Identical but different

GUY LYON PLAYFAIR explains why some twins are telepathic and some aren’t, and why it matters

In my 2003 article The Twin Thing ( FT171:34-40) I described how the history of twin telepathy research has been one of stops and starts, and how it was then possible to read all the accounts of properly conducted work on it in a single day. I also mentioned my being told (wrongly, as it turned out) by the lady on the front desk at the Department of Twin Research (DTR) at King’s College, London, that they were “not interested in spooky stuff”.

Since then, much water has flowed under Westminster Bridge, which links King’s with St Thomas’s Hospital across the Thames, where the DTR’s premises are located. There, a large team of scientists, some of them twins, have been studying the genetic and/or environmental origins of a wide range of diseases and psychological conditions, with the help of the 12,000 volunteer twins on its books, and have published more than 600 papers on their findings since the unit was founded in 1993.

A June 2013 press release revealed that also being studied was something rarely even mentioned at this academic level, let alone taken seriously – telepathy. Since I was involved in this sudden transformation of a previously taboo subject into one deserving as much study as any other human ability, let me summarise briefly how it came about.

In 1997, I helped to set up what was probably the first live demonstration of twin communication at a distance for Carlton TV’s The Paranormal World of Paul McKenna. It was not my idea, but producer Mike Johnstone’s, to have one twin hooked up to a polygraph in a soundproof room, while the other, in the studio, was given some kind of surprise or shock. This, I knew, was what twins were best at picking up.

Elaine Dove certainly picked up “something from somewhere” as polygrapher Jeremy Barrett put it when the pens on his chart paper shot upwards, one of them nearly running off the paper. “It looks to me like shock or surprise,” he added. Elaine’s sister Evelyn had been asked just to relax in front of a pyramid put together by the special effects team. As she was dreamily visualising her favourite holiday beach, the pyramid exploded with a loud bang and a shower of sparks, giving her a very surprising shock indeed. This looked to me very much like telepathy in action, so I decided the subject needed further study.

I ransacked the shelves of several libraries, starting with the special collection of twin literature at the Royal Society of Medicine, finding the word ‘telepathy’ in just two or three of the hundred-plus books there. I eventually found enough material for my talk at the 1998 conference of the Society for Psychical Research in York, an article in the SPR Journal (January 1999), and the first edition of my book Twin Telepathy in 2002.1

One of the few who showed serious interest in my York talk was Adrian Parker from the University of Gothenburg, where he is now Professor of Psychology. He would love to do some twin research, he said, if he could raise the money, but he knew that getting funding for anything remotely connected to a subject then widely considered in academic circles to be taboo was not easy.

I eventually managed to get him in touch with the King’s unit, who were very helpful, granting him ‘visiting scientist’ status, which gave him access to their premises, and their twins. They also invited him to their annual garden party in 2009, where he and PhD student Göran Brusewitz were able to persuade 224 twins to fill in an ‘Exceptional Experiences’ questionnaire. This revealed that at least a third of them had some kind of telepathy-like incident to report. In this group, there were twice as many identical, or monozygotic (MZ) as fraternal ones (dizygotic – DZ). Subsequent surveys in 2014 and 2015 confirmed that telepathy, or at least a belief in it by a good many twins, was clearly far more widespread than scientists had seemed to want to know.

By then, I had taken part in three more televised experiments in which one twin’s reactions to a minor shock inflicted on the other at a distance were recorded on a polygraph. These were shown on the UK’s Channel Four Richard and Judy programme in 2003 and on the American Discovery (2004) and National Geographic (2005) channels. Later, Parker and his Danish colleague Christian Jensen were able to arrange for two more, one for the Danish DR-1 channel and the other, which was filmed in King’s, for ABC’s Twintuition series.

Although these were all financed by television companies, who as always were interested in entertainment rather than science, the last two were reasonably well controlled. The Danish one was able to test my hypothesis that twins whose zygotes (eggs) divided a week or so after fertilisation were more likely to provide evidence for telepathy than those for whom division took place in the first few days. Studies of 44 MZ twins at the University of Indiana had found that the later the division, the closer the bond would be after birth. This confirmed that, as Orwell might have put it, some identical twins are more identical than others. 3

Unfortunately, not all adult twins know when their split took place, though with the introduction of

At least a third had a telepathylike incident to report...

ultrasonic scanning it is now possible to know exactly when, and for the Danish experiment the scientists managed to find a pair of young women who knew they were ‘late splitters’ and also reported regular instances of what they considered to be telepathy. Sure enough, their polygraph charts showed some of the clearest coincidences between stimulus and response yet recorded. Parker and Jensen duly wrote up their experiments, which were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Explore (Nov/Dec 2012 and Jan/Feb 2013).

What, you may be asking, is so special about twins? They are not the only ones to have telepathic experiences. Where they differ is in the way they get the message. Non-twins usually get it in the form of an idea or image, but with twins it can also take the form of a strong emotion, or a physical reaction, which can be recorded on a polygraph. Some speak of ‘just knowing’ when the other is in trouble, and I have often come across the words ‘half of me gone’ to describe how it feels when the other dies. In such cases, there is no need for telepathy since to some extent they are the same person.

Yet is it worth spending time and money on a notoriously elusive phenomenon which some still claim does not exist? Here, for example, is Professor Richard Wiseman explaining it away in his book Paranormalia (2011): “Twin telepathy is due to the highly similar ways in which they think and behave, and not extra-sensory perception”.

The evidence, especially that of the polygraph, suggests otherwise. Any human faculty deserves thorough investigation, and telepathy, if fully examined, will force us to rethink much of physics and psychology as we know them. There is now plenty of evidence to suggest that some twins do communicate with each other at a distance under certain very specific circumstances, and can not only do so on demand, but under strictly controlled conditions in which their received impulses can be instrumentally recorded. This has now been done several times.

Reports of anomalous twin connections date back at least to the 18th century, so why has it taken so long for the coin to drop? One answer is that so few have done either their homework or their field research, preferring to dismiss the whole subject with a wave of their magic wands, as the example above indicates. Even an open-minded critic has to admit that all experiments mentioned here have involved very small samples, and to win general acceptance a large scale study is called for. There is as yet no sign of the level of funding this would involve.

Catherine Crowe gave another answer in The Night-Side of Nature (1848): “Any discovery tending to throw light on what most deeply concerns us, namely our own being, must be prepared to encounter a storm of angry persecution… Hence, these hasty, angry investigations of new facts, and the triumph with which failures are recorded; and hence the willful overlooking of the axiom that a thousand negatives can not overthrow the evidence of one affirmative experiment”.

Such a discovery has now been made, and such experiments have been performed and published. They were anticipated half a century ago when a pair of ophthalmologists from Philadelphia claimed to have shown that a stimulus given to one twin could be reflected in a simultaneous alteration to the other’s brainwave pattern. Though published in the prestigious journal Science, it provoked quite a storm of angry protests from readers, who objected to just about everything to do with the suggestion that brains could communicate in this way.

An appeal to colleagues to repeat their findings went unheard, although another experiment published just two years later lent them some support, but since it appeared in a parapsychology journal, it was generally ignored, despite the uncompromising claim that” “In a physically isolated subject, we have observed physiological reactions at the precise moment at which another person… was actively stimulated”. 4

In a letter to Science following the publication of the article mentioned above, a reader noted that if authors Duane and Behrendt had really established what they were claiming, “this finding is surely the most profound scientific discovery of the present century,” and expressed surprise that “the authors do not appear to appreciate the revolutionary implications of their results.” 5 He was not satisfied, quite reasonably, that they had done this, so it proved not to be the discovery of the last century.

There is mounting evidence, however that we now have the means to make it the discovery of this one.