She rattles off location of 40 elements on the table, names of foreign capitals.
Here’s one instance to show you that there are few limits to the human mind; that even a child can hold, in its memory, more than most adults care to try remembering. Two-year-old Nilshika Ashoka entertains herself by challenging her memory.
While others her age learn to form words, this toddler can recite the periodic table of the chemical elements, the Mendeleev table, so called after its Russian inventor, who arranged the different chemical elements based on recurring trends in their properties in 1869.
Nilshika possibly does not understand the rationale behind the arrangement of the elements, but she will recite the whole table to you, at a pace that will leave you amazed. Give her less than a minute, and she’ll tell you the location of 40 elements on the periodic table.
The daughter of Ashok T, a business analyst, and Swapna Ashok, a homemaker, Nilshika showed remarkable powers of memory at an early age. “She could memorise all kinds of things. Some of our friends pointed out this uncanny ability, and we have given her things that she could commit to memory,” said Swapna, her mother.
Even though Nilshika has never been to even a play school, she already knows the names of all the planets, continents and oceans. All the little girl’s neighbours at her apartment block in Sahakar Nagar know the child, and marvel at her memory. “When I first met her, I just could not believe that such a tiny tot could hold so much information!” says Kranti Kumar S, a neighbour.
“We were just casually talking, and Nilshika surprised us by telling us the capitals of several foreign countries. Some of those, of course, even I could not recall,” said Hyma Abbavaram, another neighbour.
“There are children who show remarkable mental and intellectual abilities at an early age, sometimes even before they turn five. Depending on their ability, they should be trained in a special manner,” said Bhupendra Chaudhry, consultant psychiatrist, Manipal Hospital.
Little Nilshika sure has a headstart over other tiny tots. She still has two years to go before she starts regular school. Is it true, what Laszlo Polgar, father of the Hungarian chess prodigy, Judith Polgar, said, “Geniuses are made, not born”?
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