Twin Telepathy

Mindlink by Daniel Wilke

Kim: Ron, why can't my brothers be normal?
Ron: They're relatively normal. For twins, I mean. At least they don't speak their own weirdo language.
Jim: Hikka-bikka-boo?
Tim: Hoo-shaw!

— Kim Possible, "The Twin Factor"

In fiction, at least, it is common for twins — especially identical twins (or brother-sister twins who seem otherwise identical) — to seem to share a Psychic Link, even in series which do not otherwise have any paranormal element. This connection may vary from a vague feeling of when the other twin is in danger, to continuous telepathic communication, to being an outright Hive Mind. They often experience each other's injuries as part of their link, and frequently finish each other's sentences. In a very few cases, the siblings involved are not twins.

Thanks to the Mindlink Mates trope, this level of closeness can lead to other interpretations of their relationship.

Compare with other types of Psychic Links and Synchronization.

Related to, but distinct from, Single-Minded Twins and is often a product of Twins Are Special.

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Examples:

Advertising

• This Pepsi commercial hilariously uses this trope with twins Separated at Birth (both played by Rick Moranis).

Anime & Manga

• Toyed with in the case of Shagia and Olba Frost from After War Gundam X, since they have this power yet it's not fully explained if they're normal siblings or fraternal twins.
• Seen in Volume 8 of Arisa; as Tsubasa is hurt, Arisa flatlines in the hospital, and Tsubasa even says not to underestimate the bond between twins as she races to help Arisa.
• It's downplayed in Aruosumente, but Dante seems to always know when his twin Lante is crying (when they were children) or even just can't sleep.
• The Comic-Book Adaptation of Breath of Fire IV plays up the telepathy between Ryu and Fou-lu far more than the original video game (which merely hinted at telepathy for the most part). In fact, the connection between the two (which is entirely justified as the two were Split At A Failed Summoning) is an integral and vital part of the manga's plot.
• In A Certain Scientific Railgun the Sisters network is somewhere between this and a Hive Mind. Granted, they're mass production clones who're specifically engineered to share their psychic powers this way...
• Used in the Fatal Fury movie between Half-Identical Twins Laocorn and Sulia. At first it's simply an empathic and telepathic connection, but after Laocorn becomes an invincible Physical God, the connection was ratcheted up to the point where Sulia's self-inflicted wounds weakened her brother, and her suicide effectively both shut off his invincibility and released him from the More than Mind Control state he was subjected to..
• For the Kid I Saw in My Dreams: Senri and Kazuto have shared visions as well as feel the other's pain.
• Amiboshi and Suboshi of Fushigi Yuugi.
  • They can write messages to each other on their skin. For example, if Amiboshi writes something on his left hand, the words will appear on Suboshi’s left hand.
  • Suboshi believed Amiboshi died when he could no longer sense his twin’s life force. Turns out Amiboshi was alive, just blocking their mental connection.
  • Even after Amiboshi lost all memories of his past life, he could still feel Suboshi’s death.
  • In the anime, Suboshi’s soul remains alive in Amiboshi and the two share a body.
• Takuma and Kazuma from Gakuen Babysitters have this briefly during the latter's Sick Episode for the sake of a joke, where the former declares that he's fine by himself without missing a beat, causing the latter to sense the statement as he lay sick in his bed.
• In Guardian Fairy Michel, the magnetic fairies have this bond.
• In Innocents Shounen Juujigun. Laurent and Lillian have the ability to communicate through thoughts, as well as experiencing what the other is feeling to some degree. This is initially very helpful in keeping the Crusade organized, but when Lillian cuts off the link due to anger over being confused with his brother, things get complicated. Lillian brings the link back during his death scene in a desperate bid for someone to save him. Thanks to that, Laurent gets to personally witness and feel his little brother's last moments.
• Ako and Riko from kissxsis tend to know when the other is up to shenanigans. They even Lampshade it when one of them is having a particularly ecchi Imagine Spot by the other one calling them out on it.
• L and R Nomura of Marginal #4 share dreams fairly often. Interestingly, the two times it's shown in the series, in the dream, R is a normal human and L is some sort of fantasy being — a vampire, or a genie.
• Miracle Girls is based on this trope; the main characters are identical twins with psychic powers, including telepathy with each other. (Although there have been instances where they were able to communicate with other psychics.)
• In Osomatsu-san, sextuplet variants happen, complete with the brothers being able to have conversations with each other mentally.
• In the manga of Ouran High School Host Club, during the test of courage chapter. Hikaru and Kaoru are separated, and the latter gets locked in a classroom. Hikaru somehow manages to find Kaoru and explains that he had heard his twin's voice telling him where he was, even though Kaoru had no way of telling his twin his whereabouts and Hikaru could not have found out through someone else.
• Defied in The Quintessential Quintuplets, where Nino explicitly says that the quintuplets don't have telepathy.
• Episode 20 of Space Runaway Ideon features the villainous twins Kiyaya and Dopa, who use their telepathy in working together. The telepathy extends to Kiyaya feeling her brother's death when his ship is destroyed, and she herself is killed shortly after.
• Trigun Maximum has a pretty literal example, with Knives's ability to invade Vash's mind and the plants' general ability to communicate with each other over great distances. When Knives is using his power, Vash can also 'feel' it from kilometers away. On the other hand, they disagree on almost everything and really don't understand each other. In fact, they suffer from a really bad communication breakdown.
• Sorta used in the Vampire Princess Miyu manga, with the Minami twins. Eldest twin Rima can't leave their home because she's a full-blooded mermaid who lives in a tank, but she can see the outside world through the senses and specifically the eyes of Mari, the youngest twin.

Comic Books

• The short-lived "Captain Hunter" feature in Our Fighting Forces had this as part of its premise — During the Vietnam War, USAF Capt. Phil Hunter searches for his twin brother Nick, who was shot down over North Vietnamese territory. He's certain Nick is still alive due to hearing his telepathic cries for help. Phil seems to think every set of identical twins has the same limited ability to communicate telepathically
• ElfQuest: The maximum "sending range" (range of telepathic powers) is important to the plot on numerous occasions. Sending across the Vastdeep (ocean) requires a powerful magic amplifier. But twins Suntop and Ember, despite actually having distinct genetic code (one immortal, one wolf-blooded), can contact each other from halfway across the world, and know when the other is in distress.
  • Then again, a weaker version of this connection is used for the entire family, and for any close kinship relationships the series over: They feel hurt and loss even without direct sending. The Wavedancers are particularly attuned to the loss of their tribemates.
• Green Lantern (1941)'': It depends on the writer, but Jade and Obsidian had a sort of vague empathy/danger sense regarding the other about half the time.
• DC Comics Kobra series had twins with a physical telepathy (they felt the other's pain). Just after the end of the series the evil twin found a way to kill the good twin without dying himself.
  • In a similar incidental story from the Amalgam Universe, a "good" twin was suffering when his "bad" twin was imprisoned, feeling as though he was in prison with his twin. The judge in the case saw that they even share injuries and this prompted him to release the "bad" twin, despite the seriousness of the charges, on the grounds that it was unfair to the innocent "good" twin. The "good" twin then performed a Batman Gambit where he pretended to turn bad and was shot, seemingly through the heart. His "bad" twin dies instantly since they share injuries, but the "good" twin survives because of one slight anatomical difference between the twins - his heart is on the opposite side of his body to normal.
• Raptors: The Molina twins, Drago and Camilla, are shown as being able to communicate with each other through long-distance telepathy. This might be explained by their vampiric nature, however.
• Superman: In the storyline Two for the Death of One, the Man of Steel gets magically split into two duplicates who can send telepathic messages to each other before being merged back together.
• The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers: Robot brothers Topspin and Twin Twist demonstrate an ability to share pain, feelings, and even experiences. Taken further, this also means that if one dies they both die. It's the result of a medical condition known as a Branched Spark, which only crops up with every one in a million Sparks.
• X-Men:
  • The Stepford Cuckoos, creepy psychic quintuplets. They are clones of non-twin telepath Emma Frost. They are separate entities, but sometimes the same sentence will run between two, three, or even five connected speech bubbles.
    • This is more because their power is that, while they are all telepathic, the group of the Cuckoos is also capable of going full Hive Mind with each other and amplifying their powers. This was a major plot of why one of the quints died during New X-Men.
    • This creates an interesting situation in terms of punishment. It's revealed during a mini-series that Emma "grounds" the Cuckoos by telepathically locking them in their own minds so that they can't communicate with each other like they normally would.
  • Through Psyloche's telepathy, she and her twin brother Captain Britain share a special bond.

Comic Strips

• Crabgrass: Played for laughs in this comic; after Miles wonders if Kevin and Krystal have this, Kevin proves they do by silently insulting Krystal, and seeing her react to his words.

Fan Works

• In The Awakening of a Magus, Fred and George have a bond powerful enough to not only mindspeak, but potentially pool their magical power together. Also, it's stated that a lot of Percy's emotional problems are because he had a strong bond with his twin brother who died at the age of one day.
• Child of the Storm has a literal example with Jean Grey and Maddie Pryor a.k.a. Rachel Grey, her stolen-at-birth twin sister. Complicating matters further is the fact that Jean's cousin, Harry, is also connected into this ad hoc telepathic network, one with an apparently global range that apparently goes all the way back to the womb... but until the second book, when two of the participants are in their late teens, they don't actually notice it, merely responding to significant expenditures of power. Later on, they can and do use it to communicate and home in on each other, whether awake or asleep, though they have to focus on doing so.
• In A.A. Pessimal's take on the Discworld, Valentina and Vassily Romanoff are the twin children born to Witch Olga Romanoff. Even the circumstances of their conception had an element of magic; Olga, guided by her Witch experience, initially thought it was only going to be a single birth. But her best friend Irena Politek, another Witch, got exasperated with her during an intense discussion verging on argument.^note Olga, a noble-born Rodinian, made a few off-hand remarks about the fecundity of Rodinian peasants, and even said the peasantry tend to breed like rabbits. Irena, a Rodinian kulak herself, got exasperated and wished a multiple birth on Olga. This occurred at such an early stage in Olga's pregnancy that the embryo obliged the magical imperative. The children, a boy and a girl, therefore have more than the naturally expected amount of bonding. Olga and her Wizard husaband discover later that while both were born with magical potential, their son Vassily has voluntarily renounced his share of the magic, gifting it to his sister Valentina, as a Witch can use it where a potential Grand Duke does not. All that remains, for him, is a sort of psychic bond to his sister, who will know when he's in trouble and can come to his aid.
• In fanfic Hellsister Trilogy, Supergirl and her evil doppelganger Satan Girl develop a psychic link for unexplained reasons. Each one can "hear" and sense her twin's thoughts and emotions, and "talk" through the mind-link.
• Luke and Leia in Precipice have a special Force-bond that lets them communicate with each other even light-years away, which they make use of by the time they reach their teenage years. In their earlier years, they had this same connection, but could only project dreams to each other and not outright communicate.
• In Rocketship Voyager the Delaney twins share a Psychic Link and are involved in an experiment in using telepathy to communicate with deep space vessels, with Jenny Delaney on Voyager and Megan Delaney on Mars. Tom Paris begins to suspect they're a very long way from home when Jenny tells him she can no longer "hear" her sister.
• Twinning With a Twist: Sammy believes this is in effect when she and Amy are dueling each other during the fifth challenge, where each of their blows were clanging against the other's padded stick and not actually hitting.
• The Xenoblade Chronicles 3 fanfic Queen's Paninis: Eunie tries to use her "magical twin connection" to find her twin Noah. Lanz thinks this makes perfect sense, because his twin sisters talk this way all the time. Ethel, exasperated, points out that Lanz and his sisters are Machina, and their "connection" is radio. Eunie does manage to find Noah, but mostly by reading ether flows.

Films — Live-Action

• Justified in Avengers: Age of Ultron with the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver due to Wanda's psychic abilities. This link isn't shown or implied for most of the movie, but when Pietro dies, Wanda instantly feels it even though she was nowhere near him at the time.
• Blood of the Tribades: Although not stated, twins Darvulia and Erzsi seem to have it, as they finish every sentence the other makes, knowing what they will say unfailingly.
• In The Boondock Saints, the twins receive their calling from God at the same time. As they were both asleep before it happened, it's debatable whether it was telepathy or actual divine interference. The sequel plays with the ambiguity some more by having the twins act antsy about their past as The Saints before the plot kicks off.
• The Octopus in The City of Lost Children is practically a Hive Mind, and is referred to in the singular.
• The Corsican Brothers by Cheech & Chong, very roughly based on the Dumas book of the same name. The film plays the central concept for slapstick, with the brothers hitting themselves to cause injury to the other.
• In Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Prince Nuada and Princess Nuala can read each others' minds. It's also an instance of Synchronization, as an injury to one is an injury to the other.
• A partial example in Nadja, where Edgar is sometimes able to feel what Nadja is thinking and feeling.
• Replicant: The Replicant is somehow receiving memories from his double. Since the person he was cloned from is a serial killer, this leaves him pretty horrified.
• In Star Wars, Luke and Leia have a connection despite having been Separated at Birth, which conveniently doesn't appear until a crucial moment in the second film. (This may have more do with the fact that both of them are strong in the Force than with them being twins, though, as Luke demonstrates a similar connection with his father.)
• In Tom And Thomas, the titular children share a psychic link with one another, even though they were separated soon after birth. Tom & Thomas "talk" to one another and even feel each other's pain at times. At one point, Thomas gets tripped in class, and at the same time Tom falls down.
• Happened as a source of comedy to the twins played by Jackie Chan in Twin Dragons.
• Experienced by Julius and Vincent Benedict (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito) in the 1988 film Twins (1988), complete with Synchronization, much to the latter's discomfort.

Literature

By Author:

• In one of his absurdist comic short stories, Woody Allen briefly alludes to a pair of identical twin brothers ... one of whom would take a bath, while halfway around the world the other would mysteriously get clean.

By Title:

• They aren't exactly twins, but in The 39 Clues, Amy and Dan can sometimes tell what the other is thinking just by looking at each other.
• The Alterien series. The Sisters of Orion are telepaths and are also linked to each other.
• The novel American Gods had a very minor side story about a set of twins with a form of telepathy. When one of them lost his arm, his sister's arm shriveled up and became useless, even though they were geographically separated and there was no way she could even have known about it.
• In Awaken the Stars, Ella and Eric share such a link. Too bad Eric is already dead by the time the story starts... The existence of said link really didn't help Ella to keep it together.
• In The Bad Place, the characters Verbina and Violet have this as well as the ability to form a telepathic link with all nonhuman animals.
• From David Eddings' The Belgariad series come the twins Belkira and Beltira. Not only can they communicate with each other, but functionally have a single mind, such that they are used to read two separate prophecies to find similarities between them. Only one character can reliably tell them apart, since they do tend to finish each other's sentences.
  • From the same series, Polgara and her twin sister Beldaran. This is explored in much more depth in the actual Polgara book, as Beldaran had a normal lifespan compared to Polgara's The Ageless-style immortality, and is thus long since dead.
• In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, when either Esteban or Manuel is coming home, the other twin knows it when his brother is still blocks away.
  "...telepathy was a common occurrence in their lives..."
• Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: The twins in Lady Slings the Booze have this to such a degree that they're basically one mind in two bodies.
• Discussed and averted in Castle Hangnail. Molly tells Majordomo that she and her twin don't have a private language or know what each other are thinking.
• In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath, protagonist Jame and her fraternal twin brother Torisen have moments of intense connection, sometimes in dreams and sometimes in waking life. He, though, is in denial about this and many other strange things that happen around him.
• Circleverse: In Cold Fire, the third book of The Circle Opens, the main character teaches magic to a pair of twin girls who have this kind of connection, although it is more empathic than telepathic, and appears to be mostly restricted to knowing when the other one is hurt or in danger.
• Dexter comments on the apparent telepathy between Astor and Cody (sister and brother, she's three years older). Judging by his comments in the novels, either he's noticing it more (and finding it more worth mentioning) or it's getting stronger as they get older.
  • Dexter himself seems to experience this, at least in the novel, with his older, almost identical, brother, Brian, to the extent that Dexter often finds himself inadvertently observing Brian's murders and on at least one occasion instinctively knowing his location, initially leading both he and the reader to suspect that Dexter may be the real Ice Truck Killer.
• Invoked in the backstory of Miss Level, a witch from the Discworld novel A Hat Full of Sky. She is, in fact, one person born with two bodies, but most people assume she is a set of twins. She took advantage of this to perform a mind reading act in her circus days, as well as an impressive juggling routine.
• The Dresden Files: In Dead Beat, Harry notices a pair of twins in the pub that he knows by sight who have twin telepathy. In the scene, they're playing chess together, which (amusingly) Harry finds somewhat masturbatory.
• In the first book of the Evil Genius Trilogy, Jemima and Niobe (AKA Jem and Ni) are psychic twins that used their telepathic link to coordinate several successful burglaries, until they were enrolled in the Axis Institute. Unfortunately, their bond doesn't survive the strain of the coursework, and their part in the novel ends with Ni staving Jem's head in with a computer monitor.
• In False Colours by Georgette Heyer, protagonist Kit Fancot and his twin brother, Lord Denville, know when their twin is in some sort of trouble... which is why Kit, a junior diplomat, comes back to England in the first place, just in time to get entangled in a Twin Switch.
• Forced Perspectives by Tim Powers:
  • In the backstory, the cult in the 1960s included a pair of twins (fraternal twins, male and female) who had a psychic link and were intended to play a key role in the cult leader's Assimilation Plot before it fell apart.
  • In the main story, the present-day villain who has revived the Assimilation Plot has acquired another set of telepathic twins to play the corresponding role; Lexi and Amber are identical twin girls, and their telepathic bond is so strong that even they can't tell which is Lexi and which is Amber.
• Nick Dunne in Gone Girl cites this as a reason why his twin sister Margo (or "Go") never doubts him and he doesn't have to explain himself to her. This doesn't come up in the film adaptation because while they're still close, Ben Affleck is obviously older than Carrie Coon.
• The Weasley twins in Harry Potter, especially in the movies. It's implied that they do this just to mess with people's heads.
• Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar: In the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy, one character has this with his twin. Then one of them dies, showing the reader that twin telepathy can be a bad thing.
• The Angevin Empire of the Lord Darcy series is shown in Michael Kurland's A Study In Sorcery using telepathic twins to send covert messages across the Atlantic and keep real-time tabs on their New World settlements. Only thirty-six people are entrusted with the secret of this communication method. Darcy himself is only entrusted with the knowledge that a method of real-time communication exists, but quickly roughs out the theory after meeting one twin in the New World and realizing he'd met the other at court in England. Upon his return, he tells the King that if they want to keep their enemies from realizing that magically gifted twins can have special abilities other sorcerers don't, they really should call the project about said application something other than Gemini.
• Samneric (Sam and Eric) in Lord of the Flies. Identical, inseparable, and finish each other's sentences.
• In the Mermaids (2001) trilogy, all identical mermaid twins can communicate telepathically. Rani's schoolmates Marissa and Marina use their ability to play tricks on people. One early sign of Rani's magical abilities is when she starts hearing the twins' thoughts.
• In The Midnight Twins series by Jacquelyn Mitchard, this is pretty much the whole point of the book. Twins Meredith and Mallory Brynn, despite being complete opposites, can communicate with each other telepathically (which they sometimes use for cheating on tests) and even have their own elaborate made up language, complete with past and future tenses.
• Referred to as a trope, and averted, in Mirror Dance. When Mark explains his reasons for searching for Miles on Jackson's Hole rather than any of the planets that Miles's frozen body might have been shipped to from there, someone asks whether he might be experiencing twin telepathy, to which he retorts that he's just being logical (if Miles has somehow survived, this is where he is likely to be and where he needs rescuing from, and if he's dead, there's no hurry to find him). "I'm not psychic. Just psychotic."
• In Mission To Mercury by Hugh Walters, the UN space exploration agency faces the problem of solar radiation potentially cutting off radio communication with the eponymous space mission. The solution is a pair of identical twin sisters with a telepathic link. One is trained as an astronaut and goes on the mission, while the other remains on Earth to relay reports on the mission's progress.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: When twins Aureliano Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo are children, their mother gives one a glass of lemonade and the other, who had not tasted it, correctly says that it needed sugar.
• Para Imperium: A part of the House of Silver's control of the Federation is their telepath breeding program. Telepathically linked twins aren't the only form of faster-than-light communication, but Quantum Entangled Comms have a limited lifespan and wormholes are incredibly expensive to construct and place.
• The Power of Five: Jaime and Scott Tyler's power; both can read minds but decided to read each other's minds instead of other people's because of the evil thoughts humanity can possess.
• In the book version of The Prestige, Andrew has always felt a psychic connection with someone he believes to be his long-lost twin. The truth is rather complicated. The "twin" is real, and was created by Tesla's duplication machine when Andrew was a young boy.
• In Psy Changeling, aside from usual Psy telepathy, Ashaya and Amara Aleine have a strong telepathic bond.
• In Julian May's Saga of the Exiles tetralogy, twins Kuhal Earthshaker and Fian Skybreaker are so closely linked that they more-or-less form only one person between them.
• In The Sevenwaters Trilogy, this is pretty much a given at Sevenwaters, both between twins (there's a set in every generation) and between Sorcha and several of her brothers.
• The twin brothers Jacob and Alex Teller of The Shapeshifter series have psychic link as well as a knack for impersonations.
• Sisterland: When Violet is interviewed on the Today Show, her twin sister Kate can hear Matt Lauer's questions even though they're only playing in Violet's earpiece.
• In Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character and his sister can think as one and combine their intelligence if close together.
• In Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell, the Big Bad has dozens of copies of himself, all of which share one mind, since they were created by traveling to some universe that appears to duplicate everything on a quantum level. When one of Jim's sons goes through a portal to another universe, he suddenly seems to be in two places at once, having been connected in the same manner to his twin brother on the other side. This is Hand Waved as the twins having been one cell at one point in their development. Finally, when both twins fall in love with the same woman, who also falls in love with both young men, she use the Big Bad's method to duplicate herself, thus allowing herself to be with both of them at the same time (still one mind but now shared by two bodies).
• Kathryn Lasky's Starbuck Family series of juvenile mysteries features two sets of telepathic twins: Half-Identical Twins Liberty and July, and their identical younger sisters, Charly and Molly. Their Twin Telepathy allows all four to communicate with any of the other three, despite the pairs being several years apart in age.
• Starfleet Corps of Engineers: The Miradorn and their twin telepathy are explored in detail as part of The Cleanup.
• Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield are shown to have instances of this sort of telepathy in the Sweet Valley High series, although it only seems to manifest at plot-relevant moments.
  • Lampshaded at one point, when Jessica and older brother Steven are separated from the rest of the family during an earthquake, and Steven asks Jessica if she can use her telepathy to sense if Elizabeth is okay. Jessica snaps, "It's not like a psychic telephone hotline I can dial up whenever I want to."
• Bran and Matthew Maddox of A Swiftly Tilting Planet possess the ability to sense what the other is feeling. It's implied that this is a limited version of "kything," the magical form of communication used by a number of characters in the series.
  • Although, as an odd Inversion, twins Sandy and Dennys Murry can't kythe while their siblings, Meg and Charles Wallace, have been practically mind-liked since the latter was five.
• Tales of the Branion Realm: In The Stone Prince, a novel about a royal family touched by the gods, two of the characters, identical twin princes, are linked Seers. They were conjoined twins at one point (broken apart during birth) and have complementary powers — one gets his visions at night, the other in the daytime. As knights, they fight cooperatively, without thinking, and other sets of twins in the realm try to imitate their style. And finally, when one goes insane, the other nearly goes with him. Since inheriting the throne would involve literally becoming the vessel of their God, that too would be problematic. Would the God know which one of them was first-born, or would It take both of them? If it picked on one, what would happen to the other? There are hints that this has indeed happened in the backstory, and that it ended badly. Oh, and they sleep together, though no sex is implied.
• In Time Enough for Love, Opposite-Sex Clone twins Lapis Lazuli Long and Lorelei Lee Long claim to possess this. It's never verified (and the other characters display an uncharacteristic lack of interest in exploring the phenomenon), but they do talk in Finishing Each Other's Sentences and generally behave like Single-Minded Twins.
• In Time for the Stars, this form of telepathy is used to achieve superluminal communication. However thanks to Time Dilation the twin on Earth ages much quicker than the one on the spaceship. Fortunately his descendants can also communicate this way.
• Twins in the Tortall Universe share a mild magical/empathic link with each other.
  • In Song of the Lioness, Alanna and Thom share a link. Thom later exploits it to borrow Alanna's magic (without her permission) for some big project. Happens to be resurrecting Duke Roger, her mortal enemy.
  • Aly and her twin Alan are mentioned to have a link in the Trickster's Duet, but it's only mentioned by Alanna and George in that Alan can't sense much about where the missing Aly is, just that she's alive.
• In Warrior Cats, Squirrelflight and Leafpool had this in their earlier books.
• In the Whateley Universe this is the primary mutant power of Michael and Edward Samson (Heckel and Jeckel), two pranksters who tend to lose track of their own identity at times. At Whateley, they had been Underdogs, but they later used their abilities to good effect in the USMC as members of the Equalizer unit, aka the Dragonslayers.
• Almi and Merrill of Within Ruin not only share a mind but a soul. Any twins born to elves possess this unique feature, with the caveat being that if one dies so does the other. To avoid any dilemmas this may cause, Elven parents always murder any twins born to them. Problem solved!
• Kestrel and Bowman Hath, the main characters of William Nicholson's Wind on Fire trilogy, have this for no adequately explained reason. Actual telepathy, not just an empathic connection.
• Two randomly-introduced young characters in the Young Wizards series' eighth book walk up to Nita on the Moon and subsequently: finish each other's sentences; declare in stereo that they're a "Twychild"; burst into laughter; and then walk away. How the main characters did not find this irritating is a mystery to many.
• In Zer0es, Flicker assumed that this was the nature of her superpower when it first manifested as the ability to see through her twin sister's eyes. When her ability developed further and she learned to see through any person's eyes, it made her power a lot stronger, but she also was somewhat disappointed that her bond with her sister wasn't as unique and special as she'd initially thought.

Live-Action TV

• The Conjoined Twins Bettie and Dot from American Horror Story: Freak Show possess this.
• The Babylon 5 verse already has non-twin telepaths. The Centauri, however, place special value on telepathic twins, using specially-trained pairs raised from birth as the Emperor's personal communication system. The Emperor seems to normally have two sets of twins, and one from each pair always accompanies the Emperor when he travels while the others remain in the palace. This provides instantaneous communication and awareness of the Emperor's situation independently of any technology that could be hacked or jammed.
• Batwoman: Subverted. Kate and her twin sister Beth do not have any form of "magical twin connection." However, in her insanity, Beth blames Kate for not using this connection to find her and save her when she was kidnapped and tortured.
• Played for Laughs in BOB ❤️ ABISHOLA. In the episode "Ralph Lauren and Fish". Douglas is lost in the hospital trying to find the waiting room and Christina, while high on Xanax, claims she can locate him because of their "twin connection". It doesn't work.
• The Salamanca brothers from Breaking Bad use this. In fact, it's the only way they communicate.
• On Cheap Seats and other Sklar Brothers projects like Sklarbro Country and Dumb People Town, comedians Randy and Jason Sklar repeatedly demonstrate that they can speak in unison as if telepathically linked.
• Played with in one episode of Cheers. A character who's pregnant with twins stops a pair of adult identical twins as they're leaving the bar, and asks if it's true that twins can read each other's minds. They stand there silently for a second, and she says, "Well?" One responds, "Oh, we're discussing it." (More than likely, they were pulling her leg.)
• Criminal Minds: In the episode "Broken Mirror," a teenage girl is abducted. When the team meets the girl's twin sister, she's lying in the middle of the road where her sister was taken and announces that her sister is alive, but scared. She scoffs at the idea that they feel each other's pain, but she says that they've always been able to get a sense of each other's emotions, even when they're separated. It never comes up again.
• This was the central premise of the British kids' show The Gemini Factor. Two teens, a teacher's pet girl and a rebellious boy, meet and start having Psychic Link flashes. Turns out, of course, that they're twins who were Separated at Birth.
• In The Haunting of Hill House (2018),: The youngest Crain kids, twins Nell and Luke, share a deep bond and are occasionally able to experience what the other is feeling, including a sense of each other's pain:
  • Hugh Crain gives Luke a bowler hat and asks if he's happy. When Nell replies for him, Hugh asks how she knows, to which she replies with a shrug that "it's a twin thing."
  • Later on, she accurately guesses that he's scared because she feels it, too.
  • In Luke's focus episode, he relates that Nell's ankle went crazy when Luke broke his. This foreshadows that Luke having a sore neck and feeling cold all over despite the hot weather is because Nell hung herself and died.
• In Jekyll, the protagonist's twin sons display some form of this in the end, when they imply that they are able to "switch bodies." However, they are fraternal twins rather than identical.
• Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure has long-lost siblings Zac and Mimmi who sometimes share visions, particularly when one of them is in trouble or distressed, though whether they are twins is never stated.
• Played for Laughs in Pair of Kings where Brady (a white boy) and Boomer (a black boy) are twin brothers and in an attempt to prove that to a group of girls in The Pilot, Brady says he will guess the number Boomer is thinking of.
  Brady: It's seven!
  Boomer: Nope, 133!
  [the girls walk away, unimpressed]
  Brady: [to Boomer] Dude, we always do seven!
  Boomer: Those girls looked smart, I had to go triple digits!
• Gem and Gemma from Power Rangers RPM take this to its logical, creepy conclusion. They show every sign of being incapable of independent thought, speech, or action for their first several episodes, though they got better when Gemma started seeing a guy (namely, Flynn.) Gem wanted no part in that, so they developed on-again off-again individuality and the ability to speak independently on occasion. Each got a Good Troi Episode apiece of being featured as an individual.
  Gem: We don't
  Gemma: split up
  Gem: Ever!
• Les Revenants: Camille and Léna. It's revealed that this was the unintentional cause of Camille's death.
• In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Miradorn are all like this, and if one twin dies, the other suffers in ways that weren't made perfectly clear (but the remaining twin went on a crusade to kill the one who killed his twin, and considered this "all he had left.")
• In Star Trek: The Next Generation, a species called the Binar are all born as twins with built-in telepathy.
• In Star Trek: Voyager, a pair of twin boys rescued from the Borg quite possibly shared this trait, if only because they were Borg.
• The Suite Life of Zack & Cody:
  • Zack says he'll use his twin telepathy to get Cody, explaining that twin telepathy is how he knew Cody broke his arm that one time. Carey says Zack is the one who broke his arm.
  • Also used in "The Suite Smell of Excess" as Carey's excuse for them dreaming about the same alternate universe. Or Was It a Dream?.
• In Teenage Bounty Hunters, Sterling and Blair are fraternal twins who communicate detailed information without saying anything out loud or time passing for anyone else. This is represented on-screen as them having telepathic conversations when looking at each other, but it's implied that's just a representation of them knowing each other that well. Subverted when it turns out they're not twins or even siblings, but cousins. Their mothers, who are identical twins, do have the same ability though.
• Fraternal twins Kate and Kevin on This Is Us have occasional moments of knowing each other's emotions and thinking alike. When Kate is hospitalized on Christmas Eve with appendicitis, Kevin is seen in the waiting room clutching at his side while she's being operated on.
• Tracker (2001) had a race called Orsians who were always born in pairs and each set of twins had a telepathic link to one another.
• The episode of The Wizard "Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves" has a girl starting to have psychic visions of her twin, fostered by evil gypsies.
• The X-Files:
  • The Creepy Twins in the episode "Eve". Though raised by different parents 3000 miles apart, they "just knew" about each other's existence and murdered their fathers in the same unusual manner, so as to reveal their location to the other. They actually weren't twins, but clones; the result of a eugenics project Gone Horribly Wrong.
  • In another episode Mudler and Scully are interrogating twins separately about a suspicious death, but they both tell the same story. Exactly the same story.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: The Dvati are a non-human race composed entirely of twins, with one soul shared by two bodies. As a result, each pair of Dvati twins can communicate with each other telepathically over any distance, even across different planes of existence.
• Warhammer 40,000: On the rare occasion that twins are born to the Eldar they possess a strong psychic bond, often they are used as steersmen for Revenant Titans that operate in pairs. When one twin is killed their soulstone is almost always bonded to a Wraithknight and the surviving sibling pilots it, using their bond to become one with their vehicle.

Video Games

• BloodRayne featured a pair of psychic Nazi twins who were born as conjoined twins and then separated. Attacking one hurts the other. They're probably among the most sympathetic villains in the game.
• Slight subversion from the Code Geass Nintendo DS game: though the main villains are psychopathic twin princes Castor and Pollux, only the former possess this form of telepathy; Pollux has a superior version of Lelouch's own Magical Eye.
• Roderick and Madeleine Usher have a form of this in Dark Tales: Fall of the House of Usher. In particular, any physical injury which befalls one twin will also happen to the other. This actually forms the original urgency of the adventure, because Madeleine is missing and the twins' doctor fears that if she isn't found soon, it could result in both of their deaths. To find her, he summons Monsieur Dupin and the Player Character. Then it gets worse.
• Dead Man's Hand has a pair of twin gunslingers acting as a Dual Boss, who can somehow read each other's minds and work in almost perfect unison when cornering the player in their battle.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, Porom knows when Palom's in trouble half the world away. This might seem odd, given that the two are Polar Opposite Twins, except for the one thing both have in common: magical prowess.
  • In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, Yuri and Chelinka can speak telepathically with each other after the Time Skip, since Chelinka lost her voice after watching their adoptive father die. She's slowly trying to get better, though.
• A subversion of sorts: They're not related at all, but this trope was the prime reason that many players assumed that Link and Zelda were twins (or at least siblings) in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The characters share a telepathic bond through much of the game, and Link's uncle's final words in the English version were to tell Link that "Zelda is your...", which many people thought was supposed to have been finished by the word sister.^note Allegedly, the missing word was supposed to be destiny. This line was removed in the Game Boy Advance port, and re-added (although slightly different in the American translation) in the Bonus Dungeon when you encounter a boss pretending to be Link's uncle.
• In Mega Man Battle Network, this is a core part of the plot ever since the first game, where it is revealed that MegaMan.EXE is Lan's twin brother, Hub, who died shortly after birth, and was resurrected as a NetNavi. His DNA was changed to be 0.01% different from Lan's (specifically, his eye colour is what was changed) so as to prevent this from reaching dangerous levels (to the point where in such a state, if Hub were to take damage, so would Lan), but it can still appear either through running the Hub.bat program or occasionally tapping into it when Lan and MegaMan synchronize.
• In Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, Tate and Liza of Mossdeep City's Gym are Half-Identical Twins who specialize in the Psychic type, and use their own psychic powers to finish each other's sentences. This is the only time in the series where two people share the position of Gym Leader.
• Second Sight, two minor characters featured were Tanya and Ivan: according to Dr. Grienko's notes, these twins are both psychic, and as such possess not only the standard Psychic Link but also telekinesis and other powers. However, these powers are only active while the two are in close proximity; once they're separated, the twins are powerless.
• In Slipstream 5000, racers Kin and Gin are alleged to have telepathic abilities, which would presumably help their coordination when driving a flying car together. Whether they really do have such abilities is not stated.
• Tales of the Abyss: You can debate whether you want to call them twins, but Luke and Asch have a mental connection that allows them to speak to each other. It's one-sided, though, as Asch is the only one that can initiate it between himself and Luke. Lorelei can speak with both of them, but again it's one-sided. This could possibly be attributed to quantum entanglement, as the clones are supposedly replicas using special vibrating particles of magic that match the original.
• In Tell Me Why, twins Tyler and Alyson Ronan rediscover their childhood telepathic abilities and develop the ability to visually manifest their differing memories to each other.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Segiri (Number Seven) and Number Thirteen have this, which Segiri even calls telepathy. We don't get the full details on what it does, but considering that they're descended from machina, it's entirely possible that it's just flat-out radio. When Thirteen went missing years ago, this link was cut off, but it returns once they find each other again, even after Thirteen runs away. The interesting part is that due to everyone being born from Uterine Replicators, no one has any concept of twins or even siblings; no one ever understood why Segiri and Thirteen looked identical, much less why they had such a connection.
• In Yoshi's Island, the Yoshi only know where to find Baby Luigi because of Baby Mario's link with him.

Webcomics

• Gwen and Liesel from Camp Weedonwantcha think they have this, but it's implied that they're just weird.
• Subverted in College Roomies from Hell!!!: when Roger's Half Identical Twin sister Lily tries to read Roger's mind, she manages to almost correctly divine the major events of the past four months in-story, except reversing or twisting around the details (e.g., she claimed he'd shot God with a Satanic missile, when in fact he's shot Satan with a blessed shotgun). Roger dismisses this as coincidence, a strange attitude for someone who was so immersed in the bizarre.
• Mary and Sue have this in Dubious Company. Sal refers to it as the "upgraded" version of twin empathy. It is not without its downside. When Mary becomes The Mole, she gushes over Elator more often than she provides useful information. Cue Sue smashing her head into the table to turn it off.
• Mob Psycho 100 has the Shiratori twins, Kaito and Daichi, who have this as their main ability. With some training, they learn to combine their psychic powers to read the minds of others.
• In Umlaut House 2, Electronic Telepathy is commonplace, but twins Alice and Lain are almost always wire-linked together. And they apparently use twinspeak in the link.

Web Original

• Used only once with Vex and Vax in Critical Role, to powerful effect. When Vax falls unconscious while he's separated from the group in Episode 25^note  in D&D, characters must roll each turn when they fall unconscious to determine whether they die or not , Matt mentions that Vex feels an inexplicable sense of dread, and that she immediately knows her brother is in danger.
• Liam Kyle Sullivan: When Kelly and Chris begin bickering in "Shoes", their mother tells them "Stop fighting, you two are twins, for goodness sake...Don't they have the same thoughts?" The video then shows the interior monologue for them, with Kelly thinking about shoes and Chris thinking about a Playstation, proving that, no they really do not.

Western Animation

• Dragons: Riders of Berk: Ruffnut and Tuffnut call this twintuition, although there's no evidence in-universe to be anything more than just coincidence.
• In the 80's G.I. Joe cartoon, identical evil twins Xamot and Tomax displayed this and Synchronization as well.
  • They demonstrate this in G.I. Joe: Renegades as well.
• Discussed in Gravity Falls — Wendy asks if Dipper and Mabel have this, and Dipper says no, but sometimes they have a weird thing where their allergies act up at the same time.
• In Justice League, a link develops between Supergirl and her Cadmus-created clone Galatea, causing Supergirl to pick up images of Galatea's black-ops assassinations and Galatea to start being inhibited by Supergirl's conscience.
• In Kim Possible, the heroine's younger twin brothers often engage in Finishing Each Other's Sentences and develop a "weirdo language".
• The twin bounty hunters I and Am in Samurai Jack. They use this to great effect in springing traps: one twin to watches from afar while the other twin, who had buried himself in the snow and couldn't actually see the target, sprung the trap. It still wasn't enough against Jack.
• In the Western cartoon SilverHawks, Steel Heart and Steel Will had such a link.
• Más y Menos of Teen Titans (2003) apparently have this, as Más was able to sense when Menos was frozen. This makes sense, since they have Wonder Twin Powers. There is a bit of a Bilingual Bonus here as well, since Más explains in Spanish that he has a magnetic sense that grows stronger as he gets closer to Menos, but Panthra simply translates for Beast Boy (and the audience) that "it's a twin thing".
• Transformers: Prime: Dreadwing, spark-twin to Skyquake, actually felt his brother's demise over the vast distances of space. This is never explained in depth, but a few things were clear: He knew his twin was dead, and he was PISSED.
  • Another example when Starscream cloned himself. He got to feel their pain as they were killed one by one.
• Yin and Yang from Yin Yang Yo! exhibit rare flashes of this when they're separated and in trouble.
• Young Justice (2010). Invoked when Superboy and Miss Martian go undercover in Belle Reve Penitentiary disguised as a twin Brother–Sister Team of supervillains. When Icicle, the villain in charge of the attempted breakout, notes that they need a method of coordinating with their fellow inmates in the women's section, Superboy plays along by claiming that he and his sister have this trope and kept it a secret so their power-nullifying collars wouldn't be programmed to block it (when in fact it's just Miss Martian using her natural telepathy). There's no evidence that the actual Terror Twins have this as part of their powerset, but Icicle doesn't know enough about them to dispute Superboy's claim.

Real Life

• According to various real-life stories, this trope is indeed Truth in Television, at least occasionally.
  • In an episode of Iron Chef America, guest judges Tia and Tamera Mowry noted that the challengers, identical twin chefs Nicola & Fabrizio Carro, were a lot quieter than everyone else and communicated more with slight glances and motions. The girls said they did the same thing. Of course, that comes more from simply being extremely familiar with each other than anything that would mean kicking one means the other feels it.
  • A pair of French identical twins, appropriately known as Les Twins, are a dance duo that have said that they can "feel what the other is going to do before he does it". This can be seen in their freestyle dance battles, where the two are effortlessly in sync with one another.
• Horrifyingly tested by the Nazis in Wold War II. Mengele in particular was fascinated with identical twins and would perform experiments to see if they could feel each other's pain or distress by separating them and giving one good conditions and then torturing or inducing diseases in the other.
• A somewhat less fantastical possible explanation for identical twins, at least as children while their environment has been mostly the same, seeming to know each other's thoughts and mimic one another's actions unprovoked: given the same genetic predispositions and similar parenting and resources, they're wired to have predictably similar thoughts and actions, and to make similar decisions given the same stimuli.
  • Which means the real life examples are rather Single-Minded Twins, not as extreme as in fiction, of course.
• Dicephalic parapagus twins^note In lay terms, this refers to an especially rare type of conjoined twins where the two share one overall body, but have their heads side by side Abby and Brittany Hensel can type emails without talking to each other even though each girl only controls one hand; they just know what the other wants to say. The duo are also able to carry out a multitude of highly coordinated actions; famously, both passed their own driving test and are able to drive using much the same techniques as described previously.
  • Even stranger is that while being interviewed, you will occasionally see either one or the other put both hands to her face. Keep in mind that each girl only controls one hand. Apparently they either know when the other is going to perform this gesture or they just have really fast reaction time (and great aim).
• Conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan are joined at the head and brain and really do share thoughts and sensory information between themselves. Tickle one, both laugh; put a pacifier in one's mouth, the other stops crying. Born in 2006, doctors haven't yet confirmed how extensive this sharing is as the girls have been too young to fully explain their shared awareness.
  • As seen in 2010 and 2014 documentaries, it is clear that they do share sensory input, to the point of being able to see through each other's eyes, taste what the other eats, and feel what the other touches.
• Neuroimaging studies have shown that identical twins think much more similarly than non-twin same sex siblings.

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