TWIN TELEPATHY

This book is short, a paperback without a hardback edition, written in an easy, almost conversational style peppered with wry humour, and could thus be overlooked as a mere trifle. That would be a grievous error, for it is an important work written by a man who is a profoundly well-informed and experienced student of parapsychology. Before reading this book I had thought that telepathy between twins had been well studied and found to be less than convincing, but nothing could be further from the truth, as the author crushingly demonstrates. Playfair starts by giving a comprehensive history of twin telepathy. Although recognised earlier by a handful of people as being worthy of study, he traces the beginning of actual "hard" research on the phenomenon to the work of Horatio Newman in the 1940s. Newman looked at the incidence of telepathy in identical twins, what he called "one-egg" twins. His key subjects were themselves scientists whom he described as being "hard-boiled"; he found these hard-boiled one-eggers to share " a subtle affinity". Playfair goes on to scrutinise the subsequent sparse record of research into twin telepathy and finds most of it, whether yielding positive or negative results, to be wanting in various ways. Playfair skilfully draws a distinction between thought concordance in twins – such as when both say the same thing at the same time, start humming the same tune, or choose similar clothing – and what seem to be more specific psi interactions. He laces his review of the research with many accounts of apparent twin telepathy: these are effective in illustrating the various aspects of the research and turn what could have been a somewhat dry catalogue into riveting reading, underlining the fact that behind the research are actual human experiences. Regarding the research itself, Playfair identifies what appear to be a few common factors that have emerged. In general, telepathy seems to occur most readily between people sharing some kind of bond – the stronger the better, such as mothers and children, long-term couples, good friends, and even pet owners and their pets, as demonstrated in the work of Rupert Sheldrake (e.g. Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, 1999). Playfair considers identical twins to be at the top of the tree of bonded pairs, and the incidence level of telepathy between them comes out in most studies at around the 30 percent mark, typically involving those who display fairly outgoing tendencies. As with many other psi phenomena, twin telepathy seems to be most evident in daily life rather than in laboratory conditions, and particularly when a strong stimulus is involved such as surprise, pain or crisis. Such "vivid conditions" are of course difficult to produce in the laboratory, but it is the test of a good experiment designer to find ways around the problem. Playfair cites an experiment he designed which was conducted on a 1997 television programme. For this, the production team tested four pairs of identical twins. Each unsuspecting "sender" twin was surprised by a loud alarm fitted to the back of the chair they were seated in, a distinct shock to the system that in three of the four pairs registered simultaneously in both twins' brainwave patterns, even though each "receiver" twin was closeted some distance away in a separate, soundproofed room. The most successful pair were used for the actual programme, and a version of the experiment was repeated on air. The brain waves, blood pressure and galvanic skin response of each twin clearly registered the contrived shock. As the experiment's technical supervisor put it at the time, the receiver twin "certainly picked up something from somewhere". Interestingly, the receiver twin could not give a clear account of what her sister had experienced, but her unconscious physiological systems had undoubtedly responded. (I understand this general procedure has been conducted again since the book was published, with equal success.) All this would be enough from one short book, but Twin Telepathy goes one stage further: the author makes a preliminary stab at an explanation of the mechanism that might be at work in twin telepathy. He basically follows the line taken by the physicist Amit Goswami, who argues for the primacy of consciousness over matter in the grounding of reality, and invokes quantum mechanics to explain telepathy along with other – perhaps too many – other psi effects (see his Physics of the Soul, 2001). Specifically, Playfair refers to the now-proven phenomenon in quantum mechanics of non-locality, in which a suitably stimulated atom emits a pair of photons simultaneously in different directions; when one is intercepted the other, which could theoretically be on the other side of the galaxy, also responds – instantaneously, faster than light. The two photons are said to be "entangled". Quantum physics has for some time been invoked in various general ways to explain anomalous events, to the anger of many hard-line physicists. It is indeed true that there are huge technical problems in understanding how quantum-level events could be translated into the macro-world of everyday reality, but we must remember that it is nature that makes the rules, not science. What is good here is that Playfair tries to identify a specific quantum mechanical effect with a specific psi-problem. (I was surprised but pleased to see him taking this route, as I had attempted something similar in my Haunted Land (2001), where I suggest a basis for certain kinds of apparition by linking hallucinatory mechanisms and archetypal effects to the action of certain brain structures that are thought by some neuroscientists to interface with quantum level states.) At the very least, as Playfair points out, this non-local quantum-scale entanglement phenomenon is a striking metaphor for telepathy between identical twins, the two entangled "photons" from the same "atom" of a human egg. Twin Telepathy is essentially a plea for parapsychologists, whether sceptical or otherwise, to revisit the psi resource potentially offered by identical twins, and this time to conduct better designed and more thoroughgoing experiments. Playfair makes a strong case that it could be a productive line of enquiry, but only time will tell if any experimentalists are paying attention.