A two-year-old girl from Kentucky, Isla McNabb, has become the youngest to ever join Mensa, the association of people with high IQs. Jason and Amanda McNabb, Isla’s parents, said the little girl learned the alphabet at 18 months and soon after learned to read. Mensa International is a nonprofit organization open to anyone who scores at least in the 98th percentile on a standardized IQ test. It is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world.
Isla joined the organization after scoring in the 99th percentile in intelligence, which is excellent for her age on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Isla’s parents noticed from the first moment that she had a high attention span. And while he was clearly very intelligent, nothing seemed completely out of the ordinary until he started learning things that were unusual at his age. An example? Isla began learning colors, numbers and the alphabet at the age of one. “When asked at seven months, she chose objects from picture books,” explained Isla’s father, Jason McNabb. For her second birthday, Isla’s aunt Crystal gave her a tablet and when Jason wrote the word “red” she was surprisingly able to read it. Both Jason and Isla’s mother, Amanda, were surprised. So they continued: Jason wrote the words “blue”, “yellow”, “cat” and “dog” and read aloud and without hesitation everything that was asked of her.
It still is. At some point, Isla’s parents discovered that the little girl was writing next to each object the name that represented it: the chair became “chair,” and the same was true of the sofa, for example. Her cat Booger was also found with the letters CAT on its side. And that’s when Amanda suggested Isla get tested.