12-year-old girl beats Einstein, Hawking to set new maximum IQ score

The 12-year-old girl Lydia Sebastian in UK has achieved the highest score of 162 in a Mensa-supervised IQ test, placing her in the top 1 percent of the population. The result suggests the student have higher IQ than the geniuses Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

The British student, from Colchester County high school, a selective girl’s grammar school in Essex, England, gained the maximum possible score for people under 18 years old, which for Mensa, an individual is already considered genius with a score over 140. According to Mensa, only 1 percent of people who took the test achieve the maximum mark, and the top score in the IQ test for adults was 161.

Mensa, a club for people with high IQs, only considers those at the top 2 percent of IQs, which indicates that Sebastian may have passed the requirement to be a member of the club. However, there is still no update on the process about Sebastian’s membership of Mensa.

Sebastian was thought to gain higher score than Hawking who had an IQ of 160, and Einstein. However, Einstein never took a modern IQ test, but experts say that he had the same score with Hawking.

But neuroscientists said even the tests can be used to measure memory, mathematical ability, verbal reasoning and logic, it is inappropriate at determining the overall intelligence of a person. The process requires the interaction of several brain regions at once to prove the mental abilities of an individual.

Sebastian also said that she’s not into being compared to Einstein and Hawking. “They've achieved so much. I don't think it's right," she told CNN.

The new record was the second time that a young female has gained higher score than the best minds in science. In August, another 12-year-old Nicole Barr, from the UK, had the same score with Sebastian. She is already a member of Mensa.

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