The problem with knowing everything about everything

You might know or occasionally meet someone who seems to have encyclopaedic knowledge. They virtually know everything about every field, topic, occurrence and theory. They have read it all up, have great retention and can recall it all as needed with great precision. For example, things like major air crashes that have taken place, when, where, aircraft specifications, how many casualties, the exact reasons for the crash etc.. Or which CS problems are in PSPACE-complete; who proved which theorem, how; all the algorithms and terminology. The GDPs of nations, the major contributor to the GDP. Which language has what origin, how they branched. And so on.

Mind you, I am not talking about people who name-drop or just pretend knowledge. These guys indeed know all that (or have all the information).

I don't know if anyone else has faced this difficulty, but I find it very difficult to have a "research style" conversation with a person of this type. They are full of so much information that a conversation on any topic soon gets into the minutest of the details, takes detours into detailed information from other related topics and sub-topics, such that you soon forget the big picture in the thick information foliage they have created around you. It gets frustrating because, there is hardly the excitement of speculating or wondering about ideas when everything gets reduced to a bunch of cold pieces of information. I may get a lot of interesting information that I didn't know, but hardly any research value.

I don't mean any disrespect to this type of people, but I sometimes suspect even they face such difficulties in their own research work (perhaps, unknowingly). It might be difficult to get enough free mental space for the unfolding of new ideas; or the new thoughts they think might compete to get mapped on to a piece of fact they already know. You see, research cannot begin in a matter-of-factly mood. Research begins with a sense of awe and ignorance about something. So, I wonder if too much knowledge is detrimental to generating fresh research ideas.