History Main / YouCanNotGraspTheTrueForm

* ''Manga/ChainsawMan'': Devils are manifestations of human fears and phobias, growing more powerful the more common and the more intense that fear is. The Darkness Devil, representing the primal fear of the dark, is therefore an entity of almost literally incomprehensible power. While its physical form is easy enough to perceive, if bizarre, its attacks are preceded by surreal imagery, such as croaking frogs or praying astronauts, that have no causal relationship to the ''result'' of those attacks.

* In ''LightNovel/TheCircumstancesLeadingToWaltrautesMarriage'', Freyja in her full glory cannot be properly seen by mortals and is perceived as an intensely bright light. She has to power down to communicate with Jack.

* ''LightNovel/NyarukoCrawlingWithLove'':

[[caption-width-right:350:Apparently, [[Characters/MarvelComicsGalactus a gigantic man in a purple suit and an oversized helmet]] [[HumansAreMorons is the most complicated form humanity can grasp]].]]

* ''Film/AScannerDarkly'', the [[{{rotoscoping}} rotoscope]] animated film based on the Creator/PhilipKDick story, had an interesting take on this.

* Foxface's special attack in ''VideoGame/ShadowHearts'' is just called !!!. [[HPTo1 It reduces Yuri's HP to 1 no matter what they were before.]]

[[TruthInTelevision More possible in real life than you may think]], just be prepared before clicking the RealLife subpage open—[[MindScrew you may leave with a headache.]]

* ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'': The Face of Fear is obscured by a helmet that the monster in question only opens to kill people with his NightmareFace, but he doesn't actually have a real face. It's always reflecting the [[YourWorstNightmare most deep-seated terror]] of the person who lays eyes upon it. However, if they're not actually afraid of him, it doesn't work at all, which once got him a fist through his skull from Dredd.

Imagine if some non-human entity, such as, let's say, Website/TVTropes, became a three-dimensional living entity with self-awareness and consciousness, that wanted to sit down and have a lovely little chat. What would it look like? Like a [[MoeAnthropomorphism surprisingly feminine, charming little sprite]] named JustForFun/TropeTan? [[MatrixRainingCode Walls and walls of PHP code that resolve themselves into a house-like shape?]] Or perhaps a whole universe, a world, complete in and of itself?

At some point in the conversation, the personification of TV Tropes drops a little MindScrew in your tea: [[TheTreacheryOfImages you are not looking at, or conversing with, all that TV Tropes is]]. You are not even seeing an [[{{Glamour}} illusion that TV Tropes is projecting into your mind]]. Rather, the sheer [[SugarWiki/SweetExists awesomeness]] of TV Tropes, the might and [[DarthWiki/ThisExists immense hideousness of it]], or [[JustForFun/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife its life-ruining influence]] bypass your eyes and occipital lobe entirely, and your mind meekly registers it as the closest, safest, yet still comparable thing on hand.[[note]]For safety's sake, just say DarthWiki/TheWikiWitchOfTheWeb put a spell on you[[/note]] You Cannot Grasp The True Form, or else you will GoMadFromTheRevelation. May overlap with BrownNoteBeing.

When someone is in a truly outlandish environment, their brain will just make up stuff for them to see. Usually an excuse for the artist not to have to draw the weird other-dimensional stuff.

[[TruthInTelevision More possible in real life than you may think]], just be prepared before clicking the real life folder open—[[MindScrew you may leave with a headache.]]

* {{Downplayed|Trope}} in ''Manga/{{Bleach}}'': If a being has an extraordinarily-high level of spiritual power, it cannot be sensed by people whose spiritual power is too low, meaning only those whose {{Power Level|s}} is sufficiently close to that of the opponent can sense it. [[BoringButPractical You'll still be able to see them with your eyes, though]].

[[folder:Real Life]]
* Color and perception both have plenty of unusual examples:
** Ever wondered why PurpleIsTheNewBlack? '''[[Analysis/PurpleIsTheNewBlack Because there is no black.]]''' A true black would reflect no light whatsoever and would look like a hole in space. That only happens in black holes. Since vision works by light reflecting off of objects, and true black is the absorption of light, our human eyes literally ''cannot'' see true black. A good demonstration is [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack Vantablack]]. That photo is neither a pile of it sitting on a sheet of aluminum foil, nor is it a PortableHole. It's simply a layer of Vantablack coating a sheet of foil. The reason it looks like a blank, formless blob is because it absorbs all the light needed to see the foil's crinkles and ridges.
** One of the great challenges for an artist learning advanced color theory is to get comfortable with exploiting the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy Color Constancy illusion]]. In any piece with strong MoodLighting, colors you think you are seeing are usually just slight tints of one or two hues. What looks like a strong green in the image may actually be, say, a pale orange-grey -- it only ''looks'' green compared to the colors around it.
** The color magenta does not correspond to a single wavelength of light, and is not part of the light spectrum -- there is no such thing as "pure" magenta light. Rather, it is the brain's way of interpreting multiple wavelengths of light from disparate parts of the color spectrum being received by your eye at the same time. [[http://www.biotele.com/magenta.html In the case of magenta, it is a combination of red and violet light, which are from opposite ends of the color spectrum; in order to "properly" interpret this, rather than seeing it as an intermediate color, the human brain instead perceives it as magenta.]] \\
Yet while pink is often highlighted as an example of such an "unnatural" color, in reality, the majority of colors humans see are this -- anything which is not one of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spectrum.svg colors of the rainbow]] is the human brain's way of interpreting a mixture of different wavelengths of light. Scientists who study this have created [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space#/media/File:CIE-1931_diagram_in_LAB_space.svg a map of colors where only the outer edge of the curve corresponds to light on the visible spectrum, the rest is human perception.]] Indeed, white and gray are the most common examples -- white light is merely light which contains a mixture of light wavelengths in high enough and close-to-equal concentration, whereas gray is the same thing, only there is less stimulation. Thus, while there is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet light, colors like pink, white, and black are mixtures of light. In the color map, a large part is shown as green, because a large number of the possible colors and hues humans can see are shades of green, as human eyes have their greatest peak in the green part of the spectrum. Creatures with different peaks for their visual spectrum would likely interpret such mixed colors in a different way. A fascinating experiment involving a similar illusory color made from tiny checkerboards of green and red proved impossible to describe properly in normal terms. Trained artists could describe aspects of it like its chroma value and saturation, but the color itself refused categorization within the color wheel.
** [[SchmuckBait Try to imagine a completely new colour.]] Just try it. You can't. The brain cannot process or even imagine a color that is outside the range of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans. This is why Don Joyce's "Squant" never ceases to madden people with its premise and Crosley's matter-of-fact discussion.
** Language is also linked to our perception of colors. If a language and culture has a bigger difference between colors, people in that society are better able to distinguish colors. This goes the other way too, as people who lack distinctions for colors are slower to recognize differences between them. However, the idea that they are incapable of doing so is pure myth; the difference is in fractions of a second of recognition speed, not actual differences in visual acuity. There is evidence that colors which humans cannot manufacture do not have names and are therefore not recognized. Scholars have studied ancient texts, including ''Literature/TheIliad'' and ''Literature/TheOdyssey'', specifically looking at the usage of color words. Many very strange color identifications are given: Green Honey[[note]]there is such a thing, although it's very rare[[/note]], Violet Sheep[[note]]look at a flock when the sun is setting[[/note]], and Wine-Dark Seas. These were often regarded as "colorful" metaphors until linguist Guy Deutscher realized '''there is no blue mentioned in them anywhere'''. At the time there were no blue dyes available[[note]]Lapis lazuli had been mined in Afghanistan for at least 6000 years prior to the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey''. It was exported to Egypt and elsewhere, used for jewelry, mosaics and floor tiles, even ground to make pigment. The Greeks would have known about it, but might have spoken of it as purple or dark green.[[/note]] and there simply wasn't a word for blue, so people had to use other colors to describe what we now know as blue. This is a pattern across all cultures: color usage appears in stages, and blue is always last. This can also be seen in young children; if they don't yet know a color they'll refer to things of that color by a color they do know. An example, again involving blue, children will refer to the sky as white (which most adults will reflexively say is blue) before they know the color blue.
** Some people have four types of cone cells [[note]]the type of cell which is primarily responsible for our perception of color[[/note]] in their eyes rather than three, which gives them a small advantage in distinguishing colors, particularly in the red region of the spectrum. Because these genes are carried on the X chromosome, this condition is more common in women, but some men also carry both variants of the red-green gene on a single X chromosome. [[note]]You aren't missing much if you don't have this condition, for the record. It mostly just makes it really, really frustrating to set the gamma on your monitor using only three colors, and makes people look at you funny when you try to explain the obvious difference between red and dark maroon.[[/note]] People with only two sets of cone cells instead of three (color blindness) or with inadequate numbers of or malfunctioning cone cells (milder forms of color blindness) are less able to distinguish colors, and as a result colors which contain light of the wavelength they are "blind" to appear considerably different to them. Related to this are images taken by telescopes (or other instruments for the case) designed to work with wavelengths that do not correspond with visible light, like [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope Spitzer]] (infrared) or [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_X-ray_Observatory Chandra]] (X-Rays). The images of SpaceClouds that we see that have been taken by them are actually processed false-color images so we can see them with our eyes; if they were sensible to those wavelengths while we'd see something more or less with the same aspect (ie: an infrared-bright region of star formation, an X-Ray emitting galactic nucleus, etc) their "colors" would be quite different.
** In (amateur) astronomy, an interesting physiological effect takes often place when observing a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_star double star]], as the less bright of the pair is seen in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors complementary color]] of the brightest one -ie, when observing a double whose brightest component is orange seeing the less luminous as green or blue, even if it's actually yellow or white. Likewise, contrast effects on them can let at least in some people see colors not actually present on stars, or at least not in one of that spectral type (faint pink, deep blue, etc).
** Starlight in general. It takes the Sun's light eight minutes to reach the Earth, so the "Sun" lighting up the sky right now is actually what it looked like eight minutes ago, and the Alpha Centauri system (including Proxima Centauri) is as it was 4 years in the past when we view it through telescopes. For more distant stars, like the Virgo cluster, we're seeing how they looked when dinosaurs walked the earth, or ''[[TimeAbyss even earlier]]''. Astronomers call this phenomenon "lookback time".
** Human brains are designed to perceive the world in three dimensions, but the human eye only perceives the world in two dimensions. The brain uses the 2-dimensional input from each eye in addition to some image process recognition to construct the perception of a third dimension inside the brain, which is why people with only one eye have diminished depth perception. This can be thrown off in various well-known ways, such as presenting a different image to each eye -- something 3D glasses take advantage of to create a stronger illusion of the third dimension from a 2D image. Many visual illusions take advantage of the brain's visual processing -- perspective in paintings is a matter of tricking the eye into seeing 3D distance which is not actually present, while real-world environments can be constructed in order to trick the brain into seeing a 3D space as being larger, smaller, or otherwise strangely shaped. Because the brain is designed to construct 3D images, it makes visualizing an object which has more than three spatial dimensions, such as some mathematical constructs, very strange -- one of the more common ways of doing so is essentially taking 3-dimensional "slices" of a 4D object, and presenting them in series over time. Similarly, human brains are designed to only perceive one dimension of time. Time and space aren't intrinsically different from one-another, so in the same way that a 1-dimensional being could not perceive the concept of turning around, we can only see the flow of time in one direction. If the universe had two or more dimensions of time, then you could "turn around" and face the past. What that would look like is anyone's guess.
** Even the concept of the ''third'' dimension can be mind-blowing to some people. Various conditions like [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyopia amblyopia]] exist, which can inhibit or remove depth perception. As an attempt to explain it to people without the condition, imagine only viewing the world through the screen on a digital camera.
** [[http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspot1.html Blind spots]]. Your brain compensates for the existing blind spots in your eyes (spots which are not covered with cones or rods due to the presence of the optical nerve), filling in the lost information. People who get retinal burns (because of handling lasers or arc welders carelessly, for example) get additional blind spots in addition to the natural ones. The brain input-processing mechanism conceals these spots and the afflicted human thinks he's perfectly okay, up until the point that enough of his retina is burned that the brain is no longer able to compensate.
** Extremely distant objects in the sky are so far away that the brain does not naturally model them as being three-dimensional objects in space. This is especially true of the Sun, Moon, and stars, all of which are huge objects which are extremely large distances away, but the brain does not naturally perceive them as large, nor accurately model their distance, due to lack of perspective.
** This is why the moon '''appears''' to be larger when it is low on the horizon versus up in the sky. There isn't an atmospheric lensing effect as many people believe, it's simply a visual illusion. The exact reasons [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_illusion are still debated]] -- sometimes it's stated to be because there are trees/buildings/the ground now visible in proximity to it and your brain is better able to judge a relative size, but it seems to work just as well with a featureless sea as the background. Another explanation is that we are simply used to objects on the horizon being smaller, but the moon doesn't become smaller, so we automatically compensate.
** Even non-celestial distant objects can mess with the brain's perception if there is no relative comparison. Just look at a plane in the sky, you have no way of judging how high or how fast it is moving other than "it's small so it's got to be pretty high". From the ground 2 planes (or their contrails) could appear to intersect with each other and nearly collide, when in actuality there may be 2 miles or more difference in their altitudes. Without perspective the brain just gives up and renders it as a 2D image.
** Forget vision. ''All'' your senses are essentially lying to you 24/7. There's nothing inherently "sweet" about sugar. There's nothing inherently "loud" about a gunshot. There's nothing inherently "painful" about a stubbed toe. These are simply the signals your body sends to your brain, in order for your body to find the most desirable environment. Just ask anyone who lacks vision, or hearing, or smell, or taste, or any other sense -- they simply aren't able to detect it, thanks to something in their body and/or brain not functioning the way it should. As a matter of fact, their experiences are arguably far closer to reality!
* Because the brain is essentially a very complicated computer made out of meat, brain damage can severely mess up people's perception of reality.
** A patient with the two hemispheres of their brain severed may be asked to pick up an object with one hand, pick up the object named, but then call the object by the wrong name when they are asked what object it is, or vice-versa. Such people may also only be able to solve math shown to one of their eyes; if it is shown to the wrong eye exclusively, they may not be able to properly solve the problem.
** Left side paralysis caused by brain damage, not direct nerve damage, leads to the common illusion that the non-functioning body parts belong to somebody else. The reason is that since the damage originates from the brain, there is no feedback from the limbs to signal that something is wrong with them, since they are technically totally functional. Therefore, the brain invents the idea that the limbs must belong to somebody else. In cognitive science, this is referred to as confabulation. It is actually rather scary that a person under such an illusion is more or less incapable of understanding that they ARE, in fact, not right. They will acknowledge any arguments made by people trying to convince them, but they will not change their mind. When the brain no longer needs to delude itself, people are confused how they could have ever believed something so ridiculous. In some cases, the same defensive mental mechanism reoccurs, and people conveniently forget their previous puzzlement. It should be noted, this happens in people who are otherwise perfectly reasonable, sane and rational, as far as it is possible to judge.
** We rely on our memories far more than we realize, so it's next to impossible to put yourself in the place of someone who has Retrograde (loss of old memories) or Anterograde (inability to form new memories) Amnesia. As a result of damage, their brains simply lose the ability to store neural information.
** Aphasia. Depending on the type, someone can understand speech but not produce it, produce speech but not understand it, have an [[PokemonSpeak extremely limited vocabulary]], or [[AndIMustScream completely lose all understanding of language]].
** Hemispatial Neglect. After receiving damage to one side of the brain, a patient loses some or all of the ability to recognize things in half of their field of vision. They can still ''see'' it, but they don't completely perceive or process it. When asked to fill in objects like a clock, they may compress all of the numbers into one side or only write half of them. This can extend to ignoring food on one side of their plate unless they view it from the eye that isn't controlled by the hemisphere affected by the condition, only shaving or putting make-up on one side, and even the belief that one limb or even one half of the body doesn't belong to them. This effect even extends into memories, where patients recalling things like objects from memory can only draw one half of them.
* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia Synesthesia]] is another odd side effect of how brains function. Someone with synesthesia not only perceives the world in the same way that others do, but additional senses are stimulated as nerve signals cross over in the brain. Each synesthetic person has their own way in which their senses cross over; some see sounds, or hear colors, or feel colors. This is a very strange sort of qualia, and even two synesthetic people who share the same crossings-over may not perceive them in the same way.
* Humans are extremely bad at understanding large numbers.
** This is a problem when it comes to making decisions, as people will actually end up [[AMillionIsAStatistic caring more about a single person than a thousand people because a single person is easier for them to understand;]] the same applies to donating money to save a small or large number of geese from an environmental catastrophe -- the larger cited number actually drew SMALLER donations in one study.
** Douglas Adams pointed out that infinity is flat and uninteresting, since it doesn't present magnitude or scale, ergo, really big things are necessary to show just how big it is. A basic example is the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex Googolplex]], a number so large that it cannot be represented longhand, even if we filled the known universe with protons and wrote a zero on each one.
** An even bigger number is [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grahams_number Graham's number]] which cannot be expressed ''with any standard system of numerical representation'' including such things as exponent stacks (e.g. a^b^c^d^e...). However, like all things, it can be expressed using certain specialized forms of recursive notation. Graham's number is the maximum limit of the number of unique variations of a particular problem. The minimal limit, at the time, was thought to be '''''6'''''. It has since been increased to 13. Numbers this large can't be constructed physically, and cannot be simulated on a 1 to 1 basis.
--->''[[TextbookHumor Clearly, there is some room for improvement, here.]]''
** Infinity itself is difficult for most people to understand, and also has very strange consequences, as two infinite quantities are not necessarily equal, and some infinities are, effectively, bigger than others[[note]]For example there are an infinite number of natural numbers and an infinite number of irrational numbers, but the second set is larger, because (very roughly) even if one were to get to the "end" of natural numbers, one could not do the same with irrational numbers[[/note]]. Related to this is infinitesimal, which is a something that can only be described as a value that is infinitely small, but still reasonably significant. It's probably first heard when taking a physics class or learning about integrals. There are also an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1, or indeed, between any two values.
** Another concept that people may struggle with are diffent representations of the same value. For example: [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999 0.999... is the same as 1]]. Not "it's almost close" or "so close it doesn't matter", it is ''equivalent'' to 1. There's proofs that show this using different methods.
* Fractals.
** Their number of dimensions varies whether it's topological or not, and their "true" (Hausdorff) number of dimensions is often non-integer. The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menger_sponge Menger sponge]], for example, is an object which has zero volume and an infinite surface area. Which means that any Menger sponge you'll see is only an approximation.
** For another example, look at [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpi%C5%84ski_triangle Sierpinski's Triangles]] (imagine a Triforce where you replace every triangle with another Triforce ad infinitum). It has roughly 1.585 dimensions (more precisely, log(3)/log(2).
** Yet another example in Geometry is the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/myriagon myriagon]]: a polygon consisting of ten thousand sides. However, on paper, the sides are far too small to see with the naked eye. What we wind up being able to see is a perfect circle.
** Averted in general with mathematics and geometry, however; while these things might be difficult to ''visualize'', people with the right mathematical training ''are'' able to fully understand mathematical concepts on their own "true" terms without resorting to visual metaphors (in fact, learning to do this is essential to progress; ''not'' learning to do this is a large part of why some people find math hard).
** Fractals are the reason for the so-called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox coastline paradox]]. If you ever looked at various measurements of the same coastline, it's likely that they're all different. The problem is since natural coastlines aren't well defined, one has to use a series of lines between points on the coastline to make an estimate. However, the more points you use, the longer the coast line becomes, to the point where you can create a fractal, which means the coastline now has infinite length.
* Although imaginary numbers[[note]]A value which if multiplied by itself, is -1, which elementary maths will tell you anything multiplied by itself is always positive[[/note]] are ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin, they actually have, more or less, practical and perhaps physical applications. Website/ThatOtherWiki [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#Applications has plenty of examples]].
* [[http://www.cracked.com/article_19936_the-5-most-terrifying-ways-your-brain-can-turn-you.html This]] ''Website/{{Cracked}}'' article contains some examples, particularly one mental disorder that makes it so you can only grasp the form of one thing at a time.
* Your own incompetence. Competency in a task is linked to your ability to judge your ability at said task; thus, incompetent people, with no training in the task, will consider themselves to be vastly more competent than they actually are. This is known as the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-kruger_effect Dunning-Kruger effect;]] however, it can be mitigated with training. Unfortunately, the very incompetence of the people may prevent them from seeking out said training, because they don't realize how incompetent they actually are. There is one exception to this rule: studies of people with clinical depression revealed that many individuals with depression have a far more realistic grasp of their own limitations than the average person. [[IgnoranceIsBliss Think about that for a second.]]
* Particles at the quantum level. To clarify, most subatomic particles exhibit 'wave-particle duality', meaning sometimes they behave like a wave, sometimes like a particle, and their true nature (if indeed they have one) is neither. In fact the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle essentially states that the more you know about one's position, the less you know about its speed or trajectory and visa versa. The kicker comes when you learn that this is not due to a shortcoming in our measuring equipment, but a law of the universe itself; there is a hard limit on how much the universe will allow you to learn about a particle, since the mere act of observing changes its nature. Since our brains are evolved to deal with concepts on the macroscopic scale, this is very hard to imagine.
* Dark Matter/Energy. A postulated form of "something" that makes up over 90% of the universe but does not have any interaction with the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact the only "Observable" effect, and hint that it exists, is its effect on gravity. Humanity (and all life as we know it) is made of "normal" matter and evolved to perceive the world through a thin slice of the EM spectrum. Through technology we have been able to extend that thin slice to allow use to visualize other parts of the EM spectrum (which really makes another example of this trope: we cannot grasp the true form of any part of the EM spectrum except for the visible spectrum, only convert it into visual light which we are able to understand), but we are still limited to the parts of the universe that are also able to interact with the EM spectrum. Something that doesn't interact with it is therefore completely unimaginable.
* All of Planck's constants are incomprehensible except two: Planck mass and Planck energy. The rest describe things like smallest unit of time or length to maximum temperature. Planck mass, while describing something on the quantum level, is the mass of a flea egg, while Planck energy is a tank of gasoline.
* The concept of a timeless universe.
** According to this idea, the flow of time as we perceive, from past to future, is just an illusion. We 3D beings are only capable of perceiving small points in time (the fourth dimension) happening around us, while there is no intrinsic difference between any given point. They are all as real as ever conceivable point in space. A good comparison would be to look at a river. The entire river exists regardless of our position in it, but we can only see the portion we are swimming in right now. Technically speaking, this also means everything that ever has and ever will happen is happening all at once.
** If you could see yourself in the fourth dimension, you'd look like a huge worm made of every single version of yourself from every moment across your entire life. There would be your embryo at one end and your deceased self at the other. All of this is without getting into the idea of [[AlternateTimeline branching pathways.]]
* The amount of radiation in the universe that we can perceive is infinitesimally small. If the entire EM spectrum were laid out from one end of the United States to the end, the visible light portion would be 1/100th the thickness of a piece of paper. That is everything our eyes can detect. Just try and imagine Radio waves, X-rays, or Gamma rays on their own, without any false color images.
* The universe itself. It goes on forever, has no boundaries, but is at the same time, finite.[[note]]But, very likely, ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#The_Universe_versus_the_observable_universe far larger]]'' than the part we can see from Earth, and perhaps even infinite.[[/note]] If you were able to move infinitely fast, you would just end up where you started. Creator/BillBryson used this example to try to explain it in ''A Short History of Nearly Everything'': Imagine a two-dimensional being who comes through a dimensional portal to Earth. He tries to determine the size of Earth by traveling along its surface in a straight line, but keeps coming back to his starting point, and can't figure out how he did it. This is what is happening in the universe, which is "curving" in a way that our brains just can't really grasp. Just try to conceive how this can happen.\\
There's also the issue of attempting to grasp its size: If the distances just in our Solar System are already mind-numbing, a light-year is almost ''ten trillion kilometers'', but at galactic (short of cosmological) scale is insignificant (just our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a size of one hundred thousand times that and the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest major galaxy, is at more than 2.5 million l.y.). That justifies to a point why SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale -- simply put, even astronomers cannot really wrap their heads around what those distances really mean.
* A lot of the really pioneering minds in advanced mathematics tend to have at at least minor breakdowns now and then, particularly those studying esoteric things like set theory (aka infinity + 1), alternative systems of math like knot theory, and those studying problems which may or may not actually have solutions. [[TheseAreThingsManWasNotMeantToKnow Apparently, it's hard on a brain to spend your days trying to grasp the true form of things that exist in fractional dimensions braided around a 4-sphere]].
* Negative mass. Try and imagine holding an object that weighs -5 kilograms.
** An object such as this would be counterintuitive, but not especially mind-bending. It would simply have the opposite reaction to normal to any force applied to it; gravity would repel it, pushing on it would make it accelerate toward your hand, etc.
* Tornadoes in open fields. Most people who witness a massive tornado in empty fields, find themselves confused if the funnel is moving towards them or just sitting stationary. This is due to humans having difficulty with comprehending spatial awareness and object enormity without having a reference point. The effect will often make it seem like the tornado isn't moving - maybe even moving away - when in actuality it's coming straight for you.
* Similarly, oceans. Standing on a beach, your horizon is, at most 5 kilometres distant. If you were looking at the Pacific, the nearest landmass (assuming you weren't ''exceptionally'' lucky enough for your geodesic to intersect with an island) would be ''one third of the world'' away.
* The concept of CessationOfExistence after death. Try and imagine what true oblivion is -- you perceive nothing, you feel nothing, you remember nothing, and you ''are'' nothing. You can't. You simply can't. The closest thing you ''can'' imagine is a dreamless sleep, but you obviously can't imagine sleeping '''forever'''.
-->'''Rosencrantz:''' We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?\\
'''Guildenstern:''' No, no, no... Death is... not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.\\
'''Rosencrantz:''' I've frequently not been on boats.\\
'''Guildenstern:''' No, no, no -- what you've been is not on boats.\\
-- '''Creator/TomStoppard''', ''Theatre/RosencrantzAndGuildensternAreDead''
* Sleep. When you do it, it might feel like a sudden stop and start, but your brain doesn't actually shut down. You simply lose conscious control for anywhere from a few minutes to several hours while your body acts on its own, maintaining its vitals and keeping you busy with dreams until you wake back up. Most of what happens then doesn't even stick and will be forgotten the moment you wake up. Since the brain is still active, we don't even know the true purpose of sleep in the first place. All we know for sure is, if we go too long without it, we die.
* Someone else's thoughts. As Creator/CSLewis put it in ''Literature/TheHorseAndHisBoy'', "No one is told any story but their own."
** While you might be able to get a sense of what someone else is thinking, you can never tell exactly what someone else has on their mind. You can't climb into their consciousness and experience the world through their perceptions. The way colors, smells, sounds, and language are interpreted in your brain are completely unique to you and only you. This is the only way you'll experience the world your entire life. We aren't even born with the ability to consider that other people can have different perspectives and mental representations than our own.
** There's no solid way of knowing what another person would do in your place. Even if it's someone you're close friends with or a family member you've know your whole life, you'll never know for certain what they would do in your place. Everyone has their own views on morality, truth, fairness, justice, mercy, acceptance, etc. Unless a person tells you outright what they think about something, you'll never know for certain how they interpret it. You'll never know if they're on your side or if they disagree with you completely.
** This state of mental variation means all of us are truly unique. Something you dislike about yourself might actually be something another person really loves about you. The people around you can still manage to surprise you, even if you've known them for years. Most importantly, even if it feels like you're the only one in the world who feels a certain way, [[YouAreNotAlone there are countless other people who have an idea of what you're going through. Not a total sense of what you're feeling, but an idea of it. People who care about you and want you to be happy. Many of them have greater knowledge and experience than you and are more than happy to share it. All you have to do is ask.]]
* Many people on the autism spectrum describe their perception of the world around them in this way due to the way they process sensory input. ''Aquamarine Blue 5'', a book of essays written by autistics, describes experiences like these.
* If the "Interface Theory of Perception" is to be believed, this is an ''evolutionary mechanic''. The gist of its argument is that each species has evolved a unique visual perception of reality to benefit their unique behavior. A good metaphor compares our perception of reality to the user interface of a computer, which masks the complex, inner workings of a computer from the user. To test this phenomenon, an "interface game" was set up to determine which of two groups would survive: organisms that perceive an objective reality versus organisms that perceive a subjective reality. '''The truth-perceiving organisms died out.'''
* People exposed to something that they have literally no frame of reference for in their prior experience often fail to construct what they are seeing in their minds. A classic example is the Native Americans believing Cortez's horsemen were giant creatures with two heads, because they had never seen a horse, let alone a man riding one, before (it's believed that myths of [[OurCentaursAreDifferent centaurs]] similarly originated from garbled memories that the Greeks had of horse-riding invaders from before tamed horses were a common sight in Eurasia). Another famous example is the crazed German private who babbled to his superior about "a crocodile in the trenches" upon seeing a [[TankGoodness tank]] for the first time.
** A fictional example of this would be how the rabbits in ''Literature/WatershipDown'' perceive motor vehicles; they see them as giant creatures called "hrududu".
* While we've managed to crack our own genome and discover every combination of nucleotides that make us who we are (although there's still work to be done in discovering every ''protein'' that can be coded from all of them, which is the other half of the challenge), pondering the nature of our consciousness is enough to make our brains hurt. Picture this; throughout most of human history, humans haven't been born one at a time. It's more or less been a constant that multiple humans happened to take their first breaths, and feel their first stimuli as conscious beings simultaneously. While we know how the body develops [[FromASingleCell from a single zygote]] (and the gametes that combine to form it), why exactly is it, that out of all the people born at that one time, our consciousness happened to be assigned to the body we have in particular? This question continues to puzzle people to this day, and it's no wonder that there's countless theories that have persisted through time attempting to answer it.
* Humans are terrible at processing [[TimeAbyss large scales of time]]. To give you an example, let's say that the entire history of the Earth was condensed into 24 hours. It takes the planet about eight-ten minutes to initially form, the moon forms five minutes later, and the planet takes about an hour to cool enough for water to form. Life don't come into existence until around four and a half later, and it takes another six hours for bacteria as we know it to even form. The first multi-cellular organisms don't emerge until ''8:30 PM'' on the clock. Where do humans fall on this clock? If four billion years are condensed into 24 hours, then we first emerged at 11:58:43 PM. Our modern civilization? ''Not even a full second.'' And this is without even getting into the timescales of the universe, which is over 3 times older than Earth. Good luck wrapping your mind around all that.
** The InHarmonyWithNature trope comes almost entirely from this. Predator-prey populations tend to show chaotic behavior within their ecological limits, where the sizes of populations change in a way that may appear random but is, in fact, obeying deterministic laws based only on the relationship between a population and its food source illustrated by the Lotka–Volterra equation. An experimental example of this was shown in an eight-year study on small Baltic Sea creatures such as plankton, which were isolated from the rest of the ocean. Each member of the food web was shown to take turns multiplying and declining, even though the scientists kept the outside conditions constant. An article in the journal ''Nature'' stated that advanced mathematical techniques proved the indisputable presence of chaos in this food web, while short-term prediction is possible, long-term prediction is not.
** To expand on the human point, [[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133807-our-species-may-be-150000-years-older-than-we-thought/ a recent archaeological discovery]] found that [[ScienceMarchesOn the human race may be 150,000 years older than we previously thought]]. That would bump up our time frame on the clock by about...12 seconds.
* Sometimes, noises synthesized using specific hardware or software will make the noise sound "off" when played on different programs. This happens quite a bit with VideoGames or even PC noises.
** A good example of this are Lavos's Roar from ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger'' and Odio's St. Alicia attack from ''VideoGame/LiveALive''. It's actually rather difficult to replicate the noises during emulation, which is why you can often look up videos of them and hear something ''completely'' different than what you remember when played.
** MIDI music made in TheNineties or the TurnOfTheMillennium can also result in the sounds either sounding weird, or simply not playing because the computer doesn't know how to play back that sound, or it plays it differently. Othertimes they can devolve into [[SensoryAbuse weird sounds]].
* To someone with dyscalculia or Dyslexia, this is how numbers and words can be seen as them, respectively. Everyone else sees something that they just ''cannot'' perceive in any way.
** Sometimes, you don't even have to be Dyscalculic to feel this with math -- one reason EveryoneHatesMathematics is that as any math teacher can tell you, once you hit Calculus, half the class will understand what you are saying (or even what they are seeing) while the others will interpret it as scribbles and jargon. The only way they can comprehend it will amount to making the ''teacher'' feel they cannot grasp the true form of how they perceive mathematics.
* As difficult as it is to imagine long stretches of time, shorter ones may be even worse. The smallest duration of time humanity has ever been able to measure is 12 attoseconds. 1 attosecond is one quintillionth of a second, which is how long it takes for a photon to travel the length of two hydrogen atoms. To put it in another perspective, if you were immortal and could perceive things in an attosecond time frame, light would seem frozen to you. You could live out the entire age of the universe, from its birth to the end of star formation, in the time it would take the average person to ''blink.''
* Linguistics. Some letters and words have no equivalent in other languages. While some languages make up for this by having the word be untranslated and taking it as a loanword (Especially common in English and Creole languages), others make the best guess they got. Reading some older works that were translated often include notes mentioning how the words can have different meanings and it's all based upon interpretation. This is also one of the reasons why some words are frequently mispronounced by non-native speakers -- since the letters all have a completely different sound (or no equivalent) in other languages.
** When you get to languages that are even older, it gets even more complicated. For example, the letters Tl -- which do not normally go together in English -- are not unheard of in some Native American tribes (Tlingit, Tlaxcala) and represent a sound the Roman alphabet cannot represent: the alveolar lateral fricative.
** We know mostly of the Greek pronunciations of some deities, words, or names in Egyptian mythology because the only way their names were written down (that we know of, or can even translate) could not be translated. This is especially the case with the Egyptian deity Thoth. "Thoth" is actually his Greek name -- his Egyptian name was pronounced ''way'' differently. This is lampshaded when ''Literature/TheKaneChronicles'' has the characters meet him, he has no real way to spell his Egyptian name in English, so he pronounces it phonetically as the only way the English speaking Kanes (and the audience) can understand.
** This is also a reason behind names for some people -- "Shit" to an Indian person would be pronounced as "Shee", yet English speakers see names like "Akshit" or "Dikshit" and pronounce them as "Ack-shit" or "Dick-shit".
* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity singularity]] of a black hole. ''You'' try and wrap your mind around an object with infinite density and a volume of zero.
* There's a phenomenon named [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking saccadic masking:]] basically, your eyes are constantly making movements as you look around (which are called saccades). As you may have noticed, your eyes don't scroll from one object you're looking at to another like a video camera, but instead seem to abruptly "cut" from one "shot" to another. This is because the brain edits these out for a number or reasons (seeing them would take more brainpower, most of them would be too blurry to be useful, and you'd likely get dizzy.)
* [[TomatoInTheMirror The brain itself]]. It's a lump of gray matter that weights a little over a kilogram and runs on about 15 watts of power, yet it's capable of storing an estimated 2.5 petabytes of information[[note]] same as about 1000 large home computers[[/note]]. With that, it can concoct the most amazing, bizarre, grotesque, horrific and hilarious ideas with even the smallest prompting. While machines can outmatch it in certain areas, it has the unique ability to understand and recognize things, assign identity and value to them and does so with a miniscule fraction of the energy and processing power. It even named and assigned identity to itself. How does it do all this? ''Even it doesn't really know.''
* Certain math functions, when given a transformation, can produce a shape or object that most people struggle to understand. A famous one is [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel%27s_horn Gabriel's horn]], an object with finite volume but infinite surface area.
[[/folder]]

* The power of Houjuu Nue from ''Franchise/TouhouProject'' is this minus the GoMadFromTheRevelation part. She can also imbue other things with the same characteristic by placing a "Seed of Unknown Form" on them, although knowing what the actual object is prevents it from working. This is actually the reason behind the [=UFOs=] in ''VideoGame/UndefinedFantasticObject''. [[BonusBoss Nue]] has placed these seeds on the fragments of the Flying Vault, which caused the heroines (who have just had a conversation about [=UFOs=]) to see them as flying saucers. [[FinalBoss Byakuren's]] group, who knew what the fragments are since the beginning, only see floating but otherwise ordinary pieces of wood and are confused by the claims of them being [=UFOs=]. The heroines investigating this discrepancy is what sets off the story of the [[BonusDungeon Extra Stage]].

** Even the concept of the ''third'' dimension can be mind-blowing to some people. Various conditions like [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyopia amblyopia]] exist, which can inhibit or remove depth perception. As an attempt to explain it to normal people, imagine only viewing the world through the screen on a digital camera.

* ''LightNovel/{{Baccano}}'''s [[spoiler:Ronnie Schiatto]] reveals his [[EldritchAbomination true form]] in the light novels once. No physical description is given, however, on the basis that the sight was so terrifying and incomprehensible that it was blocked immediately and entirely from the spectator's memory.
* Several characters in ''LightNovel/ACertainMagicalIndex'' have "unexplainable" abilities. Ollerus (a ridiculously powerful sorcerer) and Gunha Sogiita (Level 5 esper) are a couple... Gunha doesn't even know how his own abilities work (he thought he figured it out at one point, but was told that he was wrong). This is actually a great boon to these characters, as if your opponent doesn't understand what they're being attacked with, they cannot form an effective defense against it.

** In the Old Testament, God warns Moses that "you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live". Even Moses could only see His back. God, like [[Franchise/CthulhuMythos Yog-Sothoth]] (or the other way around), is omnipresent and exists at every point in the space-time continuum simultaneously yet transcends all of it. Islam takes this bit particularly seriously; arguing that if God's true form is alien and utterly incomprehensible to humans, then you cannot picture Him as anthropomorphic, therefore doing so and worshipping God through pictures is considered blasphemous, heretical idolatry ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconoclasm Christianity under the Byzantine Empire also tried this]] but failed). Which then rubbed off on Moses a bit, since when he came back to everybody else his face blinded them into making him wear a veil. That said, several Old Testament figures (including Abraham, and for that matter Moses) are said to interact with God directly. The usual explanation is that they were speaking with an angel who was speaking directly for God (acting as a kind of cosmic telephone), or else that God was appearing in [[AFormYouAreComfortableWith a form they could comprehend]]. Christians often interpret these events as pre-incarnate appearances of Christ, the "image of the invisible God".
** In another incident (Exodus chapter 24 for those who care) God appeared in full glory for seventy-four leaders of Israel total. The fun part? It mentions that they all [[DidWeJustHaveTeaWithCthulhu ate and drank together]], it says that God stood on a sapphire pavement, and absolutely nothing else.
** Notably, this is subverted in the Catholic faith, as the saints will get to see God in all his glory in Heaven, often referred to as Beatific Vision. The idea behind it is that it should destroy your very soul, but God, being God, could perserve someone from letting that happen. (Or perhaps that "no man sees my face and lives" isn't so much of a concern if you've already died, although this will presumably be the case after the General Ressurection). This is also an interpretation of the Beatitudes promising that the "clean of heart will see God."

* Played straight in Judaic and Talmudic literature, which says that God is incomprehensible. Oddly enough, some Kabbalistic poems describe him as though he were a human king, though the rabbis dismiss this as an elaborate metaphor.

** Prophet Muhammed was so frightened when he saw the ''true'' form of Angel J'ibreel, that he ran home to his wife Khadija and begged her to cover him with a cloak. This caused the Surah of "Al Muddathtir" (The Cloaked Person) to be revealed.

* In the GrandFinale of ''WesternAnimation/{{Amphibia}}'', Anne meets the Cosmic Guardian, the creator of the Three Stones who watches over the multiverse, who first takes the form of an outdated computer and then of her cat, Domino. When she asks why they do this, the Guardian explains that seeing its true form would cause her human brain to explode. When Anne is skeptical, it briefly shows its true form, which is something like a giant eyeball, surrounding by pulsating, rainbow-colored energy. Just the momentary glance freaks Anne out, seemingly proving its point.

** In (amateur) astronomy, an interesting physiological effect takes often place when observing a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_star double star]], as the less bright of the pair is seen in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors complementary color]] of the brightest one -ie, when observing a double whose brightest component is orange seeing the less luminous as green or blue, even if it's actually yellow or white.

* A good many Wiki/{{SCP|Foundation}}s are likely to qualify, although most are written as mundane things with strange properties, rather than strange things appearing as mundane things.

* In the GrandFinale of ''WesternAnimation/Amphibia'', Anne meets the Cosmic Guardian, who first takes the form of an outdated computer and then of her cat, Domino. When she asks why they do this, the Guardian explains that seeing its true form would cause her human brain to explode. When Anne is skeptical, it briefly shows its true form, which is something like a giant eyeball, surrounding by pulsating, rainbow-colored energy. Just the momentary glance freaks Anne out, seemingly proving its point.

* In ''Literature/TheQuran'' Moses asks to see God, who replies that the sight of Him to a living mortal would be too much... but He ''will'' reveal Himself to that mountain over there -- which immediately crumbles to dust.

** Hemispatial Neglect. After receiving damage to one side of the brain, a patient loses some or all of the ability to recognize things in half of their field of vision. They can still ''see'' it, but they don't completely perceive or process it. When asked to fill in objects like a clock, they may compress all of the numbers into one side or only write half of them. This can extend to ignoring food on their plate, only shaving or putting make-up on one side, and even the belief that one limb or even one half of the body doesn't belong to them. This effect even extends into memories, where patients recalling things like objects from memory can only draw one half of them.

** Starlight in general. It takes the Sun's light eight minutes to reach the Earth, so the "Sun" lighting up the sky right now is actually what it looked like eight minutes ago. For more distant stars, like the Virgo cluster, we're seeing how they looked when dinosaurs walked the earth, or ''[[TimeAbyss even earlier]]''. Astronomers call this phenomenon "lookback time".

[[quoteright:350:[[ComicBook/FantasticFour https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/56_g_1948.jpg]]]]

* Although imaginary numbers[[note]]A value which if multiplied by itself, is -1, which elementary maths will tell you anything multiplied by itself is always positive[[/note]] are ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin, they actually have, more or less, practical and perhaps physical applications. Wiki/ThatOtherWiki [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#Applications has plenty of examples]].

* Humans are terrible at processing [[TimeAbyss large scales of time]]. To give you an example, let's say that the entire history of the Earth was condensed into 24 hours. It takes the planet about eight-ten minutes to initially form, the moon forms five minutes later, and the planet takes about an hour to cool enough for water to form. Life don't come into existence until around four and a half later, and it takes another six hours for bacteria as we know it to even form. The first multi-cellular organisms don't emerge until ''8:30 PM'' on the clock. Where do humans fall on this clock? If four billion years are condensed into 24 hours, then we first emerged at 11:58:43 PM. Our modern civilization? ''Not even a full second.'' And this is without even getting into the timescales of the universe, which is over 3 times older than Earth. Good luck wrapping your mind around all that. The InHarmonyWithNature trope comes almost entirely from this.

* Humans are terrible at processing [[TimeAbyss large scales of time]]. To give you an example, let's say that the entire history of the Earth was condensed into 24 hours. It takes the planet about eight-ten minutes to initially form, the moon forms five minutes later, and the planet takes about an hour to cool enough for water to form. Life don't come into existence until around four and a half later, and it takes another six hours for bacteria as we know it to even form. The first multi-cellular organisms don't emerge until ''8:30 PM'' on the clock. Where do humans fall on this clock? If four billion years are condensed into 24 hours, then we first emerged at 11:58:43 PM. Our modern civilization? ''Not even a full second.'' And this is without even getting into the timescales of the universe, which is over 3 times older than Earth. Good luck wrapping your mind around all that.

Imagine if some non-human entity, such as, let's say, Wiki/TVTropes, became a three-dimensional living entity with self-awareness and consciousness, that wanted to sit down and have a lovely little chat. What would it look like? Like a [[MoeAnthropomorphism surprisingly feminine, charming little sprite]] named JustForFun/TropeTan? [[MatrixRainingCode Walls and walls of PHP code that resolve themselves into a house-like shape?]] Or perhaps a whole universe, a world, complete in and of itself?

Yet while pink is often highlighted as an example of such an "unnatural" color, in reality, the majority of colors humans see are this -- anything which is not one of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spectrum.svg colors of the rainbow]] is the human brain's way of interpreting a mixture of different wavelengths of light. Indeed, white and gray are the most common examples -- white light is merely light which contains a mixture of light wavelengths in high enough and close-to-equal concentration, whereas gray is the same thing, only there is less stimulation. Thus, while there is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet light, colors like pink, white, and black are mixtures of light. Creatures with different peaks for their visual spectrum would likely interpret such mixed colors in a different way. A fascinating experiment involving a similar illusory color made from tiny checkerboards of green and red proved impossible to describe properly in normal terms. Trained artists could describe aspects of it like its chroma value and saturation, but the color itself refused categorization within the color wheel.