It’s a myth that we only use 10% of our brain power. We use all of it, but 90% is used solely for trivia. Ten percent is for useful things like where you put your car keys and what your IRD number is. Ninety percent is reserved for the capital of Burkina Faso, the winner of the 2019 FA cup final, NZ’s longest serving PM and the size of Loch Ness in cubic metres.

Whether it’s Stuff-quiz-at-10am or first-Tuesday-of-every-month chances are you like to get your quiz on. Most of us do. It’s a party trick, knowing what’s special about ruthenium, or what there are 336 of in golf or what the macguffin in Pulp Fiction is. It’s a great way to start a conversation, or a great way to pull a hand-break turn on a conversation that’s going south. Don’t want to discuss your sister’s divorce any longer? Wow people with facts about Violet Jessop who survived three ship sinkings in as many years. It’s a fun approach to finishing up an endless meeting, making reference to the Chabad-Lubavitch Shluchim. And it’s a way to get a wayward chat back on track. Pop-quiz: who met Stalin at the Yalta Resort in 1945?

There’s a big difference between trivia and general knowledge. General knowledge is knowing that there are 366 days in a leap year. Trivia is knowing leap years were introduced by Julius Caesar. General knowledge is knowing the funny bone is near the humerus. Trivia is knowing the funny bone isn’t actually a bone. General knowledge is knowing B is Bravo in the NATO phonetic alphabet. Trivia is knowing Bravo Zulu is shorthand for “good job/well done”.

Samuel Johnson, the great English writer and lit-crit, said of general knowledge that it was “a store of learning, acquired by reading and conversation, respecting history, science, and art, general manners and customs”. Fun fact about Johnson: he suffered from Tourette’s and married a woman twice his age (not necessarily in that order).

Knowledge is useful. Not like trivia, which sticks to your synapses like gum to a shoe, whether you like it or not, with no respect for science, art or general manners.

That’s why pub quizzes are so popular. They are a cathartic release from the annoyance of having trivia clogging up your neural pathways … a group vomit brought about by the debauchery of consuming useless facts, like Romans at a cerebral orgy devouring nonsense then purging, collectively. Interesting trivia about Romans: they used mouse-brains as toothpaste and urine for washing clothes.

The secret to success on the pub quiz circuit is getting together the right team. It’s tempting to stack it with brainiacs but if they’re boring it’ll be a long night just to win a $50 bar tab. Better to find a tight pack you enjoy drinking with then throw in a quiz to keep things moving.

To be successful you’ll need to cover a few bases. You’ll want someone who understands sport and someone who has travelled further than Australia, someone who keeps up with world news and someone who is younger than 30. And you’ll need an English teacher or a librarian. Fun fact: Mao Zedong and Lewis Carroll were both librarians.

To actually win a quiz you have to know all the answers, and that’s much more to do with luck than IQ. Maybe you happened to spend six months WWOOFing in Split then you’ll know, if asked, which coastline it’s on, and if you like dalmatians then you’ll know how Glen Close is linked to Emma Stone, and if you really love Emma Stone you’ll know which three films Yorgos Lanthimos cast her in, and if you know that maybe you know who the first film was based on as recorded by Winston Churchill who was the great- great- great- grand-something-or-other of her lover Sarah, and if you know about Churchill maybe you know who he met in Yalta in 1945. Just knowing that might win you a bonus round for which you’d double your points. But that’s a lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’. 

The human brain has a storage capacity of 2.5 petabytes or 2.5 million gigabytes. If you had a 2.5-petabyte hard drive it could hold 500,000 movies or 600 million songs (you’d have to choose). Which is why if you know more than a dozen weird facts about entomology, you probably can’t remember your IRD number.

If we’re not quizzing to win, why do it? Rifling through grey-matter gigabytes and finding just what we’re looking for gives us a hit of dopamine, which boosts motivation, learning and the formation of memories, which makes us better quizzers. We quiz because we can…Cogito, Ergo Sum. Obscure fact about Rene ‘I think therefore I am’ Descartes: He’s also the guy who first thought up X to represent the unknown. And maybe it’s the X that keeps us quizzing, the knowledge that there’s always one more piece of the unknown left to conquer. 

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