I'm likely in the minority, but I found 3blue1brown videos difficult to understand and they usually give me a worse intuition about a concept than I previously had. I wonder why that is. Seems like most people I know swear by his videos.
Be aware that many people don't watch videos to learn, they watch to be entertained. They think that they are learning, but really they are just watching animations. In the end, they can't actually do any of the math. They haven't actually learned anything. In the same vein, that's why TED talks are so popular. It's like eating dessert... all sugar and no nutrients.
I'm not saying that 3b1b videos aren't instructional, but rather that they are so well put together that they can satisfy the entertainment-seekers while still offering meaningful content.
The question is, then, why don't you get anything out of the videos? That brings us back to the problem of mental models of understanding.
If someone teaches a subject from a completely different perspective, it may be that it confuses you as your brain tries to harmonize the two conflicting mental models, and the video moves along too quickly for you to be able to benefit from the realignment.
This is not an attack on you, btw. In fact, I believe that this realization helped me a lot as an educator to be patient when teaching. Furthermore, it does not mean that your initial understanding is wrong, but that it is a different perspective than that which is being presented by the instructor.
Alternatively, it may be that the videos move through a particular concept too quickly. I find this is an issue, too. Once I understand something new, I like to almost daydream about the concept, exploring it mentally so that I understand it from a lot of different angles. I think of it in different situations and to see if my intuitions make sense, and if they don't I ask for clarifications. You can't do that when watching a video because it doesn't stop to answer your questions.
I like 3b1b videos. Some of them I can binge on all day simply because they "click" and make sense. Others I have had to spend days (or weeks) thinking about in order to digest and understand the perspective that Grant is trying to convey. They are definitely high value and I greatly appreciate Grant's work, but I definitely have to work, too, in order to benefit from some of them.
In my evaluation of him I mentioned this, but added that he was probably wasted on 3rd and 4th year math majors, and should be teaching more intro classes where the quality of instruction was markedly worse.
Back when I used to teach math classes as a grad student, I realized that a teacher has to actively work to keep that "mental catalog" for students. The problem is that longer you are in the math world, the clearer the subject becomes. The result is that to you the teacher it really just becomes braindead obvious what's going on. As time goes on, you have to fight this "problem" more and more to keep touch with the issues your students are having.
When my high schooler come to me with math problems, the first thing I do is look at the failures and figure out what higher level step or concept is missing in the brain. Then I explain that, sometimes more than once with different approaches. Once the higher level thing clicks, I can just sit back and mostly watch.
Sometimes I'm not sure how a concept clicked, but something did and the right answers start coming out.
I learned most of the topics in those videos well enough to pass highschool/university exams, but very often the real "aha!" moment came after seeing lines transform from one into another, planes deforming, or boxes being subdivided in 3blue1brown video.
- un-abstracting abstract concepts by creating concrete examples, which end up taking the focus away from the abstract version
- serial timeline, that is like a blackboard being constanty erased instead of adding to one big construction
1) When I learn something, I like daydreaming about it and coming up with a mental model of how it is in my own head. So, having someone else's vision and animations used can screw up my own mental model and make it harder for me to forge connections between concepts.
2) I enjoy rigorous math more. I find it hard to make logical leaps and assume properties about things unless they were previously established as facts. This is why I like analysis a lot, althought I'm not great at it. I think 3B1B is more informal when explaining things, and the lack of rigour confuses me over time. Especially in a longer video.
I think 3b1b videos constantly break this rule; there is a LOT of going on visually, while the narrator is talking non-stop about some loosely related things or trivia. More often than not I have to re-watch segments multiple times because I cannot understand what the hell am I supposed to be paying attention to.
I think it’s absolutely the case that some lessons work for some people at some times for some topics and don’t for others - but that’s not likely down to any innate ‘learning style’ that one person has over another. The same approach on a different topic on a different day might have the exact opposite effect in terms of who gets most out of the lesson.