Identity, the individual, and the mind: the Hogan twins, joined at the brain
The other night I happened across a documentary on TLC entitled “Inseparable: Joined.”
Here’s an article about the people the documentary explored: the conjoined Hogan twins of Canada, who are joined at the brain:
Craniopagus twins, joined at the head, are a rarity — one in 2.5 million. The vast majority do not survive 24 hours.
The Hogan twins are not just joined at the head. They also share a connection of the thalamus called a thalamus bridge. So each twin has a separate brain and her own thalamus, but each thalamus communicates with the other one and probably with more than the thalamus.
The documentary shows this extraordinary and fascinating situation. The twins are doing surprisingly well, but the fact that they are “doing” anything at all, including being alive, is surprising. They have different personalities, and although they have some learning disabilities – perhaps due to some of their other problems, which include epilepsy (and medication for it), diabetes, and celiac disease – if you watch them you can see they are quite intelligent, although slow for their age.
The twins cannot be surgically separated; it is considered too life-threatening. They were 10 years old at the time of the documentary and are 12 years old now. They also seem to have a good sense of humor.
But perhaps the most extraordinary element of their incredibly extraordinary situation is the way in which their brains communicate. It is being studied and is not that well understood, but for example one can be blindfolded and can tell what the other is seeing. In other words, they share some sensory input. But to make it even more complex, one of the twins can see from both eyes of the other, and the other twin can only see from one eye of her twin.
In a somewhat similar manner, one twin can voluntarily move three legs and one arm, and the other twin can voluntarily move three arms and one leg. But they are able to override this and just move the arms and legs on their side of the body, so that their movements can be coordinated. So it is partly voluntary, something they can access or turn off at will.
The thalamus acts like a switchboard relaying sensory and motor signals and regulating consciousness…
The twins say they know one another’s thoughts without having to speak. “Talking in our heads” is how they describe it.
In the TLC documentary I saw, after tobogganing down a hill one twin says, “I was so scared!” and the other proudly announces, “I wasn’t scared!” followed by, “I need to hold onto my sister because she’s scared!” and raucous laughter. They seem to mean this to be some sort of joke. And it’s actually pretty witty because of course they have no choice about “holding onto each other,” and they also share emotions in the sense of perceiving each other’s emotions. Sometimes there is even carryover in which one’s emotions affect the emotions of the other more directly and seem to influence the emotions of the other.
The Hogan twins’ situation conjures up questions involving identity, individuality, and the brain. Clearly, from the example of identical twins in general, we know that DNA does not determine identity because, although all identical twins share DNA, each twin is well aware of having a separate identity from the other twin. The Hogan twins take that one (or two, or three or four or more) steps further. They have separate identities and personalities, but their shared brain connection seems to give them not only a close bond (such as many identical twins have) but the ability to access sensory, cognitive, emotional, and motor elements of each others’ bodies.
[NOTE: I haven’t been able to find a link to the documentary I saw, but here’s a different one.]
“They are of a piece” is a colloquialism formerly said of two distinct individuals sharing an opinion or view without any material implication whatsoever. Here we may be in the presence of the actual material thing: two who are also one in highly significant part. Awesome.
I wonder if they share one soul.
Cicero:
I’m assuming you are meaning to point out that of course they don’t share one soul.
An interesting question, though, in the case of all identical twins, is at what point (if one believes in the existence of souls) they are ensouled, because at the beginning the fertilized egg becomes an undifferentiated group of cells (blastocyst) and then splits into two individuals some time between day 2 and day 10, and the time of the split determines whether the twins will have one or two placentas and/or sacs, or whether they will in a small number of cases by conjoined (the latter representing a later split).
One way of looking at it is that the same forces that create the split and the two individuals also mean that there are two souls there from the start.
Many of the progressives would have executed them before they were born.
Science cannot discern between origin and expression. All that we can determine is that they share a communication link, which may or may not influence (e.g. social congruence/consensus) their individual character development.
executed them before they were born.
Labeled, judged, and subject to cruel and unusual punishment past five weeks following conception, perhaps earlier. Or cannibalized for her profitable parts. Not the conventional consumption and digestion with fava beans and a nice Chianti… well, there is #CecileTheCannibal, but [clinical] cannibalism nonetheless, under the “planned parenthood” protocol in progressive liberal societies with an established Pro-Choice quasi-religious/moral philosophy.
One of the advancing technologies in computing is user interfaces. There are some who envision an eventual bionic interface that will allow our brain to give direct commands to a computer. Others have pointed out that this would also allow us to communicate with each other, brain-to-brain, with a computer interface which would, in effect, be computer assisted telepathy.
But, these two twins can already do this. These two have a lot to offer the world in terms of getting an advance look at what this might look like and what problems it might create.
There was a pair of twins joined at the head in Los Angeles about 20 years ago. They lived to age 40. I was involved in the separation of conjoined twins in Los Angles when I was a resident in surgery. They survived the surgery but one twin did not do well and eventually died. They were female as was the pair joined at the head. The original “Siamese Twins” were male and joined only by a bridge of tissue about the waist.
I’m not interested in this. Too much of an exception. It will be whatever it will be. Meaningless.
Mike K:
Fascinating!
I think that the Hogan twins are somewhat unusual even among twins joined at the head in that they have a brain connection and also have lived a fairly long time.
I also read that there are more female conjoined twins than male ones, for some reason.
I also have read that the original Siamese twins probably could have been separated with ease today.
Weird and fascinating. What a strange existence for the twins. Sad to the extreme.
Chang and Eng, the original twins, married different women and would take turns living in each other’s houses. They were before xray so nobody knew the internal structure of the band that connected them.
Neo:
as to one v. two souls, I just ask, do not claim to know. It takes us into the old mind (and soul?) versus body question.
I wonder why you’d limit the question to one or two? Why not consider the more interesting possibility? Three!
Our sons were identical mirror image twins. One was left handed, one right handed. Their hair whirls were on opposite sides of their heads. They lost their baby teeth on opposite sides of their mouths on the same day. They were the same and different.
Also, they learned early they had a built in excuse. “Him dooed it.”, was one of the earliest sentences they learned.
Truly amazing; their lives are literally miraculous.
@Roy, we can have a form of Computer Aided Telepathy today: Thought writer (still very slow) into text words on one computer; that or a different computer silently reading out loud to an ear implant on a different person. I wrote about this around 2000, in the dot.com boom.
But mobile phones give us most of this already. Imagine a mobile phone app that allows you to think an SMS text message, and have the phone write it, and send it. Another app reads text messages aloud — but you have earbuds so others can’t hear it.
My long term biggest disappointment with computers is the very slow progress of speech to text. It might be that thought writer soon overtakes speech writer in accuracy and speed, for the one who trains it.
All whole mind – interface researchers might learn huge amounts by studying these twins — partially at the price of treating them far too much like priceless science objects, rather than like two different girls.
Hope they grow up nicely and in relative good health, both physically (given their known illnesses), and mentally, and emotionally. Very very interesting that they have the “same DNA”.
Nature vs nurture vs Free Will vs random quirks.
Great catch, Neo, on this super interesting topic.
I was fascinated by the children, their parents, their grandparents, and their story, There are no recent videos on YT, however, so I am a bit concerned. The twins are 12 or 13 now, and every stage of development has high risks.
Cicero on October 5, 2019 at 7:04 pm said:
I wonder if they share one soul.
It depends, usually incarnations do not share souls as they can just wait to incarnate as a mother/lover/etc in life.
Sharing souls can be classified as multi instancing or soul fragmentation/sharding.
It is where the spirit controls more than one incarnation at once, or bifurcating their manipulation across several lines, such as micro management.
One way of looking at it is that the same forces that create the split and the two individuals also mean that there are two souls there from the start.
The soul is technically not conjoined until the first Breath, the meld continues before then of course as preparation. But a spirit can choose to ride an avatar or not, while it is being developed physically as a body. Thus you can have children who had souls but were never born, or partially aborted. Then there are the bodies of children which had barely an association with the spirit of the soul and never developed a full soul union, because the spirit knew that it would most likely result in a pregnancy termination. Some, though, choose precisely this experience, as part of their soul group/family orientation/planning.
In order to encapsulate the relationship in a way that humanity can understand, a few things needs to be unlearned.
It is helpful to psychologically look at the soul as the union of hardware and software, with the spirit being the remote controller/user of the soul. THe brain is thus the wifi reception point or relay. It is not the originating point of the Spirit source, it is merely a relay for the manipulation orders. Consciousness is thus not generated in the brain, it is merely picked up by the brain so that it can be used to control the body, sorta like a radio or radio controlled drone.
The body is the physical unit being controlled. The soul is the union of body with the controlling spirit, thus creating an avatar or “ego”: an identity uniquely suited to experience life on this realm, that considers itself a body and learns to navigate life and death.
Because the twins have two persona/egos, they are independently controlled, but whether they are controlled by one Spirit or two spirits (soul mates) that is harder to determine, unless their celestial charts are looked at.
Fascinating, Neo. Thanks for posting.