A toddler who can do sums in seven different languages has been dubbed a “human calculator”.
Four-year-old maths prodigy Jamie Mohr has already grasped the 17 times table despite not being due to start school until next summer. The tot is already showing he has the ability of a child nearing secondary age.
Proud mother Lorraine said the pint-sized genius has astounded his nursery teachers with his skills. Despite being starved of oxygen in his mother’s womb for eight weeks, he understands fractions and percentages, knows his times tables and can add and subtract positive and negative numbers.
At 26 months old he could count to well over 100 and now, a month after his fourth birthday, he is a whizz with seven-figure numbers. He can faultlessly answer quickfire sums using numbers up to 20 in French, German and Spanish and has learned to count up to 20 in Japanese and Mandarin because “he thought it sounded cool”.
Lorraine, 38, who lives near Glasgow, says Jamie is like Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie Rain Man, adding: “We call him Rain Wean, instead of Rain Man, because he’s like a wee human calculator. He still absolutely gobsmacks me with what he can do. I think some people think I sit and coach him, but I don’t. It’s all self-taught.
“Jamie’s love in life is numbers and letters. If we’re in Asda, he’ll count up how much I’m spending and he’ll usually get it right down to the penny. Other kids want to play tig but he wants to do sums and watch people counting on YouTube.
“Even I don’t know my 17 times table, but he doesn’t even have to think about it, he is just so fast. It’s his memory – he only has to read or hear something once and it’s locked in his brain.”
To make his achievements all the more remarkable, when Lorraine was 20 weeks pregnant her placenta stopped working, starving Jamie of vital oxygen and nutrients he needed to grow. She was told her pregnancy was “no longer viable” and her baby would die in the womb within days.
But when she reached 24 weeks and Jamie was still alive, she said she knew her baby was going to survive. He weighed a tiny 1lb 8oz when he was delivered three months early at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth Maternity Hospital. He was taken to the neonatal intensive care unit and given oxygen to keep him alive. At one point, doctors gave him just a 10 per cent chance of survival and Lorraine was warned if he survived he could be left in a vegetative state or have severe learning difficulties.
But she said: “Even before he was born he did something extremely clever, because using that tiny amount of nutrients he was getting, he prioritised growing his brain. Even as a tiny feotus he knew it was more important to grow his heart and brain than his limbs.”
Known as brain-sparing, the phenomenon occurs when a feotus adapts its circulation to ensure the brain gets enough of the limited amount of nutrients available to thrive. Now, like any other happy-go-lucky toddler, he loves dinosaurs, playing football and enjoyed his birthday party at a soft play centre with friends.Unlike his peers, however, he’ll happily spend hours brushing up on his maths skills.
And it is not just numbers the toddler is skilled in.
Lorraine said: “He reads his own bedtime stories. His favourite book is the Very Hungry Caterpillar. He reads much more advanced books but that’s his favourite because it has numbers in it too. But he can read pretty much any everyday word now.”
Medics have labelled Jamie as having hyperlexia, whereby he has a superability to decode words as well as being gifted with numbers. To show family and friends proof of his skills, Lorraine has made videos demonstrating his talents. In one of them she asks him quickfire sums in Spanish and French, to which he gives the correct answer immediately.
In other videos he is able to count in 14s, 17s and 19s.
Lorraine said: “I don’t know where he gets it from. He’s got a photographic memory. He’s just a little miracle, especially after being told he would likely have a severe disability or learning difficulty. I’m just so proud of him.”
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