Twins Remix (ep. 169)

Twins, synchronicity, science, anomalies, and dark mysteries.

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In 1940, a pair of twin boys, only three weeks old, were put up for adoption in Ohio.  Separate families adopted each boy and coincidentally named both James, calling them Jim for short.  They grew up never knowing anything about one another, but their lives were bizarrely similar.  They each had a dog named Toy and in elementary school, each both was good at math, showed talent in woodshop, but struggled with spelling.  But it was as they moved into adulthood that coincidences really started to pile up.  My name...

If one is good, two must be better, so today we were talking about twin on the first of a pair of twin episodes.  Let’s start with a quick review.  Fraternal twins occur when two eggs are separately fertilized.  They are genetically distinct, basically regular siblings that happened to be conceived at the same time.  Or not.  There’s a rare circumstance called superfetation, where a woman ovulates while already pregnant and the second egg also gets fertilized.  Multiple eggs being released during ovulation can sometimes result in heteropaternal superfecundation, meaning the eggs were fertilized by different men’s sperm, creating fraternal twins with different fathers.  Identical twins occur when a fertilized egg splits, creating two zygotes with the same cells.  The splitting ovum usually produces identical twins, but if the split comes after about a week of development, it can result in mirror-image twins.  Conjoined twins, what we used to call Siamese twins, can result from eggs that split most of the way, but not complete.  Twins account for 1.5% of all pregnancies or 3% of the population.  The rate of twinning has risen 50% in the last 20 years.  Several factors can make having twins more likely, such as fertility therapy, advanced age, heredity, number of previous pregnancies, and race, with African women have the highest incidence of twins, while Asian women have the lowest. 

 

Twins have always been of great interest to scientists.  There’s simply no better way to test variable vs control than to have two people with identical DNA.  Identical twins share all of their genes, while fraternal twins only share 50%.  If a trait is more common among identical twins than fraternal twins, it suggests genetic factors are at work.  "Twins studies are the only real way of doing natural experiments in humans," says Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at Kings College, London. "By studying twins, you can learn a great deal about what makes us tick, what makes us different, and particularly the roles of nature versus nature that you just can't get any other way.”

 

NASA was presented with a unique opportunity in the Kelly brothers, identical twins Scott, a current astronaut, and Mark, a retired astronaut.  As part of the "Year in Space" project, which would see Scott spend 340 on the ISS, the brothers provided blood, saliva, and urine samples, as well as undergoing a battery of physical and psychological tests designed to study the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body.  According to Dr Spector, twin studies are currently underway in over 100 countries.  Working with data and biological samples in the TwinsUK Registry, Spector’s team has found more than 600 published papers showing a clear genetic basis for common diseases like osteoarthritis, cataracts and even back pain.  "When I started in this field, it was thought that only 'sexy' diseases [such as cancer] were genetic," Spector says. "Our findings changed that perception."

 

Back on our side of the pond, the Michigan State University Twin Registry was founded in 2001 to study genetic and environmental influences on a wide range of psychiatric and medical disorders.  One of their more surprising findings is that many eating disorders such as anorexia may not be wholly to blame on societal pressured by may actually have a genetic component to them.  "Because of twins studies,” says co-director Kelly Klump, “we now know that genes account for the same amount of variability in eating disorders as they do in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. We would have never known that without twins studies."  On the topic of body-fat, a LSU study by Claude Bouchard in 1990 overfed a dozen young male twins by 1,000 calories a day for three months.  Although every participant gained weight, the amount of weight, and more importantly for the study, fat varied considerably, from 9-29lbs/4-13kg.  Twins tended to gain a similar amount of weight and in the same places as each other, but each pair differed from the other pairs in the test.

 

While some twin studies, like Year In Space, are famous, others are infamous.   If you’re worried where this topic is going, don’t be.  We’re not talking about Joseph Mengele or the Russian conjoined twins, Masha and Dasha, though they may show up next week.  Twin studies helped create the thinking and even the word “eugenics.”  Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was one of the first people to recognize the value of twins to study inherited traits.  In his 1875 paper, "The History of Twins," Galton used twins to estimate the relative effects of nature versus nature, a term he is credited with coining.  Unfortunately, his firm belief that intelligence is a matter of nature led him to become a vocal proponent of the idea that "a highly gifted race of men" could be produced through selective breeding and that unsuitable people should be prevented from reproducing.  The word “eugenics” came up a lot during the Nuremberg trials, if it wasn’t already clear with adherents to the idea had in mind.  More recently, in 2003, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia reviewed the research on the heritability of I.Q.  He noticed that most of the studies that declared that I.Q. is genetic involved twins from middle-class backgrounds.  When he looked at twins from poorer families, he found that the I.Q.s of identical twins varied just as much as the I.Q.s of fraternal twins.  In other words, the impact of growing up poor can overwhelm a child's natural intelligence.

 

Bonus fact: The trope of the evil twin can be traced back as far as 300 BCE, to the Zurvanite branch of Zoroastrianism, the world’s oldest continuously-observed religion. 

 

Of all the things inherent to and special about twins, one of the most fascinating is twin language.  You might have seen the adorable viral video of a pair of toddlers having an animated conversation in their twin language.  If you want to bust out your Latin, it’s cryptophasia, a form of idioglossia, an idiosyncratic language invented and spoken by only one person or very few people.  It was a struggle not to throw myself head-first down the idioglossia rabbit hole; maybe for a later episode.  Twin speak, or even sibling speak has existed, for as long as human language, but has only been seriously studied for the last few decades, not only to determine how the languages develop but to see if speaking a twin language could hamper the children learning their parents’ language.  The reason twins are more likely than other sibling pairs to create their own language is less interesting than psychic phenomena - twins spend a lot of time together, being built-in companions, and are at the same developmental stage.  They unconsciously work together to build their language by imitating and pretending to understand one another, reinforcing their use of the language.  This can weaken their incentive to learn to speak to everyone else--they already have someone to talk to.  Some researchers advocate treating cryptophasia as early as possible.  According to Oxford neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop, twins often get less intervention from speech therapists than nontwins. “People often assume that it’s normal for twins to have funny language, and so they don’t get a proper assessment and diagnosis. And then, when they are identified, they are often treated together as a unit, and so each gets half the attention of the professionals working with them.”

 

When doctors first began examining cryptophasic children, they discovered that the language isn’t created out of nothing, but is made up of mispronounced words they’ve heard or references that only work inside their family.  It’s usually not a language at all.  According to Karen Thorpe, a psychologist with Queensland University of Technology, you can think of it like “conversations between married couples where words are invented and abbreviated or restricted codes are used because full explanations are redundant.”  That absolutely happens here.  My husband and I talk like kids in a tree fort clubhouse.  But sometimes, just sometimes, a full-blown language does develop, complete with syntax and totally independent of the language spoken at home.  The syntax of a true twin language doesn’t arise from mistakes made while learning the family’s language.  It’s similar to the syntax seen in deaf children who create their own sign language when not taught to sign.  This syntax could “gives us a potential insight into the nature of language” and mankind’s “first language,” says linguist Peter Bakker.  Twin languages play fast and loose with word order, putting subjects, verbs, and objects wherever, but always putting the most important item first, which makes sense.  Negation, making something negative, is used as the first or last word of the statement, regardless of how the parental language handles negation.  It’s almost like a Spanish question mark, letting you know where the sentence is going.  Verbs aren’t conjugated--go is go, regardless of it’s attached to I, he/she, us, or them.  There are also no pronouns, like he, she, or they, only the proper nouns.  There is also no way to locate things in time and space; everything just is.  If you’re a fan of Tom Scott’s language series on YouTube, he’s started making them again.  If not, start with “Fantastic Features We Don't Have In The English Language.”  I’ll put a link to it in the show notes.  If I forget, or you want to tell me what you thought, Soc Med.  Breakroom  Most children stop using private languages on their own or with minimal intervention, which is good, according to psychologists, because the longer they practice cryptophasia, the worse they do in tests later.  If you remember nothing else I say ever, remember that correlation does not equal causation.  Cryptophasia could be a symptom of an underlying handicap and that’s the cause of the low test scores.  

 

This simple-structured language is fine for two or a few people, but once there are more people to talk to or more things to talk about, you’re going to need some more features, “unambiguous ways to distinguish between subject and object,” Bakker says.  “In the twin situation these can be dispensed with, but not in languages in which it is necessary to refer to events outside the direct situation.”  So do twin languages really offer insight into mankind’s first language?  Could a primitive society have functioned as a cohesive unit with a language that can only refer to what can be seen at that moment?  That’s what linguists are studying, but UC-Santa Barbara’s Bernard Comrie adds the asterisk that this research into the infancy of spoken language is still a baby itself.  “First we were told that creole languages [that is, a distinct language that develops from the meeting a two or more languages] would provide us with insight into ‘first language,’ then when that didn’t pan out interest shifted to deaf sign language (also with mixed results)—I guess twin language will be the next thing.”  

 

It’s not an easy scientific row to hoe.  Twin languages come and go quickly as the children develop hearing their parents’ language much more than their twin language.  They might keep speaking their twin language if they were very isolated, like two people in a Nell situation or that Russian family who lived alone for 40 years, but we’ll file that idea under “grossly unethically and probably illegal.”  Not that it hasn’t been tried.  Herodotus tells us of what is considered the first every psychological experiment, when Pharaoh Psammetichus I in the sixth century BCE wanted to know if the capacity for speech was innate to humans and beyond that, what language would that be.  He ordered two infants to be raised by a shepherd hermit who was forbidden to speak in their presence.  After two years the children began to speak; the word that they used most often was the Phrygian word for bread.  Thus, Psammetichus concluded that the capacity for speech is innate, and that the natural language of human beings is Phrygian.  Similar experiments were conducted by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 12th century CE who ordered children to be raised by caretakers forbidden to speak to them and 15th century James I of Scotland who ordered children raised exclusively by a deaf-mute woman, which was repeated by 16th century Mughal Indian Emperor Akbar, among others.  I shouldn’t have to tell you that they were all based on dubious methodology and soaking in confirmation bias.  A less-terrible test was done in the 20th century by British ethologist, or animal behavior scientist, William H. Thorpe, who raised birds in isolation to determine which songs are innate.

 

One of the best-known cases a negative impact from cryptophasia is the Kennedy sisters of San Diego, Grace and Virginia, of Poto and Cabengo, as they called each other.  They created a media whirlwind in 1970s when it was reported that they only spoke their twin language, to the complete exclusion of English, at the rather advanced age of 6.  “Twin Girls Invent Own Language,” “Gibberish-Talking Twins,” “Like a Martian” the headlines read.  Here is a clip of the girls speaking and sadly this is the best audio quality I could find.  Grace and Virginia had suffered apparent seizures as infants, leading their parents to conclude that the girls had been left mentally handicapped.  Their parents opted to keep them inside and away from other children, leaving them mostly in the care of a laconic grandmother who often left them to their own devices.  They seemed like the next big thing in language-creation studies, but on closer examination, it was discovered that, like most cryptophasics, the girls were just very badly, and very quickly, mispronouncing English and German, the languages spoken at home.  Adding to their disappointment, when scientists tried to use the girls’ words to converse with them, the girls couldn’t stop laughing.  Grace and Virginia were also cleared of their parents mis-labeling them as intellectually handicapped.  Both were found to have relatively normal IQs, for as much good as IQ tests are, which is very little, but that’s another show.  The girls eventually underwent speech therapy and learned regular English, though their language skills were a bit stunted, even into adulthood.

 identical twins come from a fertilized egg that splits.  If the zygote splits most of the way, but not all, it results in conjoined twins.  Or if the zygotes collide and fuse, science isn’t really sure.  Thus conjoined twins are always identical, meaning the same gender.  Why am I pointing that out?  I met two moms of twins at the She PodcastsLive conference who regularly have people ask them if their identical twins are the same gender.  This is why we need sex ed in school.  You’ll also notice I’m not using the term Siamese twins.  That term comes from Chang & Eng Bunker, who were born in Siam, modern day Thailand, in 1811, connected by a band of tissue at the chest.  It’s not offensive per e, but just doesn’t apply to anyone not born in Siam, so people have stopped using it.

 

Conjoined twins occur once every 2-500,000 live births, according to the University of Minnesota.

About 70% of conjoined twins are female, though I couldn’t find a reason or theory why.  40 to 60% of these births are delivered stillborn, with 35% surviving only one day.  The overall survival rate is less than 1 in 4.  Often, one twin will have birth defects that are not conducive to life and can endanger the stronger twin.

 

Conjoined twins are physically connected to one another at some point on their bodies, and are referred to by that place of joining.  Brace yourself while I wallow in my medical Latin.  The most common conjoinments are thoracopagus (heart, liver, intestine), omphalopagus (liver, biliary tree, intestine), pygopagus (spine, rectum, genitourinary tract), ischiopagus (pelvis, liver, intestine, genitourinary tract), and craniopagus (brain, meninges).  75% are joined at the chest or upper abdomen, 23% are joined at the hips, legs or genitalia, 2% are joined at the head.  

 

If the twins have separate organs, chances for separation surgery are markedly better than if they share the organs.  As a rule, conjoined twins that share a heart cannot be separated. Worldwide, only about 250 separation surgeries have been successful, meaning at least one twin survived over the long term, according to the American Pediatric Surgical Association. The surgical separation success rate has improved over the years, and about 75 percent of surgical separations result in at least one twin surviving.  The process begins long before the procedure, with tests and scans, as well as tissue expanders, balloons inserted under the skin and slowly filled with saline or air to stretch the skin, so there will be enough skin to cover the area where the other twin’s body used to be. It requires a whole hospital full of specialties to separate conjoined twins, from general surgeons, plastic and reconstructive surgeons, neurosurgeons, neonatologists, cardiologists, advanced practice nurses, and maternal-fetal medicine specialists, among others.  In fact, the longest surgery of all time was a conjoined twin separation.  Separation surgeries often last an entire day; this one required 103 hours.  If they started at 8am Monday, the team finished the surgery at 3pm Thursday.  In 2001, a team of 20 doctors at Singapore General Hospital worked in shifts to separate Ganga and Jamuna Shrestha, 11-month-old twins conjoined at the head.  Not only did the girls share a cranial cavity, their brains were partially fused.  Each tiny brain had hundreds of bitty blood vessels, each of which had to be traced and identified as belonging to one or the other of the girls.  Their brains were not only connected, they were wrapped around each other like a helix.  Plus, each twin's skull needed to be reshaped and added to, using a blend of bone material and Gore-Tex fibers.  Both babies survived the surgery.  Sadly, Ganga died of meningitis at age 7, but Jamuna has gone on to live a healthy life and attend school.

 

We interrupt this podcast script for an exciting article.  Meaning I was almost done writing it, then I found something I had to go back and include.  There was another pair of conjoined twins named Ganga and Jamuna, this pair born in 1970 in West Bengal.  The pairing of the names makes sense when you learn that the Ganga and Jamuna are sacred rivers.  The sisters are ischio-omphalopagus tripus, meaning joined at the abdomen and pelvis.  They have two hearts and four arms, but share a set of kidneys, a liver and a single reproductive tract.  Between then they have three legs, the third being a nine-toed fusion of two legs, which was non-functional and they kept that one under their clothing.  They can stand, but they cannot walk and crawl on their hands and feet, earning them the show name "The Spider Girls".  Managed by their uncle while on the road with the Dreamland Circus, they exhibit themselves by lying on a charpoy bed, talking to the spectators who come to look at them.  They earned a good living, making about $6/hr, compared to the average wage in India of $.40.

 

Ganga and Jamuna have two ration cards for subsidized grain, though they eat from the same plate.  They cast two votes, but were refused a joint bank account.  They also share a husband, Gadadhar, a carnival worker who is twenty years their senior.  When asked which he loves more, Gadadhar replies, "I love both equally."  In 1993, the twins had a daughter via Caesarean section, but the baby only lived a few hours.  Though the sister would like to have children, doctors fear that pregnancy would endanger their lives.  Doctors have offered them separation surgery, but they’re not interested.  They feel it would be against God's will, be too great of a risk, and put them out of a job.  "We are happy as we are. The family will starve if we are separated."

 

Not all parasitic twins are as obvious as a torso with arms and legs.  The condition is called fetus in fetu, a parasitic twin developing or having been absorbed by the autosite twin.  It’s extremely rare, occurring only once in every 500,000 births and twice as likely to happen in a male.  The question of how a parasitic twin might develop is one that currently has no answer.  To say the fetuses in question are only partially developed is still overstating thing.  They are usually little more than a ball of tissues with perhaps one or two recognizable body parts.  One school of thought holds that fetus in fetu is a complete misnomer.  Adherents contend that the alien tissue is not in fact a fetus at all, but a form of tumor, a teratoma, specifically.  A teratoma, also known as a dermoid cyst, is a sort of highly advanced tumor that can develop human skin, sweat glands, hair, and even teeth.  Some believe that, left long enough, a teratoma could become advanced enough to develop primitive organs.

 

There have only been about 90 verified cases in the medical record.  One reason fetus in fetu is rare is that the condition is antithetical to full-term development.  Usually, both twins die in utero from the strain of sharing a placenta.  Take 7 year old Alamjan Nematilaev of Kazakstan, who reported to his family abdominal pain and a feeling that something was moving inside him.  His doctors thought he had a large cyst that needed to be removed.  Once they got in there, though, doctors discovered one of the most developed cases of fetus in fetu ever seen.  Alamjan’s fetus had a head, four limbs, hands, fingernails, hair and a human if badly misshapen face. 

 

Fetus in fetu, when it is discovered, is usually found in children, but one man lived 36 years, carrying his fetal twin in his abdomen.  Sanju Bhagat lived his whole life with a bulging stomach, constantly ridiculed by people in his village for looking nine months pregnant.  Little did they know, eh?  Fetus in fetu is usually discovered after the parasitic twin grows so large that it causes discomfort to the host.  In Bhagat’s case, he began having trouble breathing because the mass was pushing against his diaphragm.  In June of 1999, Bhagat was rushed to Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, India for emergency surgery.  According to Dr. Ajay Mehta, "Basically, the tumor was so big that it was pressing on his diaphragm and that's why he was very breathless.  Because of the sheer size of the tumor, it makes it difficult [to operate]. We anticipated a lot of problems."

 

While operating on Bhagat, Mehta saw something he had never encountered.  The squeamish may wish to jump30 and think about kittens, though if you’ve made it this far, you’re cut from strong cloth.  As the doctor cut deeper into Bhagat's stomach, gallons of fluid spilled out.  "To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody inside," he said. "It was a bit shocking for me."

 

One unnamed doctor interviewed in the ABC News story described what she saw that day in the operating room:  “[The surgeon] just put his hand inside and he said there are a lot of bones inside,” she said. “First, one limb came out, then another limb came out. Then some part of genitalia, then some part of hair, some limbs, jaws, limbs, hair.”  There was no placenta inside Bhagat -- the enveloped parasitic twin had connected directly to Bhagat's blood supply. Right after the surgery, Bhagat's pain and inability to breathe disappeared and he recovered immediately.  Upon recovery from the surgery, in which his twin was removed, Bhagat immediately felt better. But he says that villagers still tease him about it.

The story I was referring to was made into a plot point on AHS:FS, the tale of Edward Mordrake, the man with two faces.  In 1895, The Boston Post published an article titled “The Wonders of Modern Science” that presented astonished readers with reports from the Royal Scientific Society documenting the existence of “marvels and monsters” hitherto believed imaginary.

 

Edward Mordrake was a handsome, intelligent English nobleman with a talent for music and a peerage to inherit.  But there was a catch.  With all his blessings came a terrible curse.  Opposite his handsome was, was a grotesque face on the back of his head.  Edward Mordrake was constantly plagued by his “devil twin,” which kept him up all night whispering “such things as they only speak of in hell.”  He begged his doctors to remove the face, but they didn’t dare try.  He asked them to simply bash the evil face in, anything to silence it.  It was never heard by anyone else, but it whispered to Edward all night, a dark passenger that could never be satisfied.  At age 23, after living in seclusion for years, Edward Mordrake committed suicide, leaving behind a note ordering the evil face be destroyed after his death, “lest it continues its dreadful whispering in my grave.”

 

This macabre story ...is just that, a story, a regular old work of fiction.  “But, but, I’ve seen a photograph of him.”  Sadly, no.  You’ve seen a photo of a wax model of the legendary head, Madame Toussad style.  Don’t feel bad that you were convinced.  The description of the cursed nobleman was so widely accepted that his condition appeared in an 1896 medical encyclopedia, co-authored by two respected physicians.  Since they recounted the original newspaper story in full without any additional details, gave an added air of authority to Mordrake’s tale.

 

“No, there’s a picture of his mummified head on a stand.”  I hate to puncture your dreams, but that’s papier mache.  It looks great, but the artist who made it has gone on record stating it was created entirely for entertainment purposes.  If you were to look at that newspaper account of Mordrake, it would fall apart immediately.  “One of the weirdest as well as most melancholy stories of human deformity is that of Edward Mordake, said to have been heir to one of the noblest peerages in England. He never claimed the title, however, and committed suicide in his twenty-third year. He lived in complete seclusion, refusing the visits even of the members of his own family. He was a young man of fine attainments, a profound scholar, and a musician of rare ability. His figure was remarkable for its grace, and his face – that is to say, his natural face – was that of Antinous. But upon the back of his head was another face, that of a beautiful girl, ‘lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil.’”  What did we say at the top?  Conjoined twins are identical, meaning among other things, the same gender.

 

And that… though we’ll finish up out story of the twin Jims.  Their lives were so unbelievably similar, if you saw it in a movie, you’d throw your popcorn at the screen.  Both Jims had married women named Linda, divorced them and married women named Betty.   They each had sons that they named James Alan, though one was Alan and the other Allan.  Both smoked, drove a Chevrolet, held security-based jobs, and even vacationed at the exact same Florida beach, though one assumes not at the same time.  After being reunited at age 37, they took part in a study at University of Minnesota, which showed that their medical histories, personality tests, and even brain-wave tests were almost identical.  Remember, you can always find… Thanks…