It's interesting to experience your brain relearning a habit that has become so ingrained. Reminds me of the Smarter Everyday backward bike episode [1]. In fact, I just tried to tie my old 2 loop knot and accidentally tied Ian's knot again.
Seriously, it's a fun knot to tie and never comes undone.
There are a couple followups that would be interesting.
1. Try this on a tricycle. On a tricycle you steer in the turn direction and do not need to lean, as opposed to a bike where your counter-steer and lean. It would be interesting to see if that less complicated steering interaction would make it easier or quicker to adapt.
2. Try on a bicycle with training wheels, adjusted so you can still lean but aren't going to actually fall over. (This is important because if you can't lean the training wheels have essentially made the bike into a trike and so the experiment has been reduced to #1).
The idea here is that in most of his videos people were failing very fast. They might not be getting a long enough ride each time to provide enough examples of control actions and responses for their brain to learn much.
Perhaps the training wheels would provide longer trials, giving the brain a lot more to work with.
I also taught the knot to my 10-year-old just to see what she would make of it. Took her three tries to understand and now that's how she ties her shoes. It seemed much easier to explain than the standard.
My only issue is in keeping the starting knot tight. I usually use the standard shoelace knot which makes it easy to keep tension on the lace at all times, and that keeps the starting knot tight. But I'm finding with Ian's fastest knot I lose tension when I'm pushing the two loops towards each other, which causes the starting knot to loosen slightly. Is that something that can be solved with more practice?
I use elastic shoelaces that are always tied. I can put my shoes on in half a second and run out the door and there's no way they're coming off even when I'm running.