When I was growing up, my dad and I reached a kind of understanding. If I went on about the minutiae of Pokémon and other video games he didn't care about, he could respond in kind with the dull details of whatever scientific experiment fascinated him.
It was a good system, but what I didn't know was that the mutual tolerance of each other's info dumps was probably nurturing my ability to learn.
Oddly enough, that wasn't because I absorbed the science facts he was talking about because I don't really remember what he said.
According to research in Indiana and Wisconsin, just letting me explore the nitty gritty details of my interest was helpful in and of itself.