The rule in the house is we don't say "I don't know." If we don't know something, we are required to think about it and then ask a question.
Recently, he asked how an audio recoding dog trainer worked in terms of how it "went back up" because he couldn't see the internals. He knew that it went down and back up, and then knew that it was not electronic, but mechanical. I asked him to think about it. He thought, and I could see his mind working, thinking about everything in his mind where a toy of his would go down and up. He sat for around 20 seconds and asked, is it a spring? I was quite impressed considering he is 4 years old and was able to come to this conclusion.
There is a map we create, a list of things that go up and down. From that list of things that can go up and down, knowing it was not a pulley or a plunger, because it returned to its original state, he's able to limit it to the one object that would work.
The biggest jumps in my education have been directly related to people mapping Concepts and ideas instead of memorization. That's like the idea that everything is a file. From that framework you can pull out questions like, can I read, do I have permissions to read, can I write, so now when someone explains to me I knew shiny object, like a fancy Wiz Bang database, I asked a couple questions and generally know how it works.