comments_image Comments  Can 'Genius' Really Be Detected in
Infancy?  Depends on how much you believe in IQ scores. See more
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Four-year-old Heidi Hankins was all over the news earlier this
year. According to the  Daily Mail, she "has an IQ of 159 --
only one point below Albert Einstein's -- and has become one of
the youngest members of Mensa." As her father has pointed out,
she has always shown an intense need for intellectual
stimulation, bursting at the mouth to speak at birth, acquiring
vocabulary by the age of 1, and voraciously reading through all
30 books in the  Oxford Reading Tree set in an hour by the age
of 2.   We don't know just how much of this is true, but
assuming it is, Heidi's case raises an intriguing question: can
high intelligence accurately be detected this young?   In the
late '80s and early '90s Joseph Fagan and his colleagues tested
61 infants between 7 and 12 months of age on their ability to
selectively attend to novel pi