some subjects feel dizzy or nauseous. Here’s a description by a computer scientist of some of the technical issues with anomalous motion illusions, and here’s a classification of different kinds of AMI’s.

So as other posters have suggested, I’d guess that the sudden perceptual shift from one animal to another is acting on the OP like one of those optical illusions. Why exactly optical illusions can make people feel dizzy or nauseous I don’t know.