Who's the smartest person in America? Much to the dismay of Ken Jennings, a lot of people think he is.

Jennings, of course, is the guy who won 74 straight games of Jeopardy-amounting to 2,220 minutes-while pocketing more than $2.5 million along the way. Sure he's got a big brain, but the biggest?

"It's kind of sad that we so lack for intellectual role models that we have to turn to some guy on a game show to be our cultural signifier of a smart guy," says the humble yet highly humorous Jennings.

But can the acquisition of seemingly random facts actually lead to true intelligence?

Jennings took time out from his busy writing schedule to answer that question and speak with us about his passion for trivia.

His first book, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs came out in paperback in late October, and his latest effort, The Ken Jennings Trivia Almanac, will be released in January.

Do you still watch Jeopardy?

I love Jeopardy but have a hard time relaxing and watching it the way I used to. It's the kind of thing where I hear the music or the sound effects, and I tense up involuntarily. It's like a Vietnam vet hearing a helicopter go over. I have post-traumatic game show stress disorder, I guess.

What do you think accounts for our national fascination with trivia?

I think a few things drive it. One is the simple psychological fact that we like to get things right, and we like the comforting ping of producing the right answer. In our information crammed age, we have our heads stuffed with facts about our favorite sport or TV show. This information so rarely comes in handy, so it's a nice feeling to have something in your head be useful for once.

Is there a difference between trivia and intelligence, or is trivia just useless facts?

That's a big question. I don't like the idea of calling it trivia, because it implies that any knowledge you have in your head must be trivial or unimportant. If you watch Jeopardy, they are asking questions every day about the Civil Rights movement or cures for cancer or the lives of Einstein and Gandhi. This is actually important stuff that we should know. I think in earlier times this was the backbone of a broad liberal arts education. But we all became so specialized, that we started calling this stuff trivia. Trivia is certainly not intelligence, but it does seem to be correlated with intelligence. You make better decisions and judgments of the world if you are building them on many and accurate facts. And the facts in your head can be the building blocks for more substantial knowledge—even wisdom.

When was the first time you understood the power of information?

I've met people whose entire lives were impacted by learning some amazing fact. Like the kid who discovers that the giant squid has the largest eye in nature—an eye the size of volleyball-and 20 years later becomes a marine biologist. It just shows you that trivia can be a gateway drug to real knowledge. In my own experience, there were so many times on Jeopardy when some question could make a five-figure dollar amount difference in my life, like the time I got a science question right just because I read a bunch of Fantastic Four comics as a kid.

There is so much information out there. How are you managing the information explosion?

I thrive on it. It's like some super-salty water that would kill most animals, but then there is a brine shrimp that needs this weird environment to live. That's sort of how I feel about information. Some people get turned off by this flood of facts in the Internet age, but to me there has never been a more exciting time to be alive. The answer to virtually any question about the world is only the touch of a button away. That's an amazing blessing.

When was the very first moment you knew you were an information enthusiast—what we are calling an "Inforati"?

My mom always knew I was that sort of kid. I taught myself to read at age two, and I was the type who would go off with a book and not come back until I finished it. This type of person is born, not made. You are like a sponge and have a driving need to absorb information, no matter where from, almost in an undiscriminating way. I also kept a stack of notebooks filled with all kinds of weird lists. A well-organized list is very attractive to me. In a world full of grays, it was very comforting to know that my list of presidential middle names was 100 percent accurate.