everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding “I don’t know, let’s find out” to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.
Highly intelligent people tend to have better memories. If less intelligent people don’t recall something from childhood, that definitely doesn’t rule out the possibility that it did happen to them and yet had no effect, because they may just have forgotten about it.
Or, smart people had smart parents. Smart parents tend to do that kind of thing, but the main effect to the kids’ IQ comes from having the right genes, not from the actual behavior. (A lot of the things that correlate with kids having higher IQs are like this, including things like “amount of books in the house”, IIRC—control for heredity, and the effect on IQ vanishes.)
Alternate explanation for:
Highly intelligent people tend to have better memories. If less intelligent people don’t recall something from childhood, that definitely doesn’t rule out the possibility that it did happen to them and yet had no effect, because they may just have forgotten about it.
Or, smart people had smart parents. Smart parents tend to do that kind of thing, but the main effect to the kids’ IQ comes from having the right genes, not from the actual behavior. (A lot of the things that correlate with kids having higher IQs are like this, including things like “amount of books in the house”, IIRC—control for heredity, and the effect on IQ vanishes.)