BY: ROB HOFFMAN
An unlikely genius has emerged in the heart of England’s gypsy community, scoring an IQ higher than some of the world’s most renowned geniuses.
On a whim of intuition about his daughter’s exceptional intellect, James Barr took his daughter Nicole to take the Mensa IQ test. After scoring an impressive 162, Nicole blew up into a neighbourhood hero and world-wide conversation piece. It’s easy to see why, seeing as a score places her two steps higher on Mensa’s intellectual ladder than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
Nicole and her family are members of the Roma community, known as gypsies to some like her father, who says that her unbelievable IQ score is “’the talk of the gypsy community,” according to the Western Daily Press. “It’s nice for us to be in the news for something good for a change. This shows that it doesn’t matter where you come from, anyone can be academically brilliant,” James tells Western Daily Press. Everyone loves a good rags to riches story, and Nicole’s humble roots romanticize her outstanding test score into a movie-worthy storyline. Think Good Will Hunting meets Snatch. The family—James, Nicole and her baby half-sister—lives in Harlow, Essex in a caravan, and of course 36-year-old James holds down a career in gutter cleaning and driveway repair.
To further put Nicole’s capabilities into perspective, the average IQ for an adult is 100. Anything above 140 instantly shuffles you under the category of genius. Nicole’s score places her in the highest intelligence bracket on the planet, constituting only 1% of the global population, for which there is an exclusive society known as Mensa International. Of the 110,000 members of Mensa international, only 8% are under 16, and 35% are female.
At the moment, Nicole attends Burnt Mill Academy, with the ambition to one day become a doctor. Or maybe she’ll change her mind down the road and invent a time machine or teleportation device instead. Regardless of how Nicole’s career path takes shape, it’s worth remembering that an IQ test score is only a number—genius or no genius, it’s about what you contribute to the world. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for time machine.
Sources: businessinsider.com, wikipedia.org