Geesh, now I feel like a slouch for waiting until I was 3ish. ::mutter:: Young whippersnappers…
I’m surprised she isn’t signed up for the Dope by now.
I could read large format children’s books at 9 months. I just found the content a little slow and pedestrian however so I focused on other things.
Is there any correlation between reading early and ultimate intelligence? I mean, kids who walk at 9 months instead of 12 months aren’t expected to be especially talented runners.
Steve Wright kept a diary as an infant.
You can say what you want about Rupert Sheldrake’s theories, but a girl like this fits right in. One of the things Sheldrake claims in his theory of morphic fields, is, that if enough people do something often enough, it becomes easier for new people to do it as well. As if a sort of energetic path is cleared that makes walking on it easier. More and more children learn to read English, and for every new child it becomes a little bit easier.
That man is a fucking genius. :dubious:
Was his research funded by the Center for the Study of the Blatantly Obvious?
Or am I missing something?
It’s not at all a priori obvious that phenomena should become more probable the more often they occur; just because I happen to get a streak of heads doesn’t necessarily mean that future flips will be biased towards heads, for example. So there can, in fact, be substance in such a claim (as opposed to empty tautology).
That having been said, what I would want to say about Rupert Sheldrake’s theories is, well, not positive, and I hardly see how this sort of case, even if entirely on the up and up, so to speak, provides any significant legitimacy for them.
I don’t want to hijack this thread by explaining Sheldrake. Many Dopers think he’s a quack, as you can see if you go looking for SDMB threads about the guy. Many other people find his ideas revolutionary and intriguing, as do I. I also find them scientific, in the sense that he puts forward hypotheses that can be tested, even if the theory behind the experiments can’t be tested.
“When I turned two, I thought Wow, I just doubled my age! If I keep this up, by the time I’m 8, I’ll be 90!”
Well, 128, as I reckon it. Though, I suppose, if you’re both 8 and 128, you might as well be 90 to boot.
hasn’t been coached? :dubious: So, she knew to recognize certain forms as letters and that these forms are strung together to form English words? Methinks she was coached. We were all “coached”–no one sprang from the womb reading without an introduction to language with reiteration and reinforcement.
I see nothing so very great about this. Good for her, and I hope she loves to read her entire life long–but longterm, what significance does this have for her? I don’t have any wisdom teeth–does that make me one rung higher on the evolutionary ladder (ie that which is vestigal is lost?). 
Takes shoes and socks off to count. I get 64 at most. (this is why I didn’t major in math, folks).
Every human being ever born is, literally, the next stage in human evolution, compared to their parents.
And, of course, as far as stages in evolution goes, me and my monkey/horse/tree/moss contemporaries are approximately equally advanced, in comparison to our common ancestors. Their descent just happened to go off in a different direction from mine.
My thinking is, when you’re 2 years old, you have 6 more years to go before you hit 8. Thus, if you keep things up, you’ll be going through 6 more doubling periods (given that your first doubling period, from one to two years old, took a single year). So, we get a final age of 2 * 2^6 = 2^7 = 128 (i.e., first you double to four, then to eight, then to sixteen, then to thirty-two, then to sixty-four, and then, with the sixth and final double, to 128).
Of course she’s probably been taught somewhat (although apparently she read her first word, “corn”, without anyone having taught her anything about reading). However, she wasn’t “coached” on the flashcards the reporter used to test her reading ability. “Coached” would imply that she was shown those flashcards earlier and taught to repeat the words in a specific order - that she can’t really read but simply had the sound of the words memorized.
For an example of coaching vs. learning to read, my younger brother had a book about dinosaurs when he was a toddler that had one dinosaur for each letter of the alphabet and a short (four or five sentence) description of each dinosaur. When he was about 18 months old he had the entire book memorized word for word, and he knew which page belonged to which dinosaur (from the pictures), but he couldn’t read at all. Sometimes he’d “follow along” with the words by pointing his finger as he recited the text, but more often than not his finger wasn’t pointing at the right sentence to go with what he was saying.
Holy crap, you’re the next step in evolution. When I take my shoes and socks off I can still only count to 20! (21, if you’re male.)
Most of us guys would need to take off a little more than socks and shoes for that. 
I can count to 1023 on my fingers. Those with especially dexterous toes can get to well over one million.