Pranav has an IQ of 176. One person in 1 million has an IQ of 176 or above. Albert Einstein’s IQ was believed to be about 160. The average IQ is 100.
Pranav Veera can recite the names of the U.S. presidents in the order they served in office. He can say the alphabet backward. Give him a date back to 2000, and he’ll tell you the day of the week.
He’s only 6 years old.
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And as with all good genius children, he is dressed up like an adult…. sometimes the world is predictable, and very, very wrong!
wow!
Agreed – put him in a fairy outfit like Derrens parents did.
Yeah WELL I can apply foundation, blush, mascara, eyeliner and concealer all in under 10 minutes. YEAH. Who needs a high IQ when you can do that?
(I’m going to cry myself to sleep for the next week in shame. Damn clever children. D:)
Aww it’s such a shame he has to be slapped round the face really hard before he’ll be able to count those letters though, eh Derren?
hehee..sjeesus those comments…
Is he the finale of Derrens new show?!!!!!!!!
Its interesting in that he looks to be of indian descent. I know MANY friends of mine who were pressured into doing calculus when they were in the womb. They all turned out to be doctors or scientists.
I wonder if his upbringing had a role in helping him? or not? hhhmmmm
To what extent does the memorisation of the U.S. Presidents make anyone a genius? Give me a couple of weeks and I could do the same. I can also recite the alphabet backwards. My IQ is just marginally above 100. I am not a genius.
aww i want one. i know a 4 year old that can do multiplication in his head.
By the way, what is Derrens IQ? No really, I’m serious, does anybody know his IQ?
Having a high IQ means you are good at doing IQ tests and not much more. I can score over 140 on pretty much any IQ test and I rock those mensa tests people email around.. however… I can not read basic instructions. I can not remember milk. I don’t do well at trivia nights. It just means you are good at doing IQ tests.
That little boy is too cute… I always did really well at tests, but when it comes to remembering simple things, not so much. My favorite comforter has been at the cleaners since Christmas because I keep forgetting to pick it up.
wow – i wonder what hisiq will be at 18 years old.
My husband has the exact same IQ, 176, but he has Asperger’s Syndrome so he hasn’t achieved what one might expect from someone with that level of intelligence.
My IQ is pretty close to his. Who cares? In my opinion, the higher the IQ, the smarter you are, and the more you know, the harder life is. Sometimes you see way too much and it’s hard to relate to people.
Kim – that’s interesting… I’ve encountered a similar correlation between people with high IQs and dyslexia. I couldn’t say if it’s a trend or merely that the few people I know with dyslexia also happen to be smartarses!
You should read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers. You’ll find out high IQ doesn’t mean all that.
IQs are definitely one measure of knowing stuff, but the way I personally see learning is that in terms of knowledge you either know stuff or you don’t, but nearly everybody learns at the same rate.
Here’s why:
From times such as school years, you are quickly adopted the belief that you are either smart or dumb. You then fulfil this belief by looking for ways to support it and disregarding things that go against it. Think about the behaviour ‘norms’ that exist between what people may call ‘nerds’ and ‘jocks’.
If you truly weren’t able to learn stuff at all:
Your conscious mind could not make new decisions as it would not be able to learn what it thinks will be the consequence of the decision.
Your belief system would not function in light of new experiences.
If you ate a poisonous food, you survival instinct would not learn that the same food is indeed poisonous.
Not all as it seems I say…
I have an IQ of 170, but I am also really lacking in common sense and forget things all the time.
IQ is a measure of one type of intelligence and those who score high on IQ tests often lack in other areas
Have you guys ever noticed that some people who are incredibly intelligent are completely lacking in common sense? I wonder why…
A high IQ suggests a tendancy to overthink on common situations. The more we think needlessly about stuff, the more likely we are to irrationalise situations and make weird decisions. The number of thoughts is going to determine this likelyhood.
I hate him – he\’s making the rest of us look bad.
Only kidding, he\’ll probably find a cure for cancer or save the planet or something, or at least win the Weakest Link.
Why do people seem to equate being able to remember strings of facts with bein intelligent? Just because you can remember the names of 40-odd presidents, or who won the FA cup each year etc does not make you clever. It makes you a notepad! Intelligence comes into being able to figure out problems, being able to see the link between seemingly disparate facts, and being able to make leaps of logic.
Like Ianne, I have an IQ that is quite above average, but it doesn’t mean anything other than I can do IQ tests.
I am pretty sure your IQ can change as time goes by, and is calculated in comparison with the population average – so if you live in a magical land of Oxford professors, your IQ number will drop, but if you live in the Terrible Land of Troglodytes it goes up. I’m not sure if I am correct, though.
I’m not good with IQ. I honestly don’t think I have the attention span to complete any of those tests.
This is where we get the ‘mad scientist’ image from, isn´t it? He invents a time machine or suchlike but could´nae find his arse with both hands…
They’ve got EQ tests as well these days, to measure how well you get along with people (emotional quotient). IQ is skewed towards maths-like reasoning & misses out a lot of important reasoning/processing skills that matter much more when it comes to actually achieving things & hacking out a happy and fulfilled life for yourself.
Information is good. I like collecting information & quantities & statistics. Still, measuring children’s intelligence like this always depresses me. It teaches people to categorise themselves early on, and measure their value by competing against other people in some stupid number-game which they’re even told is outside their control. A below-local-average IQ score can lumber kids with self-esteem problems (obviously destructive) but a high IQ score can be damaging too. Children can mess themselves up with success-guilt or delusions of grandeur just as much as adults can.
I wish education focused on teaching people that their brains are fluid, changeable things full of undiscovered abilities, and these can be developed at any time in life and it’s *fun*. There’s so much pressure to compete against people at school, and either be a life-long ‘success’ or ‘failure’ as a result. It’s really negative and isolating and I’m in *such* a bad mood with this stupic country sometimes! I bet everything’s better in Denmark.
Also, children in waistcoats are like kittens in bonnets.
Ofcourse it did not get its IQ from his parents, let’s put that first. There are lots of examples of people with high iq with parents with normal or low iq’s.
Also, I’m sure this type of iq (….), the way it has been described here, can be triggered also by other things in its upbringing .. Parents can force their kids in such brain systems .. It does not sound to healthy .. the way it has been described here .. lot of useless stuff. Meanwhile .. where is the kid himself …
IQ is not a static thing, and not always so positive .. A very high IQ that is. As we all know by now.
You can get around, and into the university with quite normal brains … so why would you want more? If you boost it .. it will lack major in other areas … more human areas …
CQ (combined Q’s that have been developped by scientists by now) …
Who developped the IQ tests … who decides what is IQ? The iq test I have seen are a bit dumb .. and predictable .. it does not really ask something from someone .. we just reproduce stuff others thought was intelligent .. At times it is a complete waste of time, a huge spill of energy ..
The thing we are not that good in might give us the most in the end ..
kittens in bonnets = lots of scratches!
have a look at kenneth l.higbee’s book, your memory and how to improve it. This has a trick that can help you remember every day for a whole year using a 12 digit number (pg 97). You end up looking like a genius, but it is just a mind hack. The other items mentions are also memory tricks. i am sure he’s smart though
, he doesn’t have all the stuff like paying the mortgage to cloud his head
funny how people posting here seem to have an average I.Q. of 150 or more.
it\’s a miracle of a semi religious nature as Randi would say.
nice to see the immediate torrent of knee-jerk reactions trying to belittle the kid and make out he isn’t anything special. you must all be really proud of yourselves. especially all the ones who ‘have a similar IQ, but it doesn’t really mean anything’. O RLY.
Lots of famous child prodigies didn\’t end up doing anything important. To be successful you need more than just intelligence. You also need determination and rationality.
I hate all the people, who was writing to this comment and saying that their IQ is 170 and similar…You would be glad if your IQ will be above 120, morons…You are lying to yourself…(excuse my English, I am from Europe and still a student…)
My IQ is low I think… Like 100. I don’t get the questions. How can I know what the next picture is gonna look like??
I can name all shakespeares plays in the order they were written. I learned that reading Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown. And I could have learned to say the results of the football series in the UK (like the “national cup” – you know what I mean) only no-one would EVER ask me about that since I live among swedes!
A high IQ test is simply proof that you are good at the test, and if you have lots of experience with technology you are more likely to score high.
H O W E V E R, this is a very young child. He is not attending those ridiculous classes you can go to which teach you how to sit IQ test and he has not spent 18 years mucking about with computer programming. I can’t say I am that bothered by this child’s IQ, despite how very swish he is looking in that waistcoat, but lets not belittle this wee boy for no reason. He looks very sweet!
Also, an IQ in the 170s is extraordinary, all those claiming that score have clearly done online tests which, I am sorry to say, rather overscore you. The fact that they are so convinced of the test’s validity suggests intelligence rather lower than the average.
I have a degree in Psychology, and whilst it is a vast field, and I would certainly not pretend to have specialised knowledge any of those areas, I have looked at IQ as part of my studies. As several people have touched upon, IQ is what it is – a test to see how good you are at IQ tests. There are certainly many cognitive factors evaluated in IQ tests, but the test themselves still remain controversial, as indeed the general concept of intelligence does. Going by what the article above says the kid is very good at memorising sequences and perhaps even has a language hack worked out for certain feats. These are skills that anyone can develop (even Derren in his book showed us how to use memory palaces, etc). Alternatively, people (and children) on the autism spectrum can often accomplish..
tasks which seem incredible to others (for example Savant-like abilities). But this usually is severely balanced by deficiencies in normal functioning. These tasks (like memorizing lists of presidents, telling the day of the week of a date, etc) are often performed by rote-learning – memorizing and repeating the whole list, rather than coming up with higher-order big picture strategies, like a ‘mind hack’.
These specific abilities reported with this boy make me wonder what role the parents had, as it hardly seems like topics a 6-year-old would suddenly select to learn. And while they may make him stand out from his cohorts at the moment, giving him an IQ of 176, it really depends on how the curve of development continues as to whether this IQ will continue to be high…
Ah, just got the full article. Now I feel like an idiot
He seems to be a highly systematic thinker; I would be interested to know which academic areas his mother and father have their qualifications in, and whether they would be considered fairly ‘systematic’ subjects.
Glad that they’re also concerned about his social needs.
Kate, while a lot of what you’re saying is quite valid, I think it’s a bit stereotypical to assume people on the autism spectrum will have savant-like abilities or learn things without understanding.
While I and the other people with autism I know all share an above-average accuracy and ease of memorisation, I wouldn’t say that this is just by rote learning. Although it is easier for me to just read and remember a whole text than to summarise it and learn the important parts (as to me, almost all parts will seem equally important by virtue of being in the text), I do remember things better and longer if I actually understand the reasoning or mechanism behind them.
Though I must admit that all people with autism I know have Asperger’s (like me) or PDD-NOS. Maybe you mean classical autism?
Sorry, I wasn’t being clear enough and shouldn’t have used the word ‘often’ (because I had to seperate my reponse over two comments I wasn’t able to review exactly what I said in the first) – I wasn’t meaning at all to stereotype or attribute savant-like abilities unequivocally to people on the autism spectrum. You’re correct, I meant to refer to people who are on the extreme end of the spectrum/ or Autistic Savants (who are very rare and over-represented in the media and films). I would definitely like to stress that Autism has no one universal expression and is incredibly heterogeneous from person to person. And that faculty of above-average accuracy and easy of memorisation would give you a distinct edge over cohorts in certain aspects of an IQ test….
It’s odd when you read people bragging of/mentioning incredibly high IQs on the net, and they do not provide any background information. You would think that someone so smart would understand testing and basic statistics enough to know that there are many IQ tests and that most are on different scales and have different variation in the population. Therefore, the only meaningful number to report (unless full information about the test is given) is the percentage of people in the general population either above or below you in terms of score. Because of this, I am highly skeptical of these claims.
I don’t get it. My IQ is 176 too, but I don’t do crazy stuff like that. Guess I’m just lazy…
btw i’m 14