The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (44 page)

What is so interesting here is that Sartre’s whole philosophy of human existence – he is known as one of the founding figures of existentialism – is based on his mistaken notion that “nausea” is some fundamental truth about human reality – the beautiful woman in hair curlers. Moreover, it is a philosophy that is echoed by some of the most respectable figures in modern literature, from Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus to Graham Greene and Samuel Beckett. It could be said to dominate modern philosophy and modern literature. Yet we can see that it is simply a misunderstanding. “Nausea” is not some glimpse of reality; it is as unimportant as a headache, and in some ways curiously similar. If Sartre had known about the right and left hemispheres, he would have recognized that he was greatly exaggerating the importance of “nausea”. And if we could grasp, once and for all, that “alienation” in left-brain consciousness is not a glimpse of the reality of the human
condition, we would experience an enormous and immediate rise in our level of optimism and vitality.

There is another important inference to be drawn from all this. Hypnosis, as we have seen, is basically suggestion. The hypnotist’s suggestion (“your eyelids are feeling heavy . . .”) has the effect of trapping us in left-brain consciousness. Boredom and pessimism have the same effect. But if you believe – like Sartre – that life is meaningless and “man is a useless passion”, then you are in a permanent condition of negative self-suggestion, and entrapment in left-brain consciousness becomes your normal mode of awareness. So “nausea” becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Entrapment in left-brain consciousness is bad enough, but it becomes ten times worse if you accept it as a norm. On the other hand, if you are aware that whole-brain consciousness is the norm, then states of “trapped” left-brain consciousness would be accepted as casually as a headache.

This, then, is the real importance of Puységur’s discovery of hypnosis. It was the recognition of a curious anomaly that raised enormous questions about the human mind. The total eclipse of hypnosis during the nineteenth century reveals that these questions were too uncomfortable to be faced; it was easier to dismiss them and to stick to the old commonsense view of human awareness. Now we find ourselves at an interesting crossroads when we accept the reality of hypnosis (although there are still a few academics who dismiss it as a delusion) yet fail to grasp its implications. When these are finally grasped and taken for granted by every high school student – as we now take for granted the notion of the unconscious mind or of childhood eroticism – man will be prepared to begin a voyage of discovery into his own unexplored potentialities.

26

The Enigma of Identical Twins

One Mind in Two Bodies

When Jim Lewis was six years old, he learned that he had an identical twin brother. Their unmarried mother had put them up for adoption soon after they were born in August 1939. Jim had been adopted by a couple named Lewis in Lima, Ohio; his brother was adopted by a family named Springer in Dayton, Ohio. Oddly enough, both boys were christened “Jim” by their new parents.

In 1979, when he was thirty-nine, Jim Lewis decided to try to find his twin brother. The court that had arranged the adoption was exceptionally helpful. Six weeks later, Jim Lewis knocked on the door of Jim Springer in Dayton. The moment they shook hands they felt close, as if they had been together all their lives. But when they began to compare notes they became aware of a staggering series of coincidences. To begin with, they had the same health problems. Both were compulsive nail-biters and suffered from insomnia. Both had started to experience migraines at the age of eighteen, and stopped having them at the same age. Both had heart problems. Both had developed haemorrhoids. They were exactly the same weight, but had both put on ten pounds at exactly the same period of their lives, and then lost it again at the same time.

All this might seem to indicate that genetic programming is far more precise and complex than anyone had suspected. But their coincidences went much further than genetics. Both had married girls named Linda, divorced, then married girls called Betty. Both had named their sons James Allan. Both had owned a dog named Toy. Both had worked as deputy sheriff, petrol-station attendant, and at McDonald’s Hamburger restaurants. Both spent their holidays on the same Florida beach. Both chain-smoked the same make of cigarette. Both had basement workshops in which they made furniture . . .

The twins were fascinated, not only by these similarities in experience
but by their mental similarities – one would start to say something and the other would finish it.

Their reunion received wide press coverage, and they appeared on the Johnny Carson chat show. And in Minnesota a psychologist named Tom Bouchard was so intrigued that he persuaded the University to give him a grant to study the “Jim twins” scientifically. Then he went on to look for other similar pairs: that is, twins who were separated at a very early age, and who had not seen each other since. In their first few years of research they discovered thirty-four sets of such twins. And again and again they discovered the same extraordinary coincidences – coincidences that cannot be scientifically explained. Two British twins, Margaret Richardson and Terry Connolly, who did not even know they were twins until they were in their mid-thirties, had married on the same day within an hour of each other. Two others, Dorothy Lowe and Bridget Harrison, had decided to keep a diary for just one year, 1962, and had both filled in exactly the same days. The diaries looked identical because they were of the same make and colour. Both played the piano as children but gave it up in the same year. Both like eye-catching jewellery.

Since then work on twins has continued to show that in many cases – particularly of identical twins – there are incredible coincidences. Identical twins are those who are formed by a splitting of the same ovum. They have identical genes, which means they have identical eyes, ears, limbs, even fingerprints. The scientific term for such twins is
monozygotic
, or MZ for short.
Dizygotic
twins (DZ) are formed from two different eggs. The astonishing level of “coincidence” applies mainly to MZ twins. In fact, the similarities in many cases become almost monotonous. For example, the twins last mentioned, Bridget Harrison and Dorothy Lowe, had sons called respectively Richard Andrew and Andrew Richard. Their daughters were called Katherine Louise and Karen Louise, but Dorothy Lowe had originally intended to call her daughter Katherine, and changed it to Karen to please a relative. Both wear the same perfume. Both leave their bedroom doors ajar. Both had had meningitis. Both collect soft toys and had cats called Tiger. Bouchard’s intelligence tests showed they had identical IQs.

Barbara Herbert and Daphne Goodship were the twins of an unmarried Finnish student, and were adopted by different families at birth. Both their adoptive mothers died when they were children. Both had fallen downstairs when they were fifteen and broken an ankle. Both met their future husbands at town-hall dances when they were sixteen, and married in their early twenties. Both had early miscarriages, then
each had two boys followed by a girl. Both have a heart murmur and a slightly enlarged thyroid. Both read the same popular novelists and take the same women’s magazine. And when they met for the first time both had tinted their hair the same shade of auburn, and were wearing beige dresses, brown velvet jackets and identical white petticoats.

In 1979 Jeanette Hamilton and Irene Read each discovered they had twin sisters, and hastened to get together. They discovered that both suffered from claustrophobia and dislike of water, both sit with their backs to the sea on beaches, both hated heights, both got a pain in the same spot in the right leg in wet weather, and both are compulsive calculators. As children they had led scout packs, and they had both worked at one time for the same cosmetics firm.

Two male twins studied by Bouchard had been brought up in backgrounds that could scarcely have been more different. Oscar Stohr and Jack Yufe were born in Trinidad in 1933, then their parents went off in opposite directions, each taking a twin. Oscar went to Germany and became a member of the Nazi youth movement, while Jack was brought up as an orthodox Jew. They met for the first time at the airport in 1979, and found they were both wearing square, wire-rimmed glasses and blue shirts with epaulettes; they had identical moustaches. Closer study showed remarkable similarities in their habits. Both flushed the lavatory before and after using it, stored rubber bands on their wrists, and liked to eat alone in restaurants so they can read. Their speech rhythms were identical, although one spoke only German and the other only English. Both had the same gait and the same way of sitting. Both had the same sense of humour – for example, a tendency to sneeze loudly in lifts to startle the other passengers.

It is obviously very difficult, if not impossible, to explain such a series of “coincidences” without positing some form of telepathy – that is, some form of hidden connection between the twins – that persisted even when they were separated by long distances. In fact Jung, who invented the word “synchronicity” (see Chapter 54) for “meaningful coincidences”, would have accepted the telepathic explanation: there are many anecdotes in his work that are designed to illustrate the reality of telepathy. But even telepathy cannot explain how two sisters met their husbands under similar circumstances or worked for the same cosmetic firm; it must be either dismissed as coincidence or explained in terms of some peculiar theory about “individual destinies”, or even what Professor Joad once called “the undoubted strangeness of time”. If people can have glimpses of the future, or dream of events before they happen, it suggests that, in some odd way these events are already
“programmed”, like a film that has already been made. If individual lives are to some extent “pre-programmed”, then perhaps the lives of MZ twins have the same basic programming . . .

Other cases certainly seem to demonstrate the reality of telepathy. In 1980 two female twins appeared in court in York, and attracted the attention of reporters because they made the same gestures at the same time, smiling simultaneously, raising their hands to their mouths at the same moment, and so on. The Chaplin twins, Freda and Greta, were in court for a peculiar reason: they had both apparently developed a powerful “crush” on a lorry-driver, Mr Ken Iveson, who used to live next door, and had been pursuing him for fifteen years. They seem to have had rather a curious way of showing affection, shouting abuse and hitting him with their handbags. When this had been going on for fifteen years Mr Iveson decided to ask the court for protection.

The publicity surrounding the court case led to various medical studies of the twins. Their obsession with Mr Iveson was defined medically as erotomania, a condition in which a patient sinks into melancholy or mental disturbance due to romantic love. The twins proved to be mentally subnormal, although this seems to have been a later development. At school they had been slow, but not backward, and teachers described them as neat, clean and quiet. The deputy headmaster placed the blame on their mother. “It was quite clear that they had a doting mother who never allowed them a seperate identity”. They were apparently dressed identically and allowed no friends.

The twins showed a tendency to the “mirror imaging” which is often typical of MZ twins. (That is to say, if one is left-handed, the other is right-handed; if the whorls of the hair grow clockwise in one, they grow anti-clockwise in the other, and so on.) One twin wears a bracelet on the left wrist, the other on the right. When one broke a shoelace the other removed her own shoelace on the opposite side.

At some point the twins had been forced to leave home – neither they nor their mother would disclose why. At thirty-seven they were unmarried and jobless; they lived in a local service hostel. They cooked breakfast in their room together, both holding the frying-pan, then went out in identical clothes. When they both had identical grey coats with different-coloured buttons they simply swapped half the buttons so each had both colours. When given different pairs of gloves, they took one of each pair. When given two different bars of soap, they cut both in half and shared them. They told a woman journalist that they had one brain, and were really one person, claiming to know exactly what the other is thinking. Their “simultaneous behaviour” suggests that some
form of telepathy exists between them. They occasionally quarrel, hitting one another lightly with identical handbags, then sulking for hours. But in spite of these disagreements, it seems clear that their common aim is to exclude the external world and to live in their own small private universe.

Two Californian twins, Grace and Virginia Kennedy, even developed a private language in which they conversed; this started when they were seventeen months old. By 1977, when they were seven, a speech therapist in the San Diego children’s hospital began to study their private language, and discovered that it seemed to be a mixture of invented words, like “nunukid” and “pulana”, and a mixture of English and German words mispronounced (their parents were respectively American and German). They called one another Poto and Cabenga, and spoke their unknown language swiftly and fluently. Eventually they were coaxed into speaking English; but they declined to explain their former language – or perhaps they were simply unable to.

One of the strangest cases involving twins was recorded in the
New York Review of Books
(28 Feb 1985) by the psychiatrist Oliver Sacks. Michael and John, known simply as The Twins, have been in state institutions since they were seven (in 1947). They have been diagnosed as autistic, psychotic and severely retarded. Yet they possess one extraordinary ability: the ability to say on what day of the week any date in the past or future will fall; asked, say, about 11 June 55
BC
, they would instantly snap “Wednesday” – and prove correct. They are, says Sacks, a grotesque Tweedledum and Tweedledee, mirror-image twins who are identical in face, personality and body movements, as well as in their brain and tissue damage. They wear glasses so thick that their eyes seem distorted.