The Travelling Train Tracks: The Illusion of Temporal Aliasing

I filmed the video below from a train on my way to the town of Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic. The way the tracks seem to “travel” next to each other and then merge is really cool. This is due to the fact that the wooden blocks of the train tracks (called sleepers or ties) seem to be moving in the same direction that the train is moving even though in reality they are receding as the train moves forward. This effect is called "temporal aliasing", and it is the same effect that you see in the spokes of the rotating wheel of a wagon. In the case of the camera, this happens because it does not record reality in a continuous fashion. Rather the camera samples reality a number of times per second, and the samples are put together to generate the video. This is similar to how the old celluloid movies would generate the perception of motion from different successive frames each displaying different stages of a movement. If the sampling rate is not appropriate to record a moving object, the object will appear to move in a direction that is illusory, such as is the case of the wooden blocks in my video.
 
Whether the human eye/brain system takes samples of reality like a camera is controversial, and there is evidence both in favor and against this hypothesis. The interesting thing about my video is that I could not see this forward motion of the wooden blocks with my own eyes, because the blocks became a blur when the train was moving fast. I could only see it with the camera!
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