My friend recently made an interesting observation, watching movies can be draining. Well yeah perhaps. But to make this more clear, we’ve got to think of watching two movies or even three movies at a time.
Then you can actually feel the drain.
What’s the problem with this? Movies are often associated with resting or recreational activities, perhaps activities that don’t require much mental effort. But it’s instead possible that movies provide no rest and instead are quite draining.
During strenuous work, we sometimes like to watch and episode or a series to re-charge and come back to work more energized or motivated, and often times, the episode does not produce that energizing effect.
Anyway, I wanna know, if I were to study a certain topic, what medium should I study that in? From a text book or a doc? Or a youtube video lecture perhaps?
After a small amount of research, it was noticed that videos are probably more draining that text, one because, the video moves at it’s own pace, not at the pace you’re comfortable with, so you would then have to operate at a faster pace in order to keep up, and because there is more information to process.
But also, if you’re imaginative like me, then your mind does a lot of imagining and visualization as you’re reading. Which could also lead you to become distracted by thoughts and get side-tracked. Video having a set pace, does imply the subject will come to an end within a specified duration. So accumulated drain over time is likely reduced for’ information consumed through the video medium as opposed to written text.
Written text while not as draining, could take far longer to complete, resulting in a stronger draining effect overall.
Anyway, I remember watching a veritasium video about something similar before. I think he summarized that learning is probably best done through a combination of all media.