Attachment Theory, Negative Ions, and Epigenetic Negotiating: 3 Mysteries of Twin Brains
My big questions about how I’m linked to my identical twin
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Well, I’ll never be a stranger and I’ll never be alone
Wherever we’re together, that’s my home.— Billy Joel, You’re My Home
I saw my twin last weekend, which is always a good time — lots of gabbing, laughing, walking, cooking, and eating. Wine. Board games. Epic Rap Battles of History. After a lifetime of closeness, though, she and our twinness are still the site of so much mystery for me.
We were so close, in fact, that until the last ten years after I became I mom, I never stopped to think about how we were different. That curiosity just hadn’t sparked. Even though we haven’t lived together since we left home for college at eighteen and have always lived seven or more hours apart, we just remained a unit in my mind. I was an individual in the rest of my life and relationships, a we when it came to her.
Until then, our differences mostly remained the sort of superficial things we carved out for ourselves as girls. Her breakfast order was scrambled eggs, sausage, and wheat toast. Mine was eggs over medium, bacon, and rye toast. She swooned over the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island; I dreamt about a mountain cabin with recessed outdoor walkway lights (she was actually the one to be a National Park ranger for a while and live in a cute cabin in the Tetons). She liked Jon and Hutch on TV and Brian C. and Dave O. at school, and married a light-skinned blond guy with straight hair. I liked Ponch and Starsky on TV and Alfredo V. and Jorge L. at school, and married a dark-skinned guy with curly dark hair.
But she is an extreme extrovert and I’m an ambivert. We’re both good at math, but she’s better at business because she feels the pain of numbers going sour and adjusts for that. For me, math is a cool abstraction, a universal to marvel at. To process things, she moves; I go inwards.
The differences that tug at me though are the differences between us as identical twins and the rest of you singletons — the ways our brains might be linked that change our experience of going through the world. Here are the areas where my top three mysteries reside:
Attachment Theory
For most brand new humans, their most significant and primary relationship is with their mother, the person who carried them and who they meet pronto on day one. Twins (I’ll use twins as a stand in for all multiples), on the other hand, have a primary relationship to a peer, their twin, prior to birth, before they both meet the person whose body has been nurturing them. They have an other to relate to and attune with; to sense, kick, grab, and play with; someone presumably that offers comfort, security, and affiliation before they meet mom.
So, my question is, how do twins fit in with attachment theory? Attachment theory is a theory of psychology, human development, and relationships that contends that baby humans need to have a secure relationship with at least one primary caregiver for optimal social and emotional development. Baby twins like all babies naturally need to know they can count on an adult for care and sustenance, but I still wonder about the bonding and relationship component. My sense is that twins already arrive in the world with a bond that rivals that of mother-child.
Negative Ions
My next question is whether the synching of sorts that I think twin brains do when they’re together creates a negative ion bath similar to waterscapes’ — seashores, waterfalls, etc. — affect on the atmosphere? Wut?
I first read about the possible power of negative ions in Winifred Gallagher’s book, The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions (HarperPerennial, 1993):
“The atmosphere of such places [the seaside, mountain streams] is thick with negative ions; these molecules of air have acquired an electrical charge by gaining electrons, usually with the help of moving water, lightening, or deposits of low-level radioactive material in the soil. In the process of trying to shed their extra electrons to regain their neutral charge, negative ions are thought by some to create a kind of atmospheric tonic for the nervous system.” (p. 80)
More recently, I was delighted to discover greater confirmation of this idea, and, as extra icing, on the website of the Twin Doctors. (As a total aside, the Twin Doctors are twin OB-GYNs Jamil (Dr. J) and Idries (Dr. I) Abdur-Rahman who once competed on CBS’s The Amazing Race.) Dr. J writes how the “magic of Niagara Falls is real,” thanks to the 750,000 gallons of rushing water that tumbles there every three seconds.
The resulting “negative particles from the atmosphere not only can increase the flow of blood to your brain, they can also increase the levels of the feel-good chemical serotonin circulating within your brain. And the results of elevated brain serotonin levels can be nothing short of magical.”
Better memory, improved mood, sharper thinking. Dr. J gushes on about the effect of negative ions on the brain.
Anyhow, in August 2016, I was in the painful and something’s-not-right-with-my-head phase of post-concussion living (a construction worker in a crane five stories up had brushed building debris onto my head as I was walking by). My sister was traveling in my state and popped in for a breezy two-hour visit, which I remember as her chatting lots and me trying to pay attention but hurting too much and feeling very agitated. When she left though — wow. I felt amazingly good and clear in my head, as if my brain had been re-set, healed. It lasted for over two weeks and I thought I was firmly on the way to recovery.
False alarm, but that episode came to mind again after a similar experience last weekend. I had the mildest of Covid cases this past February, but I have been kind of groggy and sleeping an extra hour or two nearly every night since. Sometimes it takes hours after waking to snap out of the fog. On the third day of our recent visit, I woke up with the same clean, re-set sense in my head as I did in 2016. The post-Covid heaviness trying to drag me back to bed appeared lifted. I’ve been waking up near my normal time every day since.
Since my concussion, I’ve been following the progress of PoNS (portable neuromodulation stimulator), a “device that resets the brain,” that I read about in Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity (Penguin, 2016). The work of scientists Yuri Danilov, Mitch Tyler, and Kurt Kaczmarek at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this device stimulates the brain through the tongue in a way that has been clinically shown to improve mild-to-moderate traumatic brain injury, among other things.
So, to connect the dots of my thinking: There’s brain re-setting happening with a device that delivers it electrical stimulation. It’s the negative ions of waterscapes that refresh the brains of those nearby. Twin brains synch up (common knowledge, right?). How good and normal my head has felt after visits with my twin when I had previously been foggy-headed (or worse) is some sort of related brain cleanse, re-set, negative-ion bath. My research continues…
Epigenetic Negotiating
Finally, I have all sorts of questions around our traits, similar and different, most of which lead me back to genetics and epigenetics. The website, What Is Epigenetics?, describes the field as “the study of heritable changes in gene expression (active versus inactive genes) that do not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence — a change in phenotype without a change in genotype — which in turn affects how cells read the genes.” What epigenetics suggests for identical twins is that though they share virtually identical DNA, a range of things may affect gene expression differently in each twin.
One thing I thought I noticed as a youngster was that we both couldn’t exhibit the same trait at the same time or the same amount of a trait, as if we had a finite amount of each trait and in any given moment there was an underlying negotiation of how much each of us could use in that moment. For instance, I remember seething internally one holiday as my sister, an excellent pianist, sat at the piano and entertained the crowd, the center of attention. At that moment, I couldn’t muster an ounce of sociability or liveliness. She had taken it all for herself and left none for me!
Now I understand that particular situation easily. She’s always been more extroverted than me. Case closed. Except that I’m not so sure that I wasn’t on to something in my youthful interpretation. It does seem that in some cases we divided an open pool of options, so to speak, which only hardened over time into our adult identities.
And that brings me back to my epigenetic musings. If you were identical copies of DNA that found itself in two separate human bodies, what would you do? Express yourself identically? Or, give yourself more opportunities in the world by changing it up a bit? How would this be negotiated? How would you decide which things to keep the same and which to vary? I know it’s as if I’m attributing consciousness to the genetic code — and that is a whole other matter — but it’s a thought experiment nonetheless that I will keep dabbling in.
Attachment theory, negative ions and the brain, and epigenetic variation in twins. If you have your own personal experiences, half-formed theories, or actual research knowledge in any of the above, I’d love to hear about it!
Sharon Woodhouse is the owner of Conspire Creative, which offers coaching, consulting, conflict management, project management, and publishing/editorial services for solo pros, creatives, authors, small businesses, and multipreneurs. To support more writing like this, please consider signing up to become a medium member. It’s just $5 a month and you get unlimited access to Medium’s content.
