In my glory days I hitch-hiked about 30,000 miles throughout Canada and the US. A favourite flavour of ride was the back of a pickup. For hours I could watch the past landscape slipping away, peripheral images blasting past me into clarity then slowly receding.
The best effect was when the truck stopped. Then the landscape would seem to come rushing back toward me - even my feet seems to leap toward my face.
This is because a filter in my brain, like yours, compensates for continuous movement so that we can perceive things a little easier. Apparently, without this filter, the blur would be harder to understand.
My camera has a motion-stabilizer that can compensate for a certain amount of camera shake, but it loses its mind when I take longer exposures in lower light. What appears in the resulting images is a superb mix of blur and resolution.
I’m playing now with the relationship between movement of the subject and my own trajectory. When I move, points of light produce jagged parallel lines across my images. The pattern they produce triggers a filter in our minds that can quickly dismiss the image as simply Bad. Extreme stillness and precise focus is often a benchmark of high quality photography, such as the landscapes and still life images of Edward Weston and folks working in large format photography.
In rarer cases, if the mind is open, these patterns can actually send a message about the subjectivity of a photograph. The remind us that the image doesn’t exist apart from the observer, and underline that the relationship of motion is an integral part of perception. You don’t see a lot of paintings that communicate this relationship. This is one case where intentionally taking a ‘bad’ photo can tell us more about our subjective reality than the perfect one.