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.