Available online 22 January 2024

Fourteen pairs of twins were selected on the basis of their high scores on The Exceptional Experiences Questionnaire (EEQ), which documents the frequency and intensity of telepathic and synchronistic experiences amongst twins. The twins alternated in the role of sender in which they were exposed to a surprise or shock stimulus and in the role of receiver in which their electrodermal activity (EDA) was monitored. Sender and receiver were placed in laboratory rooms at remote ends of a building separated by distance and barriers ensuring sensory isolation. Twins in the role of sender were presented with a series of surprise or shock stimuli during the period randomly selected for presentation. This was one out of the 8 periods occurring in the block of 5 minutes. Within the selected period, the actual presentation lasted 30 seconds and occurred at approximately the midpoint of the period. The stimulus presentation in this block of 5 minutes was repeated 5 times making thereby a 25-minute session for each twin belonging to the sender-receiver pair. During this session, the other twin in the role of receiver, had been equipped with electrodes recording EDA and otherwise advised to relax during the session. The task for the judge in the studies was to use the electrophysiological data from the non-shocked twin to identify the exact periods when the stimuli had been exposed to the sending twin. The EDA from 91 useable presentations were displayed and analysed for the purpose of locating any peak EDA response in each of the possible eight periods corresponding to the stimuli exposure times. Correct identifications would thus occur by chance one in eight times. The attempts at these identifications were carried out by GB, a researcher experienced at EDA interpretation but blind as to the periods that had been chosen for the stimulus exposure. The findings from the three experimental studies showed there were 18 correct identifications out of the total 91 stimulus exposures (MCE = 11.4), which reached statistical significance on a one-tailed t-test (p = .043), and with a binomial test (p = .03, one-tailed). However, only one of the three studies reached significance, in this case at the same level as the collective results (p = .043, one-tailed). Two explanations for this are the observed variability in the task-performances of the pairs of twins and in the differences in the sources of the twins for each of the studies. The results of a questionnaire entitled ‘Experiences in Close Relationships’ (ECR), adapted for twin relationships to assess their degree of attachment, indicated that those twins with many “correct identifications of epochs from the EDA” were not significantly different from the others on this measure of attachment. However, it should be noted that the twins here according to the ECR all had close emotional relationships to each other, thereby giving too little variation to adequately test the hypotheses concerning the role of attachment. The data provides justification for carrying out further studies using this methodology and furthermore that pairs of twins should be used with greater variation in attachment measures. The results are briefly discussed in the context of recent findings concerning the neuropsychology of experiences of synchronicity.

Although there exists a wealth of anecdotal reports of apparently synchronous and telepathic experiences occurring between pairs of twins, there are very few empirical studies of these type of exceptional experiences 16. A review by Parker 14 found there were only eight attempts to study such exceptional experiences amongst twins that used controlled conditions. We have moreover been unable to find any study which has looked at these phenomena in relation to the quality of attachment between

In these studies, the output of the psychophysiological equipment measuring electrodermal activity of the receiver was used as an indication of potential connectedness underlying or expressing exceptional experiences. The design was closely based on that used in the aforementioned Parker and Jensen 15 experiment. The major difference concerned the limitation of the physiological measures to that of electrodermal activity.

Following this design, each session had a duration of 25 minutes and

The EDA data are analyzed here in relation to the correct identification of the exposure epochs.

The first study: The three pairs of twins tested here produced 19 epochs with analysable display graphs. The mean chance expectancy per epoch of a correct identification is eight or 0.125, which for this number is 2.375 correct identifications. The result gave a total of four correct placements of the epoch, which is above chance but non-significant p = .1925. A binomial test yielded also

The three studies continue the development reported in two previous studies of a methodology for studying the possible anomalous physiological connectedness between twins physically isolated from each other 10,15. All the pairs of twins in the current studies, with one exception, were deemed to be identical twins and were recruited because they as a group had reported a high frequency of such experiences in surveys 3,4. The same basic procedure was used as the one developed in the last of the

Göran Brusewitz: Writing – review & editing. Adrian Parker: Writing – review & editing.

We would like to in the first instance thank the twins for their voluntary contribution to this research project. The studies were supported as part of a doctoral thesis by generous awards from the BIAL Foundation, Portugal, the John Björkhem Memorial Foundation, Sweden, and by the J. Kleijne-Frankfort Foundation, Holland. We express a thank you for this support.

We would also like to thank the staff of the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology, Kings College London University for

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