A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius

Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever.