Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are by Lawrence Wright Page B

the other. Maybe we'd pass each other in the hallway, that was it." Bouchard had read carefully the criticism of pre-

 

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vious twin studies and knew the importance of testing the twins separately, using separate investigators, to keep from contaminating the results with the interviewer's expectations or gossip by the twins. The Jims had grown up less than a hundred miles from each other in western Ohio, so their values and many of their cultural references were similar, and of course any two people are bound to find that they have tastes, habits, experiences, and even friends in common if they live in the same society. In the case of the Jim twins, however, it was more difficult to find differences. According to their life histories and the inventories they filled out, each lived in the only house on his block, with a white bench around a tree in the backyard; each had elaborate workshops where they made miniature picnic tables (Lewis) or miniature rocking chairs (Springer); each followed stockcar racing and hated baseball. Their wives told the Minneapolis researchers that both Jims were romantics who left love notes around the house, but they were also anxious sleepers who ground their teeth at night and bit their nails to the quick during the day.
The Jims had extraordinarily parallel health histories as well: both had identically high blood pressure and had experienced what they thought were heart attacks, although no actual heart disease was diagnosed; both had had vasectomies; both had hemorrhoids; both had "lazy eye" in the same eye. The measurable features of their personalities, such as sociability, flexibility, tolerance, conformity, and self-control, were all so similar that they could have been the same person, as were their mental ability scores. "The only difference is that I would talk about my feelings where Jim felt more comfortable writing about them," says Springer. Bouchard was struck as well by the fact that their speech patterns, their body language, the way they sat in a

 

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chair or shook hands, were practically indistinguishable. Certain findings had immediate consequences. For instance, since their teenage years both Jims had suffered the same kinds of migraine headaches, which until then were not thought to have a genetic basis. Also, at one point in their adult lives both Jims put on ten pounds at the same time. Was there some kind of genetic programming at work? Such things had been suspected, but now there was a way of comparing major life changes. The possibilities for the study seemed to open endlessly. Bouchard stopped thinking about doing a little monograph.
"We got quite a bit of publicity," Bouchard recalls. " People magazine ran a story. They were on the Johnny Carson Show . They really fascinated everybody. And so I wrote a grant proposal. I had no idea it would become a life study." As a result of the publicity, however, other separated twins began to surface, creating a research bonanza. Within a year of the Jims' reunion, Bouchard had studied fifteen other sets of separated twins and put together a team of six psychologists, two psychiatrists, and nine other medical experts.
A routine developed. The twins usually arrive in Minnesota on a Saturday (international visitors arrive on Friday). They have been asked to bring whatever birth certificates, adoption papers, photographs, school and medical records, awards, and letters they can find. Bouchard usually greets them at the airport. Often the spouses or parents come as well, to be included in the family studies that have been added to the program. Sunday afternoon the twins go to Elliott Hall, where one twin begins writing out his life history, while the other twin, in a separate room, takes the first of many personality assessments, which include the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Myers-Briggs Type

 

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Indicator, and the California Psychological Inventory. When they are finished, they switch