What your IQ score doesn't tell you
"From 12 to 18 months old, we'd be driving around in the car, and she would recite her bedtime story from the night before," her dad, Ian, told CNN affiliate KNXV. "She didn't just recite them; she recited them exactly." Alexis is the youngest member of Arizona's Mensa chapter. American Mensa (PDF) is an organization for people with IQs in the top 2%. The average IQ is 100. Martin's tops 160, CNN reports. Mensa has more than 55,000 members nationally. You'd probably recognize some of the more famous ones: Nolan Gould, who plays Luke on ABC's "Modern Family"; Richard Bolles, the author of "What Color is Your Parachute?"; the Blue Power Ranger (OK, he's a fictional member). But what does an IQ score really tell us about a person? Will Alexis be a genius for life? And if you still can't speak Spanish at age 50, should you just give up? What your IQ score means An Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, is a measure of what psychologists call our "fluid and crystallized intelligence." Put simply, an IQ test measures your reasoning and problem-solving abilities. There are different kinds of IQ tests, but most analyze your visual, mathematical and language abilities as well as your memory and information processing speed. A licensed psychologist administers a series of subtests; the results are then combined into one score: your IQ. "Anybody with very high IQ, they have the ability to manipulate, process and interpret information at a deeper level and a higher speed than the average person," explained Mensa's gifted youth specialist, Lisa Van Gemert. What your specific numerical score means depends on the test you take. IQ is really a measure of how well you do on a test compared with other people your age. Scores are generally shown on a bell curve. The average score is 100. People to the far left or far right of the curve are outliers. Alexis, for example, is on the far right of the curve for children her age. Read more here