We are still primates, advanced apes. For a rundown on the similarities and some big differences, I recommend "Our Inner Ape" and related books by Franz de Waal. But, at any point in our lives, we can be seized by hunger for knowledge, understanding, information, satisfying answers. As little kids, many of us go through a stage of asking "Why?" about everything.
Like any other hunger, we can allow hunger for knowledge and understanding to get out of hand. We usually arrive at a point where we see that we are never going to get all the answers. We are not even going to ask all the questions. If we were to limit ourselves to 5-star questions only, we still would be unable to ask them all.
As we age and think and experience, we actually get better at asking questions. We can sense better which questions would probably pay off more and which are trivial or nonsensical. Our minds don't actually think in full sentences all the time. Often, we just associate this subject with that one. We bring our life experience of society, individuals, aging and luck to bear on issues of interest.
I count it as a blessing to be alive during the time when knowledge, research, experimentation and reconceptualization is so widespread and on a path of even wider dispersion. Not only do we have libraries and computers, we have much better communication with others who have more knowledge and very different experience of what life is and means.
The American schools often have planned out curricula and the plan cannot cover all the knowledge that can come to mind throughout life. Few people I know are like the student teacher who expressed some frustration with his preparation since a student had asked him a question during his first week that he couldn't answer. As humanity gets better at asking questions, we all get more and more familiar with the feeling that we can easily wonder about something that is completely new. We learn of various tools for answering but we also learn that there are many important questions that we don't know the answer to. We find that many questions that were once reported to be answered are now shown to be mysteries deeper than suspected. We find that some explanations that were accepted as answers are now rejected as badly inadequate, and some answers that were thought to be silly are turning out to be just the opposite.
I recommend accepting your own good mind, that of friends and family, and that of people across the earth. You don't have to be surprised or shocked if you suddenly develop an interest in answers to questions that you never thought about before. We humans are just beginning to wake up.
