So, to really start out our inaugural issue, we'll take a look at a moment in the new Twins miniseries on The Learning Channel.  The moment we'll be looking at is the moment in which the documentary takes a turn for the worse, at least at first appearance.  But before they get too out of hand, they pull the whole schmeer right out of the gunk and save their intellectual integrity.

Their first mistake is even answering those ridiculous claims that identical twins somehow share a weird telepathic link.  So they sit in on an experiment.  A pair of twins who spent most of their lives away from each other sit in the Fox-paranormal-expose-standard soundproof rooms, separate from each other.  One of them (Twin A) has four postcards with four different designs on them.  Twin A picks one of them, concentrates, and tries to broadcast a narrow band of thought energy into Twin B's head.  Twin B thus picks the one postcard out of an identical stack that she is supposedly compelled to choose.  A whole bunch of these studies revealed that twins tend to be right 50% of the time, whereas the percentage for normal people (or random chance) is around 25.  But is it telepathy?

So, not thinking that the test is blind enough, the researcher sitting with Twin A picks the card for her.  If the twins are telepathically linked, then they should get same results, right?  Right.  But it ain't telepathy.  The result: 25% of the time, or the same as just us ordinary folks.  Big surprise.  What the twin experts think is that the twins just tend to be making the same decisions at the same time, or thinking the same way, since their genetic codes are identical.

The whole idea that twins are telepathically connected  is as scientifically valid as suggesting that twins actually share a cosmic cowbrain, a bovine-infused ubermind that connects the two brains like a psychoneurotic, fifth-substance snot rope.

Next!