There have been several tests of ESP between twins made by goodwilling but chickenbrained researchers and all of these tests show that ESP does not exist.
You object: I should not use the word ‘chickenbrained’ and I agree that many of them are probably not goodwilling but instead trying to prove what they initially decided to be true.
Of course these researchers are not any idiots in the common sense of the word, but it requires quite much effort to invent a way to measure a new phenomenon. Students of physics are required to make the laboratory works where they measure several physical phenomena. They follow instructions that exactly tell them how to do the measurement. Assuming these students were told to invent the measurement method themselves, very few, if any, would come up with a working method. Thus, their measurements would give a negative result of a phenomenon that we know does exist. Their negative measurement would show nothing more than that they could not invent a working method. Say, ask the students to measure the spin of an electron. Only those who would not have slept in the lectures and would remember the Stern-Gerlach experiment, or some similar one, would have a chance of passing this exercise. Still, I am sure, most of them would not set up the experiment correctly and the results would be negative. If this is not enough, then ask the students to measure gravitons. Most physicists believe that gravitons exist, yet the students using university laboratory equipment will not find a way to measure them and the results will be negative. There is a famous negative experiment: the Michelson-Morley experiment that claims to show that the ether does not exist, but actually it only shows that light waves are not longitudinal and it says nothing of transverse waves and does not even show that the speed of light is constant. That is all I conclude about negative results in a physical experiment: a negative results proves much less than a positive result.
You cannot proceed with testing of a hypothetical connection with identical twins by taking a typical ESP experiment set-up and repeating it with twins. The result of such ESP experiments has always been negative and it is negative also for identical twins. This only shows that the experiment set-up does not measure any phenomenon, not that the phenomenon it tries to measure does not exist.
We must start with a model of what we want to measure. In order to measure the spin of an electron we need a model showing how charged particles should move in a magnetic or electric field. In a same way we need some model, not necessarily equations of motion, but something is needed.
First, let us motivate why there should be such a phenomenon. This is an easy starting exercise: take a pet dog and do computer programming for, say, ten years. After the ten years you are pretty much convinced that a computer just does what it is told to do and if you want it to do what it is not told to do, you have to use a random input, which can be generated in many ways but which does not have any free will as we think we have. You will not invent a way to make the computer conscious or to have feelings. That is, I have tried to think of this problem for a long time and have not solved it, and nobody has so far solved it, from which I am quite sure you will not solve it and only a real scifi-fun claims that computers will become conscious in the future. If they will, it will not be from the program but something external.
And then there is your pet, which does not think so deeply but has a free will, is conscious and has feelings. So you conclude that the dog is very much like you and the computer is very much like a clock, and that is correct. So, what is the difference? We know that the brains do the thinking: cutting away parts of the brain removes parts of the thinking ability, so we can even pinpoint some parts of the brain that do certain things. A brain works as a computer as a computer is a universal calculation machine, yet there are those things that just cannot be programmed: a free will, consciousness and feelings. You can decide to deny the free will: it is your free decision to deny the free will. You can try to deny the existence of feelings as a sizable portion of men do not have them, but women, children and animals have, so this does not work, and finally, you cannot deny consciousness. And you cannot deny that other people, indeed other mammals, have it, but the computer does not. It is a really denialist position to try to deny something that everybody has immediate experience of.
Then spend another, say, ten years in studies of physics and be convinced that the equations of motion governing material-energy do not have and do not need any of these three phenomena: free will, consciousness and feelings. Thus, they are external to our physical world.
In case it seems odd that there should exist something external to the physical world, let me just point out that time is also external to our material world. Our physical world is three-dimensional and time is not a fourth dimension. This is simply shown: in a four-dimensional world there is no present time: every time moment is equally existent, but in our world there indeed is a present time and it moves forward. We can create a simulated four-dimensional space-time model in a computer and the (basically only) way to set the present time there is to use a pointer that selects what is the present time. Such a pointer is external to the model. Some claim that the Special Relativity shows that the world is a four-dimensional space-time, a Minkowski space, but it is not. The Lorentz factor, if correctly calculated by setting time dilation equal to transverse and longitudinal directions, gives a Lorentz factor that does not give a Minkowski space. There is ether, that is, finite size space elements. It is also not so that the real world needs to be on complex numbers: complex fields in gauge fields can be realized as constructions, for instance, in electrodynamics by ball-shaped space elements. For all I know this physical world can be a three-dimensional space in real numbers with time as an external variable. I hope I did not get too technical or obscure, I will explain this in some future post. It suffices to say that time can be well argued to be external to our physical world and we need not be surprised that there would be more phenomena that are external to the physical world.
The basic model is then that the brain is a computer and it is run by a soul or a mind that is not physical and has those properties that could not be realized by a computer. It is like a flight simulator program and a user. The user does not get any information of most things that happen in the program. It only gets what is shown in the user interface and what is show can be a very much reduced view. A flight simulator can fly on an autopilot, but the user has to decide where he flies to. This is the free will: it is communication between the user and the program. The use is conscious and has feelings, but they are not parts of the communication between the human and the machine. The communication is decisions from the user to the machine and announcements from the machine to the human. These announcements, like interrupts in a computer, or alarms, are needed only it something exceptional happens requiring the user to make a decision. Thus, in this model there is minimal communication between the user and the machine: decisions and alarms. We should invent an experiment to show that this communication exists.
This communication, if it exists, is not physical and cannot be measured by physical experiments. One way to show that such communication exists would be to build a machine and to control it with our mind. For instance, we could mind control a lotto machine and win a lot of money in lotto. Before trying this, we can try something simpler: let us try to control the lotto machine with a television remote controller. The remote controller certainly sends something and can control a television set, but it cannot control a lotto machine because the latter does not have the television receiver. Thus, the machine we want to build to control with our mind must have the correct receiver. As we do not know what the mind sends, if anything, it is hopeless to try to build a receiver. Clearly, we cannot create a working experiment where the mind controls a machine.
What about controlling another body, a human or an animal body? It seems to be so that we can control only our own body, not take over some other body, thus we can add to the model the feature that the communication between the mind and the brain is personalized, apparently from the time the brain develops. Technically it is easy to create such personalized communications: all you need is a personal code to protect the communication. This code should originally be in the brain side before the communication starts in order to get it started at all. Later the code could change. It is natural to think that the original code is built from the blueprint of DNA, as all proteins and built according to DNA. And this takes us to the question of the identical twins, especially young identical twins. They have the same DNA. As children they still have not diverged much. It might be possible that in some cases there is communication error and a twin receives communication meant to the other twin. It is an error and some mechanisms would try to avoid such errors, thus the error would happen only seldom.
This is my model. One should go through the premises of the model to see if it is reasonable. Is there consciousness, a free will and feelings, or at least some of it? I find it hard to deny this assumption. Are these phenomena explainable by properties of the material-energy world as described in equations of physics? The answer is definitely no. Are they explainable as side effects of computing? I am convinced that they are not: you cannot program these things to a computer, even if some scifi-oriented brain researchers sometimes claim so. A computer can simulate a human, but it is not conscious. Does this mean that these things are external to the physical world? In my opinion the answer is yes. Time is also external and strongly connected with consciousness: that is, we are conscious in the present time and only the present time exists in the reality. If so, then there is something outside the physical world and there must be communication between the worlds. Communication does not have so many models, so there is a receiver and a sender and a communication channel. We cannot see the channel and the other side as it is not physical, but if it exists, it has the typical properties of a communication system and an experiment can be planned using those properties.
Just as a side comment: why do we think gravitons exist? Gravitons have been observed in an experiment, or maybe not despite of the Nobel Prize. They were believed to exist because gravitation should be a quantum field like other interactions. Is this a very compelling argument? No, but it is a rational argument on the same level as that there should be communication between a mind and a body assuming that some theory proposing a mind is correct.
You may make a different model, but this is a concrete and fairly realistic model for testing the twin telepathy hypothesis. Especially, we should not see ESP in the tests that are assumed to test ESP. If we give a person a card and ask him to send information of the card to another person in another place, we are asking the brains to communicate without a communication channel. The information of the card does not pass to the mind, so it is only in the brain. As well we could put two computers without a connection and ask if they can communicate. If we want to test if two people to communicate in a telepathic way according to this model, the only information that could be moved between the test persons in this model is the information on the channel from the mind to the brain, that is, decisions and alarms.
Nicely, people have already made these kinds of tests with identical twins and they have given positive results. One is here, thought concordance experiments by Susan Blackmore and Frances Chamberlain (1993)
The experiment shows that twins could more guess what the other twin decided to draw more often than expected. The authors explain the result by referring to the similarity of the twins: they are so similar that they often guess what the other will do. This may be the explanation, but notice that the decision what to draw is a decision from the mind to the brain in our model. It is exactly that kind of information that goes in the communication and sometimes might be picked up by a similar receiver, the other twin. It would be good to continue these tests. I find it hard to believe that all human decisions would be predetermined by our DNA.
The other test is about the alarms. In 2003 an independent researcher of paranormal phenomena Guy Lyon Playfair performed some informal experiments on twins for a television show
One twin was connected to a polygraph machine, the other was given an alarming situation, like that a hand was immersed in cold water. The polygraph machine recorded a physical reaction in the other twin at the time when the other twin experienced the situation. Playfair even wrote a book of the connection between twins.
There is a story of Playfair’s research in
and I guess that you may be a bit skeptical of his topics, but about the twin experiment, I just note that that is what you would expect in the model I just proposed, and you would not expect that such cases are very common as they are in fact communication errors.
I do not think either one of these tests (Blackmore and Playfair) proves any telepathic connection between twins, but as both have given positive results fitting to the hypothesis of a fairly reasonable model, I think the issue should be investigated.
The site
mentions three sets of telepathy tests of twins (Adrian Parker, Samuel Soal and Susan Blackmore), all of which were negative, but the test of Blackmore is the one I mentioned before and it actually is negative only as the traditional ESP test. I think all these ESP tests can be ignored as they do not test the correct thing.
Sites like
list a few anecdotal cases. I personally feel that many of these anecdotal cases fit to the model and the issue is in my opinion open.
I do not study paranormal things and am quite skeptical about them, but what irritates me even more is all these debunkers. There are people who insist on debunking everything from the WTC explosion theory to Holocaust time photo-forgery to JFK assassination theories and so on. Probably these people are goodwilling, but very often I would use the word chickenbrained in their cases. I have to look at this twin issue more carefully. Probably there is nothing to be found, but a small chance remains. I guess this pseudoscience is about as much science as anything done today in the science community. Sad but true.