Thanks to author and paranormal researcher Guy Lyon Playfair for this article on twin telepathy. Guy's excellent book Twin Telepathy: The Psychic Connection has recently been revised and enlarged.


THE TWIN THING

by Guy Lyon Playfair       

Twins made the headlines, as they so often do, when Lancashire teenager Gemma Houghton reportedly saved her sister's life by what sounded suspiciously like telepathy. She had been listening to music while her twin Leanne was upstairs having a bath when 'I got this sudden feeling to check on her. It was like a voice telling me "your sister needs you". It was clearly telling me I needed to go upstairs.' This she did, finding Leanne in the process of drowning after suffering an epileptic seizure. According to the paramedic who arrived at the scene just in time: 'If Gemma hadn't been there, Leanne would have died.'

'It's not the first time stuff like this has happened,' Leanne said, recalling how Gemma had once phoned to warn her of an impending attack, which indeed occurred later the same day. 'She's my early warning system', she added. (The Sun, 24 March 2009).

Nor is this the first time that telepathy may have saved a life. I know of at least three other examples, one of which I investigated at first-hand. This would suggest that the scientific community should take rather more interest in it than it yet has.

As The Times (25 March) put it: 'Something about the "telepathic" bond between twins seems to transcend even scientific reason', (note the inverted commas guarding the taboo T-word), yet the usual reaction of scientists to reports of incidents such as the one mentioned above is to mutter about 'thought concordance', 'genetic underpinning' or that old favourite, 'coincidence' and change the subject as soon as possible.

The twin bond also seems to transcend scientific curiosity. It must be one of the most under-researched areas in all of science. Even parapsychologists have a dismal record  - it doesn't take long to read everything they have written about it in the specialist journals. They have generally preferred tedious laboratory card-guessing experiments, at which twins tend to be no better than anybody else, to venturing into the field and identifying the conditions under which telepathy occurs spontaneously.

What they would find there is that telepathy tends to work best when it is needed, and when sender and receiver are strongly bonded, as with mothers and babies, dogs and their owners, and those with the strongest bond of all - twins. Twin telepathy is an example of what Margaret Mead called a 'recurrent irregularity', and if the same irregularity recurs often enough it becomes increasingly probable that it is a genuine phenomenon.

Twin telepathy has been recurring regularly at least since 1844, when Alexandre Dumas made it a prominent feature of his novel The Corsican Brothers. This is generally thought to have been based on a real-life pair, since he describes so accurately the kinds of experience that twins pick up from each other - almost invariably some kind of bad news such as pain, sickness, or death as in the case of his two Corsicans, one of whom falls off his horse, under the impression that he has been shot, at the moment his brother is shot dead in a duel hundreds of miles away. I have been given an eye-witness account of the equally dramatic reaction of a twin whose brother was murdered.

Yet for all its recurrence, the inexplicability of telepathy has led science to avoid it like some mediaeval plague - or even to insist that it doesn't exist because it can't.

Dr Nancy Segal, a former co-director of the massive twin research programme at the University of Minnesota has decreed that 'the bottom line is that I feel there's no evidence for ESP in twins'. She devotes just ten lines of her 432-page book Entwined Lives to the subject of extrasensory perception (a term no longer used by most psi researchers), stating that 'I do not question the occurrence of twins' "ESP-like" behaviour. I do wonder why some people endorse ESP in the face of more compelling data from twin studies.' (Such as?). Could it not be that an experience that is ESP-like might actually be what it looks like?

When confronted with some very compelling data recorded on a polygraph in the 2004  Discovery channel programme  Miracle Hunters, Dr Segal commented, looking rather uncomfortable, 'Well, I think there's something there. I just don't think it's telepathy.' Another clip of polygrapher Jeremy Barrett's chart pen jumping all over the place while the twin in another room was given mild shocks made her look even more uneasy. 'I think it's a kind of intriguing finding', she admitted. 'Am I going to call it telepathy? I think at this point I'm not.'

Jeremy Barrett is going to call it just that. After doing tests with nine sets of twins (four of them shown on television) he told Fortean Times (June 2003): 'What we have done with the polygraph instrument is measure things happening which should not be happening. There is absolutely no doubt at all in my mind that there is a communication taking place between these pairs of people which is beyond any explanation other than telepathy.'

These were not scientifically controlled experiments, I should add, but should be seen as informal pilot tests that gave highly suggestive results that call for replication under tighter conditions.

Scientists who find something intriguing usually examine it further, and it is good to be able to report at long last something of a potential breakthrough in twin telepathy research. In 2004 the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London sent a questionnaire to the 10,000 twins on its books that included a question never asked before, to my knowledge, by a scientific body: 'Do you have the ability to know what is happening to your co-twin when you are not there?'. More than half (54%) said yes or maybe, only 46% said no. What was particularly intriguing about these results, apart from the fact that there are some 5,000 twins out there who think they have or might have experienced telepathy, was the fact that nearly twice as many identical as fraternal (non-identical) ones said yes.

This only became widely known when it was mentioned in the Times article cited above, and I am glad to be able to report that the King's group is considering a proposal for a telepathy research programme headed by one of our leading psi researchers. Let us hope that science will one day confirm what many twins already know, as concisely summed up by Californian supermodel Barbi sisters (Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 9 June, 2002):

Sia Barbi: 'We have that twin thing going on. Wherever we are in the world, we kind of know what the other one's doing.'

Shane Barbi: 'That's right. It's instinctive. It's a twin thing.'

What can you say about infinity? Not much, to judge by the hour-long Horizon programme on Wednesday, which was padded out with clips of flocks of birds and an unbearably pretentious act-or talking to the camera. The talking heads were baffled, didn't like thinking about it. They preferred a finite universe, it was the only thing that made intuitive sense. They looked confused and embarrassed. It wasn't a rational concept. Wasn't there something else they could talk about?

I was surprised to learn that the way that many of them first discovered infinity through numbers, realising that they could go on counting for ever and ever. (Cue clips of talking heads self-consciously counting large numbers.)  Or else they came up with images to illustrate the problem, like a hotel in which there are always enough rooms to accommodate an extra person (bearded maths geezer walking down corridors looking puzzled.)

To me this seemed an oddly clunky way to think about infinity. My experience was quite different: as a small child looking up at the sky out of my bedroom window after dark and realising that space could have no end, and then hiding under the bed covers until I had managed to expel the thought. Surely numbers are just stepping stones through time and space. Why plod towards infinity one step at a time one when you can fly there at the speed of thought?

People clearly think about these sorts of things in different ways. Apparently for scientists and mathematicians, infinity is an embarrassment. A German professor's solution was simply to abolish it. Infinity, he decided, voss merely a "fiction of the human mind". (Does that remind of anything?) His solution: go on counting until you get to the biggest number - truly massive, he conceded - and then go back to zero!  Ridiculous? Ja, but less ridiculous than the alternative, surely.

OK, so really there is no such thing as infinity. All That Is is round. When you get to the end you arrive back at the beginning. Does this work? I suspect all it does is remove the problem a bit further away, so that it's less obvious, and so less discomfiting. Sceptics do that all the time to deal with the challenges posed by paranormal experience, coming up with pseudo-solutions which can't meaningfully be applied in practice, but hell, who cares, as long as it makes them feel better.

In science, mystery is the enemy. It has to be vanquished, not allowed to fester unmolested.  To argue that there are some things that are beyond us to understand is to invite the pejorative term "mysterian". I understand why scientists and mathematicians think like this, but it's philosophically indefensible.

We can amuse ourselves with ludicrous paradoxes - like the insistence that in an infinite universe a monkey must eventually be able to type the complete works of Shakespeare, another source of imagery for struggling programme makers. We can say, if we like, that the first humanoids did not need to understand infinity in order to hunt and eat their dinner, and that's why our brains can't comprehend it. But the paradox is pointless, and the scientific gloss is misleading, if it implies that had our evolutionary track been a bit different the concept would now be quite intelligible to us.

I'd argue a little humility is in order here. What infinity tells us is that our ability to reason has limits. Some things will always be beyond our ability to grasp. Let's just accept it.

Richard Dawkins is in fine fulminating form today in The Times. In a piece titled 'Hear the rumble of Christian hypocrisy' he lays into the 'religious mind' that exploits natural events for 'petty moralistic purposes'. He's talking about Haiti, of course, and the ludicrous televangelist Pat Robertson opining that the earthquake is divine retribution for a 1791 pact that the Haitians made with the devil to help rid them of their French masters (don't ask).
As with the Indonesian tsunami, which was blamed on loose sexual morals in tourist nightclubs; as with Hurricane Katrina, which was attributed to divine revenge on the entire city of New Orleans for organising a gay rally; and as with other disasters going back to the famous Lisbon earthquake and beyond, so Haiti's tragedy must be payback for human 'sin'. 
I often get the feeling Dawkins rather likes people like Pat Robertson for saying what they think loudly and brutally, a kindred spirit. His real target is the 'nice, middle-of-the-road' religious type who disowns the frothing fundamentalists while at the same time supporting what he believes to be equally nonsensical propositions about 'creation groaning under the weight of sin', and a 'god-man' having to atone for it by letting himself be tortured and executed. 

No one does righteous indignation quite like Dawkins:
Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for "sin" - or suffering as "atonement" for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology. You are nothing but a whited sepulchre.
Magnificent stuff. I wouldn't express myself in this way, but I agree with a lot of what Dawkins says about religion. So much of it is mad, incomprehensible or of doubtful value. Yet he and some other militant atheists share a curious literal mindedness with the fundamentalists, each looking to scientific facts or the scriptures as a source of absolute truth and certainty.

Those like me who don't follow any particular creed have to rely far more on an inner moral intuition to guide us about what is right and wrong, as of course atheists and humanists themselves do. If we read religious literature at all we pick and choose, taking inspiration from what makes sense and discarding the obviously obsolete or nonsensical. Interestingly, and whether or not you take them seriously, this is exactly what channelled 'spirit teachers' say we should do.

And yes, this relativist approach is adopted - necessarily - by 'nice middle of the road' theologians and clergymen. At my local church I've frequently listened to some blood-curdling passage being read from the Bible  - eg. Abraham setting out to slaughter his son at God's command - and then heard the vicar, a kindly decent man, and equally aghast,  devote his sermon to explaining why it's not really like that, and why, on the whole, we should not pay too much attention to that sort of thing.  Yet at the same time he accepts as gospel a lot of propositions, mostly dreamed up by Paul, Augustine and various committees, that I have difficulties with.

My sense about why religion is important is informed largely by religious and paranormal experience, of the kind that critics like Dawkins think is obvious spurious, on the grounds that what goes on in our heads is a matter of chemical reactions - nothing more. That's the big conclusion of Darwinism, and it doesn't surprise me that he hammers on at it. For instance I recall he says somewhere in The God Delusion that no one should attach any significance to mystical experience who has 'the slightest understanding of the powerful workings of the human mind'.

Unlike Dawkins, I want to know why the mind behaves in the way that it sometimes does. That seems like a scientific attitude, and I believe my approach to religion to be empirical, as his is.

I accept that paranormal experience has not been proved in any formal scientific sense, but I think the evidence, both anecdotal and experimental, is pretty persuasive of a process that cannot be explained in terms of current scientific understanding. I also think it poses a serious challenge to the idea that what we call the mind is merely brain activity and nothing more.  Why do people have near-death and mystical experiences? Sceptics can find flaws in the 'proofs' offered by paranormalists, but there's no convincing explanation - Sue Blackmore's efforts notwithstanding - of how such a curiously structured set of imagery, sensation and experience can occur so widely, leaving people with the conviction of having experienced God.

What does surprise me is that the challenge is not recognised, and that it plays almost no part at all in the debate about religion.  That's one reason why the literature of parapsychology deserves to be better known and understood.

Paranormalia is still in hibernation, but the books I've been stuck on are nearly done, and as 2010 progresses it will burst into life and soar on butterfly wings to a bright new future, that's the plan anyway.

Was moved to write after seeing the Horizon programme on dogs last week, which tested the ability of humans to differentiate between various kinds of noises that dogs make.  To me the idea is empirical fact. Wherever I hear my five-year old Staffie vocalising in another room I can tell what's on his mind from the sound he makes. Yet the idea was presented as a 'claim', and moreover one that science was distinctly iffy about: dog barks are just 'random noises' and their owners merely imagine they can tell the difference between them.

Apparently no one had actually thought to check this out. Horizon filmed a chap sticking a mike in dogs' faces in different situations and then playing the results back to the owners. No stats, but 'most' of the owners were able to match the bark to the situation. So not just imagination then.

Actually I'm surprised that any of the owners failed at this, as I had no trouble at all: the sounds the dogs made were unmistakably distinct, just as my dog's are. A deep throaty 'wo-wo-wo-wo-woooo' means 'strangers approaching'; a single sharp yelp (I've got locked in the broom cupboard); grrrrrr (this is MY ball); a sort of staccato, high register double bark when he's playing with my son that means, 'I can take you, loser', and other quite recognisable sounds for 'come and play', 'are we there yet?', and so on.

It seems to me that 'science', as an oracular institution, thinks something can't happen until a) it's got around to focusing on it and/or b) it can explain why it happens. There's no in-between category - no statements like, 'well, we're not sure about this', or 'we need to check this out before we talk about it': just, 'it doesn't happen, period'. Implication: it's wishful thinking, all in the imagination. It's this sort of lazy complacency, the gulf between human experience and scientific knowledge, that causes people to have suspicions about science, as much as 'ignorance' or 'poor education', which science thinks are the real reasons.

There are some nice examples of this in Irreducible Mind. Also, Guy Playfair recently reminded me about  the controversy over the ability of bats to navigate in the dark.

In 1794 the eminent eighteenth century Italian physiologist Lazzaro Spallanzani published a paper arguing that bats use their ears for this. There was no conceivable mechanism for it, and idea was denounced the following year by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who insisted on what seemed to him the far more plausible explanation, that they use the nerves in their wing tips to stop them bumping into objects. Cuvier's explanation was favoured until the mid-twentieth century, when the principle of echo-location was discovered in the invention of sonar.

The difference between the two scientists was that Spallanzani had carried out extensive experiments, eliminating each of the bats' senses in turn, while Cuvier had relied on his imagination.  As Guy argues, it's an important example of how scepticism can delay progress, which in this case would have saved lives on the Titanic. (See his piece in Skepticalinvestigations.org for details).

Back to the Horizon programme, which was interesting about the evolution of dogs, showing that dogs evolved only from wolves - and not from other canine-type species like hyenas and jackals - and also,  thanks to a fascinating 50-year ongoing Russian experiment with Siberian foxes,  that selective breeding can quite quickly turn vicious aggressive animals into cuddly pets. It aired the theory that dogs were crucial to human social development, in the help they give in herding and hunting, for instance. And it touched on the therapeutic effect of dogs in reducing stress and anxiety, about which there's a growing scientific consensus.

A really interesting Horizon programme would look at Rupert Sheldrake's research suggesting a telepathic link between pets and their owners. In this context the word 'claim' is perhaps more reasonable, given the strength and specifity of the scientific and philosophical objections. But anyone who actually talks to pet owners will soon find that it's another widely reported human experience.  I was with a cat owner yesterday who described, quite persuasively, the responses of her cat to her unspoken thoughts, for instance showing anxiety consistently over a period of two days after she briefly considered whether to get rid of it, and so on. But of course this is just something else that science considers can't happen, and even empirical evidence to the contrary is dismissed as flawed and mistaken.