Twin telepathy

On January 10th 2003, 8-year-old Richard Powles sat in a soundproof room in a London television studio in front of a table on which there was a cardboard box and a plastic bucket filled with ice-cold water. On command, he rolled up his sleeve and plunged his arm into the near-freezing water, giving a gasp as he did so. In another studio well out of sight or earshot, his identical twin brother Damien was wired up to a four-channel polygraph (lie-detector) which, under the expert supervision of polygrapher Jeremy Barrett, was monitoring his respiration, abdominal muscles, pulse and galvanic skin response (sweat on the hands).

Neither he nor Barrett had any idea what was going on in the other room, although both knew they were taking part in a telepathy experiment to be shown later that day on Channel 4's Richard and Judy chat show. All Damien had to do was sit quietly and "tune in" to his brother, while Barrett's job was to watch the four pens as they woibbled along the paper chart and look out for something that shouldn't be there.

He soon found it. At the exact moment of Richard's sharp intake of breath caused by the freezing water, there was a sudden blip on the line monitoring Damien's respiration rate. It was as though he too had gasped - which he hadn't. The effect was so obvious that Barrett pointed to it with his thumb to indicate that he knew something had happened to Richard.