Do you have one of those best friends that can finish your sentence? Pick out something that you like? Know exactly how you feel or what you might say about it? What if twin siblings had proven paranormal power to read things like this from one another? Twin telepathy is something that has been discussed for hundreds of years. This article dates back to Francis Galton’s observational article discussing the ability of twins in the same company to sing simultaneously and comment similarly in the same situation. Today, scientists toy with different ideas to find a proper explanation for these out of the ordinary experiences that twins may have.

It is said that telepathy of this sort occurs within closely connected twins during a time of crisis. For example, in 1977 a woman by the name of Martha Burke reported that she felt she had been “cut in two.” She experienced pain across her chest and abdomen. Later during that day, she discovered her twin sister had passed away in a plane crash. In addition, in 1975 Nita Hurst’s left leg bruised out of the blue one day, eventually traveling up the side of her body. At the same time, her twin was in an automobile accident. These are very strange cases because this plane crash happened on the other side of the world from Martha Burke and this car accident happened 400 miles away from Nita Hurst. Neither twins knew previously and were nowhere near the scene. I wonder how made up these stories may be, when Nita Hurst claims to have physical bruising on her body, although unharmed.

Noetic.org says that, “Despite the many anecdotes, there is a shortage of convincing evidence from laboratory studies. One reason is that there have been very few studies. Another is that among the studies conducted, factors known to enhance the chances of telepathic contact weren’t, or couldn’t be, incorporated, such as inducing danger to a twin to evoke crisis telepathy. Other variables that have been scientifically associated with a higher probability of telepathic occurrences are extroversion and a belief in telepathy, but subjects are not usually screened for these attributes.” This topic may suffer from the file drawer problem, seen as though not many studies have been collected to gather a decent hypothesis regarding what twin telepathy really is from. To make this study experimental, it would be unethical to put people in a crisis-like situation to satisfy test results. In this case, I am not even sure how a scientist could provide a horrific environment believable for twins to start their telepathy. This seems like a difficult task to do. Other ideas that people have on telepathy may not be suitable for all other twins. It is a fragile subject that we do not know much about, nor how to go about exploring.

Twins were raised apart and also studied. The findings were published in Entwined Lives, by Nancy Segal. Sixty-eight cases were studied, and the reunions displayed an act as if the twins had known one another their entire lives. There were similarities beyond genetics, of course. After 34 years apart, one set of female twins both wore seven rings, two bracelets on one wrist, and a watch and a bracelet on the other hand for the reunion. Another strange example from Noetic.org, “The “Jim twins,” for example, had been separated at 4-weeks-old and were apart for 39 years. Both were named Jim, married a woman named Linda, divorced, and then married another woman named Betty. However, one Jim was on his third marriage. They both had had childhood dogs named Toy and sons named James. One son was James Allen and the other James Alan. They both had been firemen and sheriffs. Both bit their nails, suffered from migraines, smoked Salem cigarettes, and drank Miller Lite beer. Each was 6 feet tall and weighed exactly 180 pounds, though they wore their hair differently. Among the most remarkable shared details was that both had a compulsion to build a circular white bench around a tree each of them had in his yard right before they met. Also, they both had owned light-blue Chevrolets, which they had regularly driven to Pass-a-Grille Beach, Florida, for family vacations. What’s more, both enjoyed leaving love notes to their wives throughout their homes. Their facial expressions, IQs, habits, brain waves, and handwriting were nearly identical. To top it all off, they died from the same illness on the same day.”

So what will it take to get down to the science behind these communicating brains? Perhaps we have enough anecdotes to start the conversation, but how will we reach a conclusion? This is going to be some tricky testing…