doesn't this happen in real life, too, though?

You'll see this sort of thing if there is something causing a strobe effect. If you wave your hands, fingers splayed, in front of a TV screen you see something like it or if your main light source is a fluorescent light, which strobes at 60 times per second you'll see this sort of thing with rotating objects. Another source of this sort of strobing can be from something like fence pickets moving between you and the wheel.

Our eyes see pretty much continuously but there is a persistence of vision that lets us smooth out the strobing of movie and TV images and fluorescent lights. It becomes obvious only when we see the apparent retrograde motion of things like rotating wheels.