Wonder Twin Powers
Thursday September 20, 2007 8:43 AM
If you share the same womb with another person, it's quite likely that you'll feel more connected to that person than you do to other people. But does that connection exist beyond a shared womb and upbringing? Much has been made of twin telepathy — the idea that, because twins share a womb, they also share a psychic connection.
Quite a bit of anecdotal evidence can be found to support this idea. A mother of identical twin boys claims that each of her children knows what the other is doing:
Ethan and I were driving in the car on our way to make the switch; he was sitting in his car seat as quiet as can be just looking out the window, when he tells me "Mom, tell Gabriel to get his clothes on."
I looked at him and told him Gabriel was with grandma and he wasn't here. He told me "Just tell him mom. He needs to get his clothes on."
So I called my mom out of curiosity and asked her if she was having a hard time getting Gabriel dressed, and she said yes, they were having an argument because Gabriel didn't want to get dressed because it was too cold and he wanted to stay in his jammies. I was so amazed.
Another twin writes about her experiences with her sister's pregnancy:
Before I knew that she was pregnant, I had been sick to my stomach for about four days. Then, I get a call from my sister, telling me she just found out that she was pregnant and that she had started taking her prenatal vitamins four days earlier! She hadn't felt sick at all but I seemed to be taking on all her symptoms.
The Psi Explorer postulates that twins who grow up together are less likely to possess psychic abilities as adults, since they may reject some aspects of their shared upbringing in order to establish their own identities. Twins who are raised apart and reunite later in life are more likely to explore the potential psychic connections between them.
Some telepathy studies have been done on twins, but the results are inconclusive. According to Psychology Today, "a study by British parapsychologist Susan Blackmore found that when twins were separated in different rooms and asked to draw whatever came into their minds, they often drew the same things. When one was asked to draw an object and transmit that to the other twin, who then was asked to draw what she telepathically received, the results were disappointing. Blackmore concluded that when twins seem to be clairvoyant, it's simply because their thought patterns are so similar."
If it's true that twins are more likely to possess psychic ability, they don't seem any more able to control this ability than single-birth people. The anecdotal evidence suggests that some sets of twins are able to feel one another's emotions or share experiences without speaking, but they don't seem able to do these things on command. [photo courtesy of dusdin]
