Further Possible Physiological Connectedness Between Identical Twins: The London Study
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can identical twins sense when something happens to their sibling? This London study put that old idea to the test. Researchers selected four twin pairs who reported unusual shared experiences, then shocked or startled one twin while the other sat in a separate room hooked up to a polygraph (a device that tracks body responses like heart rate and skin conductance). A blinded expert tried to guess when the shocks happened just by reading the isolated twin's body signals. They got it right twice as often as chance would predict, though the result was only borderline statistically significant — and one young pair (age 25, with one twin pregnant) was responsible for most of the hits. This replicated a similar Copenhagen experiment that also found about one in four screened twin pairs showing mysterious body-signal synchrony. Not a slam dunk, but intriguing enough to warrant bigger studies.
Research Notes
Direct London replication of Jensen 2012 Copenhagen study. Both found ~1 in 4 screened twin pairs showed significant physiological synchrony. Methodology less precise than Copenhagen (iPhone SMS vs atomic clocks). Youngest pair (age 25, one pregnant) drove most hits. Part of small but growing twin telepathy literature. Connects to DMILS/presentiment research on physiological correlations in anomalous cognition.
Four pairs of monozygotic twins selected for reported exceptional experiences were tested for anomalous physiological connectedness. One twin received five randomly-timed shock/surprise stimuli while the isolated twin was monitored via polygraph. A blinded expert used forced-choice to identify stimulus windows. Six hits occurred out of 24 assessed trials versus three expected by chance (P = 0.07, one-tailed). One twin pair produced four hits in seven trials. The marginally significant result, driven primarily by a single pair, justifies larger-scale investigation using the outlined methodology with selected twins.
Links
Related Papers
Replication Of
Same Research Program
More in Telepathy
Telecommunication Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis
Rethinking Communication and Consciousness: Lessons from The Telepathy Tapes Podcast
Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone
A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests
Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years
📋 Cite this paper
Parker, Adrian, Jensen, Christian G (2013). Further Possible Physiological Connectedness Between Identical Twins: The London Study. Explore. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2012.10.001
@article{parker_2013_further,
title = {Further Possible Physiological Connectedness Between Identical Twins: The London Study},
author = {Parker, Adrian and Jensen, Christian G},
year = {2013},
journal = {Explore},
doi = {10.1016/j.explore.2012.10.001},
}