Mensa Welcomes 2-Year-Old as Youngest Member

Mensa, the oldest and largest high IQ society in the world, has welcomed a 2-year-old as its youngest member.

Kashe Quest of Los Angeles, California, was accepted by Mensa after passing the organization's membership exam, which requires an applicant to score at least 132 on the Stanford–Binet IQ test. Passing the exam puts a candidate in the top 2 percent of the population for intelligence, according to the group's website.

Trevor Mitchell, executive director of American Mensa, said in a statement to People that "Kashe is certainly a remarkable addition to American Mensa.

"We are proud to have her and to be able to help her and her parents with the unique challenges that gifted youth encounter."

Kashe's mother, Sukhjit Athwal, told KTTV that her daughter has an IQ of 146, which is much higher than the American average of 98.

Athwal said that Kashe is able to count to 100 and knows more than 50 signs in sign language. She is also learning Spanish and can name all 50 states just by looking at their shape and location.

"We started to notice her memory was really great. She just picked up things really fast and she was really interested in learning," Athwal told KTTV. "At about 17, 18 months, she had recognized all the alphabet, numbers, colors and shapes."

The 2-year-old showcased her skills while appearing on an episode of Good Day LA, successfully identifying the state of Mississippi, according to the New York Post.

Despite her daughter's accomplishments at such a young age, Athwal said she doesn't want to "force anything" on Kashe and that she is keen to make sure she "has a childhood."

"We're kind of going at her pace and we want to just make sure that she is youthful for as long as she can be," she said. "At the end of the day, she's in that toddler stage.

"So she very much is still a normal two-year-old where we have negotiations, we have tantrums — we have everything."

Athwal said that despite Kashe engaging in normal behaviour for a toddler, "it's different because the way we communicate with her, it has to be different because she's able to understand just a little bit more."

Mensa has about 50,000 members in the U.S. and 130,000 worldwide, ranging from the age of 2 to 106.

The organization says that its members "include engineers, homemakers, teachers, actors, athletes, students, and CEOs, and they share only one trait — high intelligence."

Newsweek contacted American Mensa for comment.