It’s not quite the same thing but, after using the Kindle for Ipad app for a long time, I sometimes find myself doing the swipe page-turn motion to try and change the page when I’m reading printed books and magazines.

I had a minor fuel spill in the garage, and obviously I looked around to see if there were any hazards nearby.

About a meter away was a red barrel, and I knew immediately the the danger – “If I so much as touch/punch that, it’ll explode!”

Last year I would see the propane tank in my mom’s backyard and it’d make me think of Left 4 Dead. Funny stuff, but it goes away easily.

I’ve found the absolute worst game for this for me is Minecraft since my visual field will then seem to be organized in blocks. The first time I played the game (for several hours straight) I was seeing depth in anything linear, especially text.

I’m not sure this is limited to video games or computers though, as others have noted. I know personally I get kinesthetic “ghosts” after swimming where I still feel as if I am swimming and that it would be appropriate to move as if I were. The visual field thing happens to me anytime I have to do prolonged perceptual searching. For example I went berry picking for raspberries in the wild a few months ago and afterwards my interior environment had inappropriate depth and structure more akin to trees and bushes. I also find that weird things happen to shadows and forms (especially of fabric) if I am painting or drawing for a few days.

I figure it’s a combination of two related things: 1. inappropriate generalization of recently used perceptual/action strategies and 2. encoding of procedural memory to the brain leaking into consciousness for some reason. I would assume that both are due to your brain/body trying very hard to learn these things and maybe due to the fact that they are behaviors which mimic (or are!) important survival behaviors such as foraging and navigating.

What I wonder is if the same thing happens with other long term exposure to stylized realities, be they cartoons (watch 4 hours of Disney and see what happens, or even static images (do graphic designers start seeing the world in the style they are currently working in?).

Game stuff: “That streetlamp looks ideal for a grappling hook”

But I think applying the concept merely to games is a bit too specific. After studying thermodynamics for a while, for example, it’s easy to see it in everything one does (hot tea cooling, kitchen spills evaporating etc).

Maybe it’s just in human nature to seek to apply what we’ve experienced to new situations.