Cindy Kranz
The Cincinnati Enquirer
March 18, 2009
Boy With 106 IQ Is 1 in a Million
LOVELAND, Ohio — 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.
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| Glenn Hartong, The Enquirer |
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| Six year-old Pranav Veera, who has a photographic memory and has tested in the very upper ranges of intelligence, poses with letters spelling his name |
He's only 6 years old.
At first glance, Pranav is a typical young boy who is highly competitive at playing Wii video games and likes to play outside. A closer look reveals he's anything but typical.
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.
When Pranav was 4-and-a-half, his parents noticed he seemed unusually intelligent while playing with alphabet sets. He could even recall which letters were certain colors.
"That kind of puzzled us," said his father, Prasad Veera. "You have to have not a normal memorization, but some other means of recall."
Now, he loves all kinds of alphabets.
"He loves to collect them, like different colors, different sizes, different materials," said his mother, Suchitra Veera.
The Veeras decided to have Pranav tested three months ago at Powers Educational Services in Hyde Park, Ohio.
"I said, 'Let's try it out, because he seems to do a lot of stuff kind of not quite normal for his age,' " his father said. "He tested 176."
He seems to have a photographic memory, so keeping Pranav engaged and learning is a big challenge for his family.
His mother and grandmother, Shanta Sastri, work with him at home.
They're guided by his focus and interests.
"The way to get him interested is to associate something with numbers, like presidents' birthdays … and when they came into office," his mother said.
"Once we introduced him to the idea, he was asking more and more questions, so we created a spreadsheet for him in Excel, and he keeps on asking us to add more types of information to it, like sort them in the order that they came into office, sort them in the order when they were born," she said.
In prekindergarten, his teacher had him do more challenging work, such as division and telling time. In kindergarten, his classmates are learning the alphabet and numbers up to 100. He's counting over 1 million.
"He's an amazing child," said Marci Taylor, his teacher at McCormick Elementary in the Milford School District. "He knows so much, yet he's probably more excited about learning than any child I've ever seen. He shakes with excitement."
Pranav knows so many incredible things, she said, but what's also impressive is that he's still a 6-year-old boy.
"He loves to go play at recess and climb on the monkey bars," Taylor said.
It's possible that Pranav might eventually have his learning accelerated, even by skipping grades, but his father said they would have to consider that with his social needs. "We want him to be as normal as possible," his father said.
"Right now, it's kind of early, and we can do a lot at home," his mother added. "We have to figure out what works best, because I think it's different for each child."Pranav draws his intelligence from both sides of the family.
His father has a Ph.D. and his mother has two master's degrees.
What does Pranav want to be when he grows up?
"An astronaut," he said without hesitation.
Truly, for Pranav, the sky's the limit.
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