I have no reason to doubt it. The observations and 99%
of the presenter's explanations are consistent with the
literature and with personal experience.
Some observations:
1) The video is a powerful lesson about learning and
teaching. As we have discussed before, most thought
is subconscious. That includes so-called intellectual
tasks, not just athletic tasks. Learning requires
using your conscious mind to tell the other 99.99%
of your mind what to do. There is no direct way of
doing this. The details are only partially understood.
As a related point, introspection about thought and
learning is very likely to give the wrong answers.
Also, the linear, logical way in which knowledge is
presented in books is a good mirror of conscious
thought, but has precious little to do with how
existing information is transmitted to students,
and even less to do with how new information is
discovered.
Constructive suggestion: The spiral approach.
2) It is entirely believable that for a task like
riding a bicycle, it might take 20 hours (spread
over 20 days) to learn it the first time, 20 hours
(spread) to learn the reverse task instead, and
only 20 /minutes/ to switch back. Thereafter
switching will get asymptotically easier and less
error-prone.
As teachers, we've seen this a million times,
perhaps slightly less graphically. Students are
taught in primary school about the five-step
"poster" version of the "scientific method". https://www.av8n.com/physics/scientific-methods.htm#sec-poster
In chemistry class, students are taught to think
in terms of Bohr atoms, taught that significant
figures are super-important, taught that electrons
"want" to pair up like Siegfried and Roy, taught
that entropy=disorder. If they thought about any
of that stuff they would know it doesn't make sense,
but most importantly, they've been taught not to
think. They've been trained to memorize tons and
tons of garbage without thinking.
Then ... we have to wade in and tell them that
not only are their domain-specific factoids wrong,
their whole approach to thinking and learning is
wrong. They've been riding the backwards bicycle
for a long time, and it's going to take them a
lot of time and effort to recover.
For movement-related tasks such as riding a bike
or piloting an airplane (as opposed to purely
mental tasks like theoretical physics) it is
marginally easier for the instructor to see the
mistakes, to see how the student is struggling
... but the mental tasks involve comparable
struggles. It takes major time and effort to
unlearn misconceptions and bad habits.
3) The guy in the video is a jackass for not wearing
a helmet. I don't do anything on a bike without a
helmet. I've taught a lot of people how to ride
bikes, and the process always starts with a trip
to the helmet store.
Extra jackass points for not wearing a helmet even
/after/ he knows it's a challenging task and he's
guaranteed to fall repeatedly.
Yet more jackass points for setting a bad example
by not wearing a helmet when he knows he's being
videotaped.
Sometimes I get resistance from people who don't
want to wear the helmet. Therefore:
Pedagogical suggestion #1: Get somebody who knows
that they are doing to adjust the helmet. A badly
adjusted helmet (a) is uncomfortable and (b) doesn't
do its job, because it will get dislodged in a crash.
Pedagogical suggestion #2: When somebody crashes
in such a way as to damage the helmet, keep the
old helmet. It makes a great conversation piece.
Indeed it makes the point almost without words:
"It is better to destroy your helmet than destroy
your face." http://ix.cs.uoregon.edu/~michal/cycling/helmet.html
4) On the larger topic of stubborn brain attributes,
I highly recommend
Daniel Kahneman
_Thinking, Fast and Slow_
The book is 90% inspiring and 10% infuriating.
I suggest mostly ignoring the title and mostly
ignoring the author's oversimplified explanations
for the data. What's left is a compendium of
interesting and informative data on delusions,
illusions, and fallacies ... i.e. situations in
which people predictably make terrible decisions.
As the saying goes:
Education is the process of cultivating your intuition.
Therefore in most cases it is a mistake to permanently
label something as "intuitive" or "counterintuitive".
Kahneman's book is not particularly constructive in
the sense that it has little to say about how to train
people to do better... but still, appreciating the depth
and breadth of the problem is a huge step in the right
direction.
I say that intuitions are "mostly" good, if you average
over an unbiased sample of situations. Even so, as
Kahneman emphasizes, you need to be super-careful if
somebody can manipulate you (or select you) into a
non-random situation and exploit the fact that you
will predictably make a terrible decision.
5) Please do not think of Kahneman's System I and
System II as two inequivalent yet still comparable
things acting in parallel, like Laurel and Hardy.
The subconscious mind is /thousands/ of things
working in parallel, mostly different from each
other (not just different from the conscious mind).
Imagine Dr. Dolittle in charge of a vast horde of
dissimilar creatures that only sometimes do his
bidding.