Customer Reviews

Twin Telepathy: The Psychic Connection

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Telepathy is probably the most common form of what are called psychic or paranormal phenomena. But although it has been studied in research laboratories for more than 60 years, it remains in scientific limbo. Partly this is because telepathy makes no sense within the mechanistic world view of most scientists, and partly because it generally does not meet the standard experimental test of repeatability.

While telepathy has been demonstrated in experiments, it is (like other psychic, or psi, effects) uncontrollable and "shy." It is at the mercy of two forces that are well known by now to subvert consistent experimental results. The first is the "decline effect": subjects who exhibit psi tend to score lower as experiments go on, probably because they become bored with repetitive trials and this seems to have a negative effect on psi ability. The other is "experimenter effect," or the apparent decline in psi faculties when the investigators or the test environment are clinical, cold, or skeptical.

Guy Lyon Playfair is a distinguished psychical researcher and writer who has participated in a number of investigations of paranormal phenomena, the best known being of a poltergeist that caused all kinds of bizarre manifestations in a house in Enfield, north London. Playfair's study of the literature, both experimental and anecdotal, about telepathy led him to believe that the best conditions for telepathy involve situations where there is a strong emotional component, such as danger to the so-called "sender" of a telepathic impression, or when the "sender" and "receiver" are closely related to one another.

Who, he reasoned, are more closely related than identical twins? This book is an account of his research, both historical and empirical, to find out if identical twins have a special knack for communicating to each other without speech or any other tangible means.

What Playfair learned, and describes succinctly in Twin Telepathy, is that identical twins perceiving each other's thoughts or sensations have been recorded at least since Alexander Dumas's novel The Corsican Brothers (1844), which he believes was inspired by a true story. In any case, he reports on many other more recent real-life cases of twins with apparent telepathic links. It is not only thoughts that arise simultaneously in geographically separated twins; they often feel similar physical sensations such as pain in a particular part of the body, and sometimes have identical external symptoms even though only one has been injured. (Among the identical twins he cites are the Kray brothers, gangsters who had blood-stained careers in east London in the 1960s.)

Playfair also discovered a handful of surveys and studies of identical twins, some of which are suggestive of twin telepathy, although he candidly acknowledges that most of them are far from methodologically ideal. But he also found convincing, recorded evidence of twin telepathy from a surprising source: contemporary television guest shows, including those hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Robert Kilroy-Silk, and Esther Rantzen in which twins spoke of their own telepathic experiences.

Better still, Playfair designed experiments that were broadcast on live TV and recorded. In each case, the pairs were separated so that they had no visual or auditory contact, and one of the pair was given an unexpected, strong (though painless!) stimulus. In each case, the other twin reacted -- which in one experiment was captured by a four-channel polygraph. That's my idea of objective evidence.

Twin Telepathy is admirably free of sensationalism or exaggerated claims. Playfair lets the evidence speak for itself. He does not hesitate, though, to verbally sandpaper skeptics he thinks are just plain unwilling to recognize experimental results that are right in front of them. He concludes that, based on the available evidence, about 30 percent of identical twins have some degree of telepathic rapport.

The author's smoothly flowing style, accented with witty asides, makes the book a pleasure to read. His analytical integrity will go far toward satisfying the scientifically (open)-minded, and his speculations about the nature of telepathy will be of interest to the intellectually curious.

Twin Telepathy can be recommended as an introduction to the subject for those with little background in psychical research, as well as to avid students of the subject and professionals.

I found this book very interesting. I would like to think I am reasonably open minded (without being empty minded) when it comes to issues surrounding the paranormal. I find over zealous, simplistic and badly researched material a trial whichever side it is coming down on (belief in a paranormal or not). Happily this is not such a book. It is well researched and solidly presented. Although you can sometimes get a bit tired of anecdote after anecdote, I guess it does get the point across that something real is happening. The author goes a step further than anecdotes and personal testimonies. He looks for patterns of operation and draws on his own practical experience along with other research in the field to present a practical theory of when and why telepathy occurs.
The dry sense of humour is an acquired taste though:)

If you are interested in telepathy then this book should interest you. It is well written, informative, and just plain interesting. The book is mostly about proving the existence of telepathy and since there is an unusual amount in twins he uses them to site many examples. Easy to read but not dumbed down.