"I love general knowledge, geography, literature, music, science trivia," Kishler explained. "I just love to accumulate knowledge. I like the exercise that it gives my brain and memory."
She doesn't think of herself as a competitive person but nevertheless enjoys getting a bit amped up at trivia games.
“People really like to have some expertise on something and the brain is very good at focusing on things that you’re interested in,” Deborah Stokes, Ph.D., L.P.C., B.C.N., a psychologist in Virginia, who focuses on neurotherapy, also told Healthline.
According to Stokes, learning large bodies of knowledge can often start with trivia. And people who are interested in trivia can be brainy, have a high IQ, and be smart on a lot of levels.
However, Kounios said that people aren’t necessarily better at trivia games just because they’re more educated.
"Some people soak up facts,” Kounios added. "Plenty of people with a lot more education may not remember what they had for breakfast yesterday morning."
"In typical people, my observation, not backed up by any research, is that their interest in trivia is confined to topics that they are generally interested in. So if a person is very interested in history, then they may either seek out history trivia, or they might just naturally pick it up in the course of learning about nontrivial aspects of history."
Stokes also pointed out that trying to retain information about things we're interested in can be like a good exercise for the frontal cortex as the brain ages.
