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 unde>