Complete Knowledge

I just finished hosting my school's trivia bowl and I had a great time. If you know me for more than 5 minutes, you know that I am a walking vessel of abstract and for the most part, disconnected bits of information. That is to say, I know a little bit about a bunch of stuff as opposed to having every bit of knowledge there is to have about one topic. Now I have extensive knowledge about a few things but I am by no means the world authority on anything.

When building trivia questions, I try to reference topics that are familiar to most people and then delve a bit deeper which brings me to my point. It is always interesting to me to see that people generally know one or two things about something but not the whole body of information surrounding it. For instance, in one of the questions I showed a picture of the Taj Mahal. People immediately go excited because, I think, they thought I was just going to ask them to name it. The actual question was what city was the monument in which resulted in groans from the crowd! Most of us know the Taj Mahal when we see it but how many of us know that it is in Agra, India or the name Emperor Shah Jahan,the man who built it, or Mumtaz Mahal, the woman for whom it is an extreme gesture of love?

I'm a nerd so delve into anything that interests me but even I have tons of subject matters that I only have one bit of information for. Don't ask me anything else about it though!! LOL So then aside from the issue of time, why don't we drill down deeper into things that interest us. Our brains have the capacity for it and we live in an era where information is more readily available than ever. Or is time truly only reasons that we don't have a more complete body of knowledge?

These are my thoughts...what are yours?