Essay: The Value Of Having Knowledge

Gaining knowledge should be more than just memorizing facts. The brain does not obtain knowledge by just memorizing facts. The brain can only hold so much, causing it to make many accidents. When memorizing the focus on not primarily on understanding what you know.
In “The End of Remembering”, Foer states that “the brain is always making mistakes, forgetting, misremembering.” In order for the brain to retain knowledge, it must be exposed to the information repeatedly. For example, something may be scented with the smell of food but that does not mean you should eat it.
The brain does not keep memories forever, majority of memories are only short term because the brain tends to get side tracked. The internet is the main distraction that prevents the brain from keeping memories. Author Nicholas Carr states that it seizes our attention only to scramble it. The internet confuses all the information stored in the mind, breaking concentration and burdening the working memory.
Skimming has become another way of trying to obtain knowledge. Author Nicholas Carr states, “We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading.”Skimming does not allow the brain to receive all the details from a text, only the main portions. The brain needs to read an entire text to actually receive complete knowledge and encode the information into long-term memory. In conclusion, due to excessive skimming people are less likely to remember what they read.
When memorizing facts, there are too many to remember. Thus, the focus is not on trying to understand all the facts but trying to remember them all. When multiple memories come to mind at once, they immediately lock into a fierce competition with each other. Memories then fight to be remembered more than the other. “When these memories are tightly competing for our attention the brain steps in and actually modifies those memories,” says Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, a neuroscientist at UT Austin. Once the brain crowns the winner and loser the memory that wins is then strengthens and the loser is weakened and then eventually forgotten about.
Many equate ‘to know’ with ‘to understand’. However, ‘knowing’ something is not the same as ‘understanding’ something. In the allegory of the cave, the prisoners watch the stories that shadows play out, and because the shadows were all they ever got to see, they believed them to be the most real things in the world. But, because they’ve never experienced anything other than the shadows they did not understand that the shadows were just figures of what was really there. Not having an understanding of the outside world caused many difficulties in their society, leading to death.
Many also believe that having access to more information produces more knowledge, which will result in more wisdom. In the essay “Wisdom in the Age of Information and the Importance of Storytelling in Making Sense of the World” Maria Popova states, “We believe that having access to more information produces more knowledge, which results in more wisdom. But, if anything, the opposite is true — more and more information without the proper context and interpretation only muddles our understanding of the world rather than enriching it.” For example, many people get upset at the sight of others staring at their phones or taking pictures, it is from a lack of understanding that technology feeds our primitive desires like connection and belonging.
In all, gaining knowledge should be based on not just memorizing facts. Gaining knowledge should be based on desire, and wanting to learn. One must understand that the brain cannot secure information by just quickly reading over something without understanding what it going on throughout the text.