I’m an identical twin, and my twin sister talked to her reflection in a glass door thinking it was me. She was looking for me, and she said something like “There you are!” It was when we were university students. That sometimes pops into my mind and I crack up every time.
Yeah, as a non-twin, this is a revelation to me of one of the things you guys need to deal with day-to-day. If I see my own reflection randomly, my reaction doesn't need to factor in the possibility that it's not actually me. Bit of a mindfuck to think about.
@googlesucks6029 unless i'm missing something, I'm pretty sure this is a joke, and I also may be missing that you're making a very dry continuation of the joke. But if not, most identical twins are raised by their parents, and most parents give their children their own names. Reading that last sentence back, it sounds like I'm infantilizing you which I don't mean to do and I apologize if I did.
I remember watching a documentary about schizophrenia years ago, and a couple of people they interviewed for a study was a set of identical brothers...except one developed schizophrenia and had to go on medication and quit his job, and the other didn't (but scaled back his career aspects so he'd have more time to take care of his brother. That's brotherly love right there.)
@@JesseJames_37 thanks for clarifying. I see him in VlogBrothers videos, but prefer him on SciShow channel... I looked it up and i didn't know he was involved in so many channels, no wonder he doesn't have time to host. Other SciShow hosts are also likable, don't get me wrong :)
My phone's face unlock can finally tell my twin and I apart. Voice recognition still can't but it's progress. Edit: We're also mirror twins. I'm the lefty, but the funny part is how we can only arch one eyebrow independently, the opposite eyebrow. Also the opposite side of our lips can curl independently.
Wild. Don't have a twin but I never heard anyone else to only be able to arch and curl their lip on one side before. I can only do those, plus the vulcan hand salute, on the left side and its interesting that others might have that issue as well.
As an identical twin, hearing your brother was talking to himself in a mirror makes me feel better- one day at work I walked past a huge floor-length wall mirror and, even though my twin wasn't even in the same *state*, I froze and was incredibly confused for several long seconds. I only knew about the fingerprints, neat! I knew we shared the same pattern categories on each finger (except for I think a single one is different on us), but it's cool to know that's the case for all twins. I guess I kind of suspected the food preferences, since our friends in high school used to enjoy making lists of food one twin felt incredibly negatively towards that the other twin was over the moon for. I didn't know our microbiomes could affect our food preferences! The same house and same womb still leading to different environmental differences also explains how even our shared food intolerances affect us both very differently! I almost turned out left-handed until my parents gentley coaxed me to use my right hand more (they figured it'd be easier in life for me if I was right-handed) while my twin continues to be right-handed with the world's most immaculate handwriting, and I am right-handed with doctor's handwriting, and I'm convinced we're mirror twins in many ways. When our baby teeth started to come out, it was kind of hilarious that we'd lose the exact same tooth at roughly the same time- but on opposite sides of our mouths!
Medical conditions are the big difference between me and my brother. He has heart issues, joint issues, digestive issues and low blood pressure while all I have is high blood pressure. Doctors are really confused in the blood pressure one.
It almost sounds like a connective tissue disorder that he has, but if you're also confirmed identical twins, then it'd have to be an epigenetic one, which would be super interesting to researchers. But that would easily explain the difference in blood pressure. Connective tissue disorders frequently have low blood pressure.
@@Rose01bloomIt is still most likely epigentics, since that is how mutations or damaged DNA gets repaired. The mutations had to have occurred post fertilization. In other words, the two embryos can start to be genetically different only because of something in the environment ( in utero, post partum, …) and the damage doesn’t get recognized by the repair system, a large part of which involves epigenetics, ( e.g. chromatin regulation, expression of DNA repair genes…).
@@steggopotamus Yeah, that list made me think of this, too. Might be worth getting tested for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. There are 13 types of EDS and the only one that doesn't have a genetic test yet is hypermobile EDS. But there are clinical tests for that, too. But either or both of them might want to get evaluated for EDS and other connective tissue disorders. Not all doctors know what to look for, and if the other twin turns out to have more subtle presentation, it would still be worth knowing about, so that any trends in the direction of less subtle can be better identified and addressed.
The answer is literally chaos theory. In complex systems you can start with the same initial conditions but the tiniest fluctuations are amplified by the feedback loops of the dynamic system.
That part isn't the weird wart in my mind, as like you said it's pretty logical that over time small changed build up. The stranger thing are cases like the "Jim Twins" where similarities appear despite completely independent upbringings. There's probably a better source of information on those twins, but here's one: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Bouchard_Jr.
Speaking to a mirror believing it to be your twin is the best laugh I've had in a while "Why are you copying me? HOW are you copying me?! Stop that!" LOL
I've got an aunt who is pretty indifferent about it, but we still love her even if we're not really convinced that she's related to her chocoholic little sister, my mom and me - it leaves more candy for us!
Lol, I was just about to say that, if the brother that doesn't like chocolate also doesn't like cornbread, then that's all the proof we need that he's the evil twin.
You mean, the brother who isn't a fan? I'm kind of hoping that neither are a fan. It would be odd to tell people, "This is my brother, who is a human. And here is his twin, who's a household appliance. Please don't ask."
I had friends who were twins as kids who would do that. All our friends and I were always very confused why they both thought that was a good comeback lol
@@brandon8900 Videos are often padded to make them longer so it keeps people watching the video longer for the algorithm. This video could honestly have been 1-2 minutes and contained the same info.
It's even more disturbing when you find out some identical twins in the past were _purposefully_ separated by some unethical researchers to conduct research.
@@StunBuns Very few identical twins were separated for experimental and observational purposes. The data mostly comes from twins who were first orphaned (usually by war) then separated by adoption agencies who believed no one would accept the burden of two babies. In developed countries the practice ended in the 1950's.
My mom's a nurse, and when I was a kid, she took care of a boy who was a twin. He had some kind of serious condition from birth and his twin did not. It greatly surprised me at the time to learn that they were identical twins, since they looked and behaved vastly differently as a result of the one kid's condition. On the baby photo thing, though, that's just a sibling thing in many cases. My youngest sister and I have trouble telling whose baby photos are whose because we looked so similar as kids, and we have been mistaken for twins a few times as adults now that the six years separating us aren't as obvious.
My younger brother and my uncle (our mom’s brother) looked very similar as babies, so much so that when my brother was about 4 or 5 he misidentified a baby photo of my uncle as a photo of himself.
People thought my younger sister and I were twins when we were young, we're only 22 months apart. Now she's several inches taller than me, and it's very clear we aren't twins lol.
My first love and her sister looked so similar that they were usually mistaken for identical twins when sitting down quietly, but never when standing up, talking, or moving around. Her sister was 4 years older but almost 9 inches shorter. Their voices and personalities (INFJ vs ESTJ) were also very different.
It actually makes sense that the identical twins might not be able to tell themselves apart sometimes: they have a lot less practice than their friends and family, because most of the time they see only the other one.
With a some friends that are twins, one got quite severely ill when young and it effected their immunity for life, from that point their growth deviated. Whilst their faces and frames are near identical for their relative size there's is 3 inches difference in their height. It's like you copied an image and scaled it few percent.
Wonder if this shows how we non-twins could develop differently based on some minor difference in environment (even being raised by the same parents). Or how a single different decision leads to entirely different development than we would have had in an alternate timeline.
Oh my twin uncles were identical as kids, but since they lead different lives they're different amounts of fat and lost hair at different rates. But one example I'd point to for differences in twins is that conjoined twin duo that had all those TV specials about them, the two girls, Abby and Brittany Hensel. Clearly, they were identical when they were born. However one of them had a health scare, and now she's not as tall because of an issue with her neck and spine. Everything else about their lives has been the same, but random chance left them holding themselves differently.
Me and my sister tried this and we can't with our finger prints. We're not fully sure if we're identical or not. This is interesting... other identical twins who see this.. can you open each other's phones with biometrics?
@@dollyraestar7624 It's hit and miss with my brother and I. It doesn't always work, but we can unlock eachothers phones with the biometrics. Weirdly though he has a higher success rate unlocking my phone than I do with his phone. But then again I know his pass-code pattern anyway lol.
Yup, twin identicalness is...really interesting. A pair of twins in my high school were of course similar, but were easily distinguishable. They had a different jawline and voice, let alone mannerisms, personality, and preferences. I kinda felt bad for them, cuz they couldn't pull off the twin swap tricks. Meanwhile, I eventually knew a pair of twins in college....though it took me more than a year to realize there were two of them. One had similar classes, one lived near me. I was so confused at how they would get to places so quickly...until one of them dyed their hair and it was obvious that it was two people. They were so similar. I'm not surprised they intentionally stayed away from each other.
I dated an identical twin for a few months between high school and college; they were purposely not identical (different haircuts and glasses frames, plus they had somewhat different taste in clothes) so I never really had to look for the little ways to tell them apart.
keep in mind most twins aren't identical. Fraternal Twins are about twice as common as identical twins. People tend to forget this because the media tends to ignore fraternal twins unless they're opposite genders in which case they're almost always portrayed as if the gender is the only difference and are otherwise fraternal, because fraternal twins being basically normal siblings that just were born at around the same time is just less striking
My twin sister and I did our best to look different from each other. We had a deal with each other starting in the 3rd grade. I wore my hair short and she wore hers long. We both wore very different clothing styles. I wore eyeglasses. She didn't need them. We never wanted to trick people, except Mom. She was never tricked, even with her back turned away.
@@AncientWildTV Two of my aunts are fraternal twins. In their youth, one had brown hair and eyes. The other had red hair and blue eyes. The brown haired one was 4 inches taller. My Mom with blonde hair and hazel eyes would be confused for one of the twins along with the red-headed one. My Mom was about 12 years older.
We had twin teachers in middle and high school. They never married, lived together and were very difficult to tell apart. But in time we got very good at recognizing each one. One of them had a slightly more rounded face and would laugh more often and louder. The other was a bit more quiet and serious.
I had identical twin student teachers my junior year in high school. One taught Spanish, the other Math. None of the students knew ahead of time and they started the same day, so we went from one class to the next and did a double take. For a few minutes in the second class, I just sat there confused as she introduced herself as Miss M__. After 10 minutes, one of the braver kids raised his hand and asked "are you student teaching 2 subjects?" and she laughed and explained her twin status.
I always felt sorry for such twins. It feels messed up. My twin sister and I live separate lives. I have a husband and son. I would have missed out on that. Many times, we have lived in different states. We are living in the same town at the moment, though.
I married a widower who had twins. They were in first grade when I met them, and had the same haircut. It took me about a month of constant exposure to be sure I was addressing the right one if they were standing still. About 4 months to tell them apart at a distance or in motion. Then they ceased to look alike to me, and the subtle differences seemed obvious. Then they became massively tall teenagers, and even their dad is occasionally messing up names now, and it is SO HARD to know who's who in older pictures! I have to drag up my old comparison points or rely on my memory of which twin liked that shirt or did that activity. It's wild.
When I first started teaching in elementary school I had a pair of identical twins. Their appearance might have been the same, but there was an intangible difference so that one struck me as prettier than the other. They got similar grades, but for different reasons. In writing a story, A was creative and interesting, though she made spelling and structural errors, while B wrote precisely and without error but was boring. In math, A could figure out word problems and concepts, though she made errors in computation. B's computational skills were outstanding, but learning new concepts required effort. They were both B students, but for very different reasons.
As a sibling of identical twins, I believe I have a heightened ability to tell twins apart. To me, all identical twins have easily distinguishable features that make them look obviously different. I’m also the only person in my family that can tell the twins apart in photos (including the twins). Has there been a study done on this potential phenomenon? Are there other siblings of twins that feel they have the same skill?
I was forced to read a book in middle school whose plot relied on a clone character having the same fingerprints as his genetic donor. I happened to already know that twins don't have identical fingerprints, so it fully broke my immersion.
They're not technically identical but they're so close that a human analyst for a crime lab wouldn't be able to tell them apart so unless your book was science fiction and an AI couldn't tell them apart then the immersion shouldn't have been broken.
When people ask which one is my identical twin brother and which one is me in our old baby pictures I just say I cannot differentiate between twins. They give me a look but it's the truth 😂
As an identical twin, I feel that I have been blessed with something extremely rare. This is a bond that very few people experience in their lives. The fact that identical twins get split up shows a lack of understanding of the situation, and a cruelty that I cannot describe. Experiencing life with my twin is a privilege that not many understand, and if it is broken is one of the most cruel and horrendous crimes I can imagine. This is a bond which non-twins will never understand.
I was the second twin and I was born breached. I came out blue. I outweighed my sister by a pound. We were 5 weeks premature. I was often ill in my preschool years. I still ended up being about 3 inches taller. We were both seriously allergic to milk at a time when that was generally unknown (1967). Soy milk was a new product and it took seeing 6 specialists to get it. So it wasn't a great start in life. I'm right handed. My sister is ambidextrous. There are more than 2 types of twinning. For example, an egg can split and be fertilized by separate sperm. They would have the same genes from Mom and different genes from Dad.
I learned about that kind of twins from SciShow I think, and have since wondered if my twin and I might be that sort, as the doctors weren't sure if we were identical. I'm also the second twin, but am and (almost) always have been smaller. It's interesting to hear it doesn't always work that way. Make sense, as these thing don't always go typically. We were both also allergic to milk and (in the early 80s) it was still almost unknown and took ages and Mum's tenacity to get us on soy instead. Interesting to connect momentarily with another twin who went through that particular early challenge (all the more so, from the sound of it).
I remember a new friend of mine in 5th grade. We had the same class. I was new to the area. He seemed really well-known and well-liked, at least in our class. Just remember him being a super-fun guy to be around, and what he looked like. Normal height for our age, slightly stocky, short blonde hair. His place was on the way to school. He mentioned I could come over. So one day I showed up, knocked, waited. Then the door opened. There he was. I remember there being a brief, slightly odd pause, as if he didn't recognize me. I said "Hey Brandon, what's up" or something like that. Then he just left the door open, and walked away. I was left standing at the door like ...uhhh ok ... After what felt like an eternity (it was probably more like 15 seconds), my friend came running up to the door, from a stairway on the right, which turned out to go to their basement (just remembering details). "Oh hey man! come in". I was seriously thrown off for a second. I'm sure he knew immediately by my reaction. The funny part I remember is him not caring or giving it hardly any attention, we're all downstairs and he says "oh ya that's my twin", or something like that. Then goes right back to talking about whatever he was saying before. Lol, I obviously had absolutely no idea. I think I remember there being another friend down there already. Dunno, it was a while ago. In hindsight, he was a clever guy and probably thought it'd be funny to play it off that way. Regardless, he was pretty sociable; and yet I hardly ever saw his brother. Even at their place. I got the impression he was extroverted and his twin wasn't. Could just be they had different friend groups. Don't know, but this video reminded me of him. I didn't know them very long. They may have been ended up completely different than what I remember. Too bad we moved so much. This was before the internet was common. I moved and lost contact with him. Ah well, *shrug
My question here is can you tell yourself apart from your brothers in baby pictures? The only way I can tell which kid is in a baby photo is to look at the date of it (or if it's at home, which house it is). You don't need to be identical twins to look the same as babies.
@@katinapac-baez5083I am so glad to hear.Mom say this because I hear so many people say things like they look so much like you or they have so in sow's eyes or whatever and it's like they just look like a baby😂😂
My boys are a liiittle over a year apart (so not twins). Now as teens they have settled into the oldest looking like my husband and the younger is a dead ringer for my dad, however as babies, they kinda kept switching back and forth. Sometimes people would ask if they were twins, then there'd be a growth spurt and look a different enough that people thought they were just friends. Rinse, repeat for maybe 2 years.
@@katinapac-baez5083 My cousin's daughters are about a year apart and she used to dress them alike sometimes (mostly for holidays/special occasions so she could put them in cute matching dresses). When they were toddlers/preschoolers she probably had a lot of people assuming they were fraternal twins.
My favorite twin fact is there is such a thing as “mirror twins”. It happens when that one zygote splits and instead of splitting into to an exact image. It splits into an exact reflection. I’m a photographer and did a session with mirror twins. I face swapped (taking the face in one photo and adding it on top of another usually to get a photo with everyone looking and smiling at the camera) an image and mirrored the face I was swapping in. I was very diligent to keep the right faces on the kids to make sure I respected them properly. Mom reached out and said I switched the face swap up. I insured I didn’t but mentioned how I mirrored the face and she told me about this phenomenon! One twin has a mole on the right side of her body and for the other it’s on the left in the exact same position. SUPER cool if you ask me!
And this is why "clones are perfect replicas" is false as well. I was pleased to see the Clone Wars series actually go into the individuality of clones more.
I have triplets-two identical and one fraternal. It's always interesting to see how viruses affect them-the identical two usually have the same symptoms at the same time, while the timing and symptoms of the fraternal triplet are always different.
5:50 The Bryan Brothers -- the best Men's tennis doubles team in history comprises one lefty and one righty who are both identical twins. Also, one is an inch taller, and after watching this, I'd bet the taller was born first.
One of the more interesting examples of differences between identical twins is with the band Steam Powered Giraffe. Two of the members are monozygotic twins, but one is a cis male and the other is a trans woman. So, even something as deep-rooted as gender isn't identical. (Great band, btw. I'd recommend checking out their music)
0:25 this same thing happened to me today in reverse. My friends and I were out shopping and her twin sister was there. She walked to the end of an aisle and started doing a little dance, in front of what she thought was a mirror, but it was just her sister doing the same dance as her. To be fair there are a lot of mirrors in that store tho
Senior year I got to know a set of twins the Prathers, they looked so similar that I often confused the two of them. But after a few years of knowing them, one of them dated one of my best friends, and the years caught up I could easily tell them apart just by face shape lol. They were identical but they carried themselves differently at all times, Heather was always much more quiet and reserved while her sister Ashley was easily excitable and a party girl. They were great friends of mine who I miss dearly, the years drifted us apart but the memories last forever
Starting at 7 I went through most of my schooling with twin brothers who didn't look like twins so I was surprised to hear they looked identical until a couple years prior when their facial features started developing differently.
There used to be a pair of identical twin brothers in our town who married identical twin sisters. They ran a grocery store and even into their sixties I could not tell them apart. Their families occupied a duplex. It wasn't surprising their kids looked very similar.
Mine and my twins thumb prints are close enough that we can actually unlock eachothers phones which is wild. Also looks like we were born the wrong way around lol. I, the lighter smaller baby, was born first.
I'm an identical twin. I have talked to a lot of mirrors, often in a store. I randomly have days where I think I look more like my twin than myself when I look in a mirror, usually because of an expression on my face. When I was born, I had a lot less blood than my twin. I was very pale. She was very red because she had too much blood. As an adult, I am chronically ill with an autoimmune disease. My twin is healthy. She talks to her doctors about my medical problems because she is at higher risk. She has never had any of the life threatening or life debilitating problems that I have.
My sister and I are years apart. Our own mother couldn't tell our baby photos apart except for the backgrounds and clothes. Until we hit puberty, age matched photos we look like twins. Then we rapidly diverged.
Abby and Brittany Hensel are conjoined twins and are different in height, have different food preferences, have different pain tolerances, and have gotten sick at different times. Of the 3 sets of identical twins I know, I can always tell them apart. Their faces are different enough to recognize them.
There are a lot of twins in my family, but only my grandfather and his brother were identical. They had very similar taste in general, to the point where they bought and wore the same clothes for most of their lives, and even bought the same car accidentally one time. The other fun thing about this is that my mom and aunt and their cousins are genetically half-siblings, and boy do they all look it. One of my brothers (they are fraternal twins) also looks just like our grandfather and his twin.
I’m an identical twin and I feel like my brother and I are a good example of how different identical twins can be. We were monochorionic (shared a placenta, can’t remember if we shared an amniotic sac), he was born head first and I was a breach baby. I have always been bigger, which allegedly in part is due to my brother’s more, I suppose severe, scoliosis (he never needed a back brace or anything, his spine was just more twisted than mine as mine was/is pretty negligible), so we’ve always had a noticeable height difference. He’s had issues with nutrition in the past (temporary gluten intolerance, was thought at one point to be celiac disease but it went away), but I never have, but I am sensitive to caffeine and he isn’t. Even beyond genetics we have some strong differences. We have a lot of similarities and things in common too, but I’ve always found it interesting how different we are politically (I’ve always been fairly left wing, he’s more right wing than I am but I don’t know if I’d say he’s fully right of centre, I’m honestly not sure) despite having grown up in the same household our entire lives. I suppose it’s an example of how the internet can shape who you are as a person, as that’s one of the only things I can think of that would be different is what we would separately see that would shape our views (also this is something I still feel with what he talks about today), but also I’ve always had mental health struggles with depression and anxiety my entire life, and I have hyper empathy, so I feel like those could be contributing factors too. Edit: I made it to the food preferences part and it reminds me, my brother loves spicy food, and I can’t stand it. I have a very white tolerance to heat/spice (because I’m white), but my brother loves spice/heat that I would find painful and unenjoyable. Related side note on spice, I took a tiny bite of a spicy shrimp at an Indian restaurant a few years ago, and it gave me an asthma attack. Also my brother doesn’t have asthma, there’s another difference.
There was a pair of twins in my school who kept saying they were identical but they looked nothing alike, even when the one twin didn’t dye her hair. It was weird and no body believed them. But they were definitely different as different could be personality wise
Dogs have no more trouble smell'stinguishing two identical twins who've never spent a day apart than they do telling the difference between a strip of bacon and a desk lamp.
My brother and I go to Twins Days in Twinsberg every year to participate in studies like the one you mentioned! As we've gotten older we've grown less identical (the big one is he grew out his beard and i didn't) but we're still pretty alike!
I can spot mental differences in twins such as likes & dislikes, preferences for particular gestures & mannerisms, and the type of people they prefer to be around.
Twin here. Strangely, my twin is both taller and heavier than I, but also the one that got sick more. I have always been extremely healthy, while my twin has always gotten sick and/or injured much easier than I did, even from birth where they had to stay at the hospital for a few days after we were born, but I was fine.
My best friends in elementary were identical twins, and the only way I ever found to tell them apart was height. The elder girl was slightly shorter (about a cm). It was easiest to tell them apart when I was between their heights, but they had a growth spurt and ended up slightly taller than me, but twin 1 was still the shorter sister.
As a parent of identical twins. I remember that on the old foto's THEN I could immediately say who's who. But after many years the tiny items that differentiate seem to get forgotten. And I now have a hard time to see who's who on the old pics.
I have absolutely no trouble identifying my twin sisters in baby photos. But I imagine that’s because I could consistency see both of them at the same time, whereas they could only ever see their sibling. (I don’t think looking in a mirror together on occasion would make a difference.) I am also usually able to identify them on the phone unless it’s a single word said in an atypical manner.
I had a coworker who was an identical twin, but one started losing his hair while the other kept his for longer. One was also noticeably plumper than the other.
there was a pair of identical twins in my secondary school. one of them was deaf from birth, and had a noticeable lisp/'deaf accent', and the other was fully-hearing. i also have twin cousins; they're fraternal (one blonde, one brunette) but if you saw them, you'd think they were identical and one of them used hair dye. very much confused me as a kid
It sounds like your brothers aren't just identical twins, but mirror twins, which is a rare subset that can lead to opposite handedness and other related bilateral effects like glasses prescriptions.
Not to mention that an identical twin is the closest thing to a true clone that we will ever have. A cloned embryo made in a lab will develop in different womb conditions, have different diets, different environmental conditions, different childhood experiences, and will likely grow up in a completely different generation than the person they were cloned from.
Saw the Olsen Twins thumbnail and wondered why it changed but then I remembered that they’re fraternal twins and this is a video about identical twins 😂
scent is another difference, while obviously not detectable by human metrics, dogs will always be able to distinguish between identical twins by scent, they are not fooled by a look-a-like.
I know identical twins...2 sets. I defintely can tell one set apart from each other. The other set i sort of can. They don't dress too much the same and wear different glasses. The other set, one is shorter but they both ened up fat. On recently had weight loss surgery. I, besides their family, was the only one who knew which ine was which. But i also spent a lot of time together too. Both lacked oxygen in the womb and it shows (and that is all i am going to say about that).
My sisters are twins, and our best guess is that they're half-identical. While I have known them literally my entire life, as they're older than me, and they just look different to me, when they were younger and dressed and styled their hair similarly, people who didn't know them as well would confuse them, enough that they swapped places in high school for one class where they disliked the teacher, just to see if he'd notice. (On the first day he'd made them sit on opposite sides of the room.) But they're slightly different heights, they look different (to me at least), and they have opposite handedness (one is right-handed, the other left-handed). Their voices sound different to me, and there are a raft of other differences I can identify. But, for context, I have never been fooled by identical twins in real life; within a day of meeting a set, I can tell them apart effortlessly. In one case, I got to know only one twin because I worked with her, and then one day I randomly encountered her twin, and then rather than confusing her with her sister, I asked her if she had a twin. I'd immediately picked up on differences in her neck, her jaw, and her ears that told me it wasn't my work friend. (And those are just what I remember seeing.)
I’m now curious to know about Siamese twins. Would they have a different finger prints? Different DNA if you sampled skin from different limbs? You got my curiosity running now!
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Twins give greater example of nuture over nature
There's reason for males to be more selective
JMP's interface looks like something from the early 2000....
Man, what a sponsor. Good job, guys!
"you just chose the model that makes the most sense for your data." That is how you get bias right from the start. It's a very slippery slope.
I’m an identical twin, and my twin sister talked to her reflection in a glass door thinking it was me. She was looking for me, and she said something like “There you are!” It was when we were university students. That sometimes pops into my mind and I crack up every time.
She talked to her reflection. What is she, a gorilla?
Yeah, as a non-twin, this is a revelation to me of one of the things you guys need to deal with day-to-day. If I see my own reflection randomly, my reaction doesn't need to factor in the possibility that it's not actually me. Bit of a mindfuck to think about.
That's wild
How high was she
Fun fact: Most identical twins also don't have the same name. This is usually due to environmental factors.
Interesting, could it also be due to cultural factors?
@googlesucks6029 unless i'm missing something, I'm pretty sure this is a joke, and I also may be missing that you're making a very dry continuation of the joke. But if not, most identical twins are raised by their parents, and most parents give their children their own names. Reading that last sentence back, it sounds like I'm infantilizing you which I don't mean to do and I apologize if I did.
Hmm…I think more research is needed on this.
I know of one set of twins raised apart that have the same first name. The families did not know they were a twin when they were adopted.
Always at different positions in space as well, environmental factors win for sure.
i’m not convinced jaida didn’t volunteer to host this video just to make fun of her brothers
😂
I remember watching a documentary about schizophrenia years ago, and a couple of people they interviewed for a study was a set of identical brothers...except one developed schizophrenia and had to go on medication and quit his job, and the other didn't (but scaled back his career aspects so he'd have more time to take care of his brother. That's brotherly love right there.)
Jaida is an excellent SciShow host-both crystal clear and animated.
Agreed, she makes everything more interesting to me.👍
I wonder if she wants to move to wyoming permanently?
And by wyoming, I mean montana. I'm in colorado, you'd think my brain would have figured this out by now.
@@CityTropesHank Green? He's still the executive producer, as listed in the credits.
@@JesseJames_37 thanks for clarifying. I see him in VlogBrothers videos, but prefer him on SciShow channel... I looked it up and i didn't know he was involved in so many channels, no wonder he doesn't have time to host. Other SciShow hosts are also likable, don't get me wrong :)
My phone's face unlock can finally tell my twin and I apart. Voice recognition still can't but it's progress.
Edit: We're also mirror twins. I'm the lefty, but the funny part is how we can only arch one eyebrow independently, the opposite eyebrow. Also the opposite side of our lips can curl independently.
Wild. Don't have a twin but I never heard anyone else to only be able to arch and curl their lip on one side before. I can only do those, plus the vulcan hand salute, on the left side and its interesting that others might have that issue as well.
Fascinating. 😊
my phone cant. Luckil I trust my brother.
@@MrPhelan1979 what OS? Mine just started after the latest android update
You can teach yourself to lift the opposite eyebrow. It takes a couple weeks, but then you'll be unstoppable!
As an identical twin, hearing your brother was talking to himself in a mirror makes me feel better- one day at work I walked past a huge floor-length wall mirror and, even though my twin wasn't even in the same *state*, I froze and was incredibly confused for several long seconds.
I only knew about the fingerprints, neat! I knew we shared the same pattern categories on each finger (except for I think a single one is different on us), but it's cool to know that's the case for all twins.
I guess I kind of suspected the food preferences, since our friends in high school used to enjoy making lists of food one twin felt incredibly negatively towards that the other twin was over the moon for. I didn't know our microbiomes could affect our food preferences! The same house and same womb still leading to different environmental differences also explains how even our shared food intolerances affect us both very differently!
I almost turned out left-handed until my parents gentley coaxed me to use my right hand more (they figured it'd be easier in life for me if I was right-handed) while my twin continues to be right-handed with the world's most immaculate handwriting, and I am right-handed with doctor's handwriting, and I'm convinced we're mirror twins in many ways. When our baby teeth started to come out, it was kind of hilarious that we'd lose the exact same tooth at roughly the same time- but on opposite sides of our mouths!
Medical conditions are the big difference between me and my brother.
He has heart issues, joint issues, digestive issues and low blood pressure while all I have is high blood pressure.
Doctors are really confused in the blood pressure one.
I got Typ 1 Diabetes with 40. My brother got it 3 years later :(
It almost sounds like a connective tissue disorder that he has, but if you're also confirmed identical twins, then it'd have to be an epigenetic one, which would be super interesting to researchers.
But that would easily explain the difference in blood pressure. Connective tissue disorders frequently have low blood pressure.
Doesn't have to be epigenetic right? DNA isn't necessarily entirely identical. Even says so in the video.
@@Rose01bloomIt is still most likely epigentics, since that is how mutations or damaged DNA gets repaired. The mutations had to have occurred post fertilization. In other words, the two embryos can start to be genetically different only because of something in the environment ( in utero, post partum, …) and the damage doesn’t get recognized by the repair system, a large part of which involves epigenetics, ( e.g. chromatin regulation, expression of DNA repair genes…).
@@steggopotamus Yeah, that list made me think of this, too.
Might be worth getting tested for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. There are 13 types of EDS and the only one that doesn't have a genetic test yet is hypermobile EDS. But there are clinical tests for that, too. But either or both of them might want to get evaluated for EDS and other connective tissue disorders. Not all doctors know what to look for, and if the other twin turns out to have more subtle presentation, it would still be worth knowing about, so that any trends in the direction of less subtle can be better identified and addressed.
The answer is literally chaos theory. In complex systems you can start with the same initial conditions but the tiniest fluctuations are amplified by the feedback loops of the dynamic system.
Exactly
Ah yes, the twin two-body problem version of the more-well-known three-body problem.
This is often called the "butterfly effect". See the Wikipedia article.
That part isn't the weird wart in my mind, as like you said it's pretty logical that over time small changed build up. The stranger thing are cases like the "Jim Twins" where similarities appear despite completely independent upbringings.
There's probably a better source of information on those twins, but here's one: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Bouchard_Jr.
@@bhami or "The 3 Body" problem... which gets worse as you add more bodies.
Speaking to a mirror believing it to be your twin is the best laugh I've had in a while "Why are you copying me? HOW are you copying me?! Stop that!" LOL
I believe what you meant to say was, "One of my brothers likes chocolate and the other is wrong."
this. 5 bucks the other one is just choosing to not like chocolate, just to be a little different. cuz who doesn't at least like chocolate?
I've got an aunt who is pretty indifferent about it, but we still love her even if we're not really convinced that she's related to her chocoholic little sister, my mom and me - it leaves more candy for us!
The brother that doesn't like chocolate: he's the evil twin.
It must be true
Lol, I was just about to say that, if the brother that doesn't like chocolate also doesn't like cornbread, then that's all the proof we need that he's the evil twin.
The brother who likes asparagus: he's the evil twin. :--P
You mean, the brother who isn't a fan? I'm kind of hoping that neither are a fan. It would be odd to tell people, "This is my brother, who is a human. And here is his twin, who's a household appliance. Please don't ask."
@@NotSoMuchFrankly What about chocolate covered asparagus?
My identical boys call each other ugly😂😂
That’s … kinda chill, I like it
I had friends who were twins as kids who would do that. All our friends and I were always very confused why they both thought that was a good comeback lol
Mine too
1 - Fingerprints
2 - Height and weight
3 - Food preferences and microbiomes
4 - Dominant hand
5 - DNA due to inevitable mutations
Heroe!
Attention spans are so short these days that we make these comments so people can click on the video, read this and leave.
@@brandon8900 Videos are often padded to make them longer so it keeps people watching the video longer for the algorithm. This video could honestly have been 1-2 minutes and contained the same info.
As an identical twin, the concept of “reared apart twins” makes me want ugly cry
same, dont want to imagine what it would be like without my best friend
Makes my heart hurt
Look for the documentary “Identical Strangers.” I won’t give anything away other than it is related to that topic.
It's even more disturbing when you find out some identical twins in the past were _purposefully_ separated by some unethical researchers to conduct research.
@@StunBuns Very few identical twins were separated for experimental and observational purposes. The data mostly comes from twins who were first orphaned (usually by war) then separated by adoption agencies who believed no one would accept the burden of two babies. In developed countries the practice ended in the 1950's.
My mom's a nurse, and when I was a kid, she took care of a boy who was a twin. He had some kind of serious condition from birth and his twin did not. It greatly surprised me at the time to learn that they were identical twins, since they looked and behaved vastly differently as a result of the one kid's condition.
On the baby photo thing, though, that's just a sibling thing in many cases. My youngest sister and I have trouble telling whose baby photos are whose because we looked so similar as kids, and we have been mistaken for twins a few times as adults now that the six years separating us aren't as obvious.
My younger brother and my uncle (our mom’s brother) looked very similar as babies, so much so that when my brother was about 4 or 5 he misidentified a baby photo of my uncle as a photo of himself.
I'm a twin. If I was out with my twin sister and our older sister, (as adults) we would be, occasionally, mistaken for triplets.
@@LGW27it seems like your parents found the prefect baby recipe when they got their first child, and then they hit copy/paste after that 😛
People thought my younger sister and I were twins when we were young, we're only 22 months apart. Now she's several inches taller than me, and it's very clear we aren't twins lol.
My first love and her sister looked so similar that they were usually mistaken for identical twins when sitting down quietly, but never when standing up, talking, or moving around. Her sister was 4 years older but almost 9 inches shorter. Their voices and personalities (INFJ vs ESTJ) were also very different.
It actually makes sense that the identical twins might not be able to tell themselves apart sometimes: they have a lot less practice than their friends and family, because most of the time they see only the other one.
With a some friends that are twins, one got quite severely ill when young and it effected their immunity for life, from that point their growth deviated. Whilst their faces and frames are near identical for their relative size there's is 3 inches difference in their height. It's like you copied an image and scaled it few percent.
Wonder if this shows how we non-twins could develop differently based on some minor difference in environment (even being raised by the same parents).
Or how a single different decision leads to entirely different development than we would have had in an alternate timeline.
Oh my twin uncles were identical as kids, but since they lead different lives they're different amounts of fat and lost hair at different rates. But one example I'd point to for differences in twins is that conjoined twin duo that had all those TV specials about them, the two girls, Abby and Brittany Hensel. Clearly, they were identical when they were born. However one of them had a health scare, and now she's not as tall because of an issue with her neck and spine. Everything else about their lives has been the same, but random chance left them holding themselves differently.
As an identical twin: My brother can unlock my phone with his finger print AND his face.
Me and my sister tried this and we can't with our finger prints. We're not fully sure if we're identical or not. This is interesting... other identical twins who see this.. can you open each other's phones with biometrics?
@@dollyraestar7624 ive tested face recognition (it couldnt tell), but I havent checked fingerprints.
@@dollyraestar7624Ahha! So ideally one uses FaceID and the other sticks with TouchID, solved!
@@dollyraestar7624 It's hit and miss with my brother and I. It doesn't always work, but we can unlock eachothers phones with the biometrics. Weirdly though he has a higher success rate unlocking my phone than I do with his phone. But then again I know his pass-code pattern anyway lol.
I believe you, so can mine.
Yup, twin identicalness is...really interesting. A pair of twins in my high school were of course similar, but were easily distinguishable. They had a different jawline and voice, let alone mannerisms, personality, and preferences. I kinda felt bad for them, cuz they couldn't pull off the twin swap tricks. Meanwhile, I eventually knew a pair of twins in college....though it took me more than a year to realize there were two of them. One had similar classes, one lived near me. I was so confused at how they would get to places so quickly...until one of them dyed their hair and it was obvious that it was two people. They were so similar. I'm not surprised they intentionally stayed away from each other.
I dated an identical twin for a few months between high school and college; they were purposely not identical (different haircuts and glasses frames, plus they had somewhat different taste in clothes) so I never really had to look for the little ways to tell them apart.
keep in mind most twins aren't identical. Fraternal Twins are about twice as common as identical twins. People tend to forget this because the media tends to ignore fraternal twins unless they're opposite genders in which case they're almost always portrayed as if the gender is the only difference and are otherwise fraternal, because fraternal twins being basically normal siblings that just were born at around the same time is just less striking
Thats interesting. But there are many non-identical twins and they are typically just like siblings in a family having the same age
My twin sister and I did our best to look different from each other. We had a deal with each other starting in the 3rd grade. I wore my hair short and she wore hers long. We both wore very different clothing styles. I wore eyeglasses. She didn't need them.
We never wanted to trick people, except Mom. She was never tricked, even with her back turned away.
@@AncientWildTV
Two of my aunts are fraternal twins. In their youth, one had brown hair and eyes. The other had red hair and blue eyes. The brown haired one was 4 inches taller. My Mom with blonde hair and hazel eyes would be confused for one of the twins along with the red-headed one. My Mom was about 12 years older.
Jaida is GREAT, please keep her as a host! (and more fish vids!!)
We had twin teachers in middle and high school. They never married, lived together and were very difficult to tell apart. But in time we got very good at recognizing each one. One of them had a slightly more rounded face and would laugh more often and louder. The other was a bit more quiet and serious.
I had identical twin student teachers my junior year in high school. One taught Spanish, the other Math. None of the students knew ahead of time and they started the same day, so we went from one class to the next and did a double take. For a few minutes in the second class, I just sat there confused as she introduced herself as Miss M__. After 10 minutes, one of the braver kids raised his hand and asked "are you student teaching 2 subjects?" and she laughed and explained her twin status.
I always felt sorry for such twins. It feels messed up.
My twin sister and I live separate lives. I have a husband and son. I would have missed out on that. Many times, we have lived in different states. We are living in the same town at the moment, though.
I married a widower who had twins. They were in first grade when I met them, and had the same haircut. It took me about a month of constant exposure to be sure I was addressing the right one if they were standing still. About 4 months to tell them apart at a distance or in motion. Then they ceased to look alike to me, and the subtle differences seemed obvious. Then they became massively tall teenagers, and even their dad is occasionally messing up names now, and it is SO HARD to know who's who in older pictures! I have to drag up my old comparison points or rely on my memory of which twin liked that shirt or did that activity. It's wild.
Jade's Brother: IT WAS ONE TIME!
😂🤣
When I first started teaching in elementary school I had a pair of identical twins. Their appearance might have been the same, but there was an intangible difference so that one struck me as prettier than the other. They got similar grades, but for different reasons. In writing a story, A was creative and interesting, though she made spelling and structural errors, while B wrote precisely and without error but was boring. In math, A could figure out word problems and concepts, though she made errors in computation. B's computational skills were outstanding, but learning new concepts required effort. They were both B students, but for very different reasons.
0:51 meme right there!
Me, as an identical twin clicked as soon as possible
Literally same
Same
Same
Literally same
I'm not, but I sent it to a friend who is. We are taking genomic science together now. Also clicked as soon as possible
As a sibling of identical twins, I believe I have a heightened ability to tell twins apart. To me, all identical twins have easily distinguishable features that make them look obviously different. I’m also the only person in my family that can tell the twins apart in photos (including the twins). Has there been a study done on this potential phenomenon? Are there other siblings of twins that feel they have the same skill?
My sister has always been able to easily tell our younger twin sisters apart but I (the oldest) have always struggled.
I was forced to read a book in middle school whose plot relied on a clone character having the same fingerprints as his genetic donor. I happened to already know that twins don't have identical fingerprints, so it fully broke my immersion.
They're not technically identical but they're so close that a human analyst for a crime lab wouldn't be able to tell them apart so unless your book was science fiction and an AI couldn't tell them apart then the immersion shouldn't have been broken.
When people ask which one is my identical twin brother and which one is me in our old baby pictures I just say I cannot differentiate between twins. They give me a look but it's the truth 😂
I can't differentiate between babies
As an identical twin, I feel that I have been blessed with something extremely rare. This is a bond that very few people experience in their lives. The fact that identical twins get split up shows a lack of understanding of the situation, and a cruelty that I cannot describe. Experiencing life with my twin is a privilege that not many understand, and if it is broken is one of the most cruel and horrendous crimes I can imagine. This is a bond which non-twins will never understand.
I was the second twin and I was born breached. I came out blue.
I outweighed my sister by a pound. We were 5 weeks premature.
I was often ill in my preschool years. I still ended up being about 3 inches taller.
We were both seriously allergic to milk at a time when that was generally unknown (1967). Soy milk was a new product and it took seeing 6 specialists to get it. So it wasn't a great start in life.
I'm right handed. My sister is ambidextrous.
There are more than 2 types of twinning. For example, an egg can split and be fertilized by separate sperm. They would have the same genes from Mom and different genes from Dad.
Thanks for sharing! And I never knew about that kind of twins, that's interesting
I learned about that kind of twins from SciShow I think, and have since wondered if my twin and I might be that sort, as the doctors weren't sure if we were identical. I'm also the second twin, but am and (almost) always have been smaller. It's interesting to hear it doesn't always work that way. Make sense, as these thing don't always go typically. We were both also allergic to milk and (in the early 80s) it was still almost unknown and took ages and Mum's tenacity to get us on soy instead. Interesting to connect momentarily with another twin who went through that particular early challenge (all the more so, from the sound of it).
@@dollyraestar7624
Thanks for sharing. I know so few twins, personally. It's interesting to note commonalities.
Fun fact: When your twin goes for a haircut, your hair doesn't automatically cut itself.
I have a fraternal twin and we have rhyming names, if we were identical it would suck. Also interesting my twin is shorter and gets sick more than me
Oh our parents made a point of naming us completely different names. By pure coincidence our names ended up being etymologically similar.
Pichael?
@@JoaoPessoa86 ooh could you explain the names & etymologies?
@@drpeppperdevil they somehow both meant the same thing from difrent root languages, one via latin the other via germanic
That's not interesting at all. You're no more alike than any other pair of siblings except that you're the same age.
I can't believe her brother actually failed the mirror test
I remember a new friend of mine in 5th grade. We had the same class. I was new to the area. He seemed really well-known and well-liked, at least in our class. Just remember him being a super-fun guy to be around, and what he looked like. Normal height for our age, slightly stocky, short blonde hair.
His place was on the way to school. He mentioned I could come over.
So one day I showed up, knocked, waited. Then the door opened. There he was. I remember there being a brief, slightly odd pause, as if he didn't recognize me. I said "Hey Brandon, what's up" or something like that. Then he just left the door open, and walked away. I was left standing at the door like ...uhhh ok ...
After what felt like an eternity (it was probably more like 15 seconds), my friend came running up to the door, from a stairway on the right, which turned out to go to their basement (just remembering details). "Oh hey man! come in".
I was seriously thrown off for a second. I'm sure he knew immediately by my reaction. The funny part I remember is him not caring or giving it hardly any attention, we're all downstairs and he says "oh ya that's my twin", or something like that. Then goes right back to talking about whatever he was saying before. Lol, I obviously had absolutely no idea. I think I remember there being another friend down there already. Dunno, it was a while ago.
In hindsight, he was a clever guy and probably thought it'd be funny to play it off that way.
Regardless, he was pretty sociable; and yet I hardly ever saw his brother. Even at their place. I got the impression he was extroverted and his twin wasn't. Could just be they had different friend groups. Don't know, but this video reminded me of him. I didn't know them very long. They may have been ended up completely different than what I remember.
Too bad we moved so much. This was before the internet was common. I moved and lost contact with him. Ah well, *shrug
My question here is can you tell yourself apart from your brothers in baby pictures? The only way I can tell which kid is in a baby photo is to look at the date of it (or if it's at home, which house it is). You don't need to be identical twins to look the same as babies.
As a mom, that is embarrassingly true...
@@katinapac-baez5083I am so glad to hear.Mom say this because I hear so many people say things like they look so much like you or they have so in sow's eyes or whatever and it's like they just look like a baby😂😂
There are only a few baby appearance templates.
(Made-up fact, but it seems like it!)
My boys are a liiittle over a year apart (so not twins). Now as teens they have settled into the oldest looking like my husband and the younger is a dead ringer for my dad, however as babies, they kinda kept switching back and forth. Sometimes people would ask if they were twins, then there'd be a growth spurt and look a different enough that people thought they were just friends. Rinse, repeat for maybe 2 years.
@@katinapac-baez5083 My cousin's daughters are about a year apart and she used to dress them alike sometimes (mostly for holidays/special occasions so she could put them in cute matching dresses). When they were toddlers/preschoolers she probably had a lot of people assuming they were fraternal twins.
If a fertilized egg is a person, should identical twins get half a vote? (Just kidding.)
Mirror handed twins would be awesome tag-teams in the WWE
My favorite twin fact is there is such a thing as “mirror twins”. It happens when that one zygote splits and instead of splitting into to an exact image. It splits into an exact reflection. I’m a photographer and did a session with mirror twins. I face swapped (taking the face in one photo and adding it on top of another usually to get a photo with everyone looking and smiling at the camera) an image and mirrored the face I was swapping in. I was very diligent to keep the right faces on the kids to make sure I respected them properly. Mom reached out and said I switched the face swap up. I insured I didn’t but mentioned how I mirrored the face and she told me about this phenomenon! One twin has a mole on the right side of her body and for the other it’s on the left in the exact same position. SUPER cool if you ask me!
Jaida is so good!! Love her hosting
I'm a fraternal twin and I can't even identify which of us is which in baby photos lol. Though past that point it starts to get pretty obvious.
And this is why "clones are perfect replicas" is false as well. I was pleased to see the Clone Wars series actually go into the individuality of clones more.
😊You are a shiny human , I really like your episodes and fish channel, thankyou!
well presented with honest easy to understand info
I have triplets-two identical and one fraternal. It's always interesting to see how viruses affect them-the identical two usually have the same symptoms at the same time, while the timing and symptoms of the fraternal triplet are always different.
5:50 The Bryan Brothers -- the best Men's tennis doubles team in history comprises one lefty and one righty who are both identical twins. Also, one is an inch taller, and after watching this, I'd bet the taller was born first.
One of the more interesting examples of differences between identical twins is with the band Steam Powered Giraffe. Two of the members are monozygotic twins, but one is a cis male and the other is a trans woman. So, even something as deep-rooted as gender isn't identical.
(Great band, btw. I'd recommend checking out their music)
Oh wow, thats fascinating. Really makes me wonder about the biology of gender identity.
Even further than that, there ARE reported cases of monozygote twins being assigned different sexes at birth!
0:25 this same thing happened to me today in reverse. My friends and I were out shopping and her twin sister was there. She walked to the end of an aisle and started doing a little dance, in front of what she thought was a mirror, but it was just her sister doing the same dance as her. To be fair there are a lot of mirrors in that store tho
My sister is 2 years older than me. She ran finger prints when in university and it came back as me. How lol
Senior year I got to know a set of twins the Prathers, they looked so similar that I often confused the two of them. But after a few years of knowing them, one of them dated one of my best friends, and the years caught up I could easily tell them apart just by face shape lol. They were identical but they carried themselves differently at all times, Heather was always much more quiet and reserved while her sister Ashley was easily excitable and a party girl. They were great friends of mine who I miss dearly, the years drifted us apart but the memories last forever
Starting at 7 I went through most of my schooling with twin brothers who didn't look like twins so I was surprised to hear they looked identical until a couple years prior when their facial features started developing differently.
There used to be a pair of identical twin brothers in our town who married identical twin sisters. They ran a grocery store and even into their sixties I could not tell them apart. Their families occupied a duplex. It wasn't surprising their kids looked very similar.
Mine and my twins thumb prints are close enough that we can actually unlock eachothers phones which is wild. Also looks like we were born the wrong way around lol. I, the lighter smaller baby, was born first.
I'm an identical twin. I have talked to a lot of mirrors, often in a store. I randomly have days where I think I look more like my twin than myself when I look in a mirror, usually because of an expression on my face. When I was born, I had a lot less blood than my twin. I was very pale. She was very red because she had too much blood. As an adult, I am chronically ill with an autoimmune disease. My twin is healthy. She talks to her doctors about my medical problems because she is at higher risk. She has never had any of the life threatening or life debilitating problems that I have.
My sister and I are years apart. Our own mother couldn't tell our baby photos apart except for the backgrounds and clothes. Until we hit puberty, age matched photos we look like twins. Then we rapidly diverged.
1:32 Well, there goes my plans for the weekend...
Abby and Brittany Hensel are conjoined twins and are different in height, have different food preferences, have different pain tolerances, and have gotten sick at different times. Of the 3 sets of identical twins I know, I can always tell them apart. Their faces are different enough to recognize them.
Growing up I knew two sets of twins. I could see how "they look identical" but I could always tell the difference between them.
"when you crave a certain food, thats your gut buddies telling you what they want" mine: CHEESE CHEESE CHEESE CHEESE CHEESE
There are a lot of twins in my family, but only my grandfather and his brother were identical. They had very similar taste in general, to the point where they bought and wore the same clothes for most of their lives, and even bought the same car accidentally one time.
The other fun thing about this is that my mom and aunt and their cousins are genetically half-siblings, and boy do they all look it. One of my brothers (they are fraternal twins) also looks just like our grandfather and his twin.
I’m an identical twin and I feel like my brother and I are a good example of how different identical twins can be. We were monochorionic (shared a placenta, can’t remember if we shared an amniotic sac), he was born head first and I was a breach baby. I have always been bigger, which allegedly in part is due to my brother’s more, I suppose severe, scoliosis (he never needed a back brace or anything, his spine was just more twisted than mine as mine was/is pretty negligible), so we’ve always had a noticeable height difference. He’s had issues with nutrition in the past (temporary gluten intolerance, was thought at one point to be celiac disease but it went away), but I never have, but I am sensitive to caffeine and he isn’t. Even beyond genetics we have some strong differences. We have a lot of similarities and things in common too, but I’ve always found it interesting how different we are politically (I’ve always been fairly left wing, he’s more right wing than I am but I don’t know if I’d say he’s fully right of centre, I’m honestly not sure) despite having grown up in the same household our entire lives. I suppose it’s an example of how the internet can shape who you are as a person, as that’s one of the only things I can think of that would be different is what we would separately see that would shape our views (also this is something I still feel with what he talks about today), but also I’ve always had mental health struggles with depression and anxiety my entire life, and I have hyper empathy, so I feel like those could be contributing factors too.
Edit: I made it to the food preferences part and it reminds me, my brother loves spicy food, and I can’t stand it. I have a very white tolerance to heat/spice (because I’m white), but my brother loves spice/heat that I would find painful and unenjoyable. Related side note on spice, I took a tiny bite of a spicy shrimp at an Indian restaurant a few years ago, and it gave me an asthma attack. Also my brother doesn’t have asthma, there’s another difference.
There was a pair of twins in my school who kept saying they were identical but they looked nothing alike, even when the one twin didn’t dye her hair. It was weird and no body believed them. But they were definitely different as different could be personality wise
As a (probably) identical twin, this was an excellent twin video. Thanks again SciShow!
Dogs have no more trouble smell'stinguishing two identical twins who've never spent a day apart than they do telling the difference between a strip of bacon and a desk lamp.
My identical twin and I swapped finger print scanned tickets at universal and the machine was fooled
My brother and I go to Twins Days in Twinsberg every year to participate in studies like the one you mentioned! As we've gotten older we've grown less identical (the big one is he grew out his beard and i didn't) but we're still pretty alike!
I have two months old identical twin, they don’t even have the same sleep patterns but they do share the same level of annoyance.
I can spot mental differences in twins such as likes & dislikes, preferences for particular gestures & mannerisms, and the type of people they prefer to be around.
Most fingerprint readers on phones and laptops have enough variability built into them that twins will most likely open the phone/laptop anyway.
Twin here. Strangely, my twin is both taller and heavier than I, but also the one that got sick more. I have always been extremely healthy, while my twin has always gotten sick and/or injured much easier than I did, even from birth where they had to stay at the hospital for a few days after we were born, but I was fine.
Are the twins on the thumbnail AI generated or am I tripping?
I literally clicked on to see if anyone else thought this
It's got that AI look about it. Can only hope SciShow would know better ;(
My sister-in-law has a niece who has identical twin daughters. While very similar, one is right-hand dominant while the other is left-hand dominant.
Jaida is so great!!
Loved the First thumbnail more :)
I once looked at photo with identical twins and the difference in height was staggering. ...until I've realised one of them had heels.
My best friends in elementary were identical twins, and the only way I ever found to tell them apart was height. The elder girl was slightly shorter (about a cm). It was easiest to tell them apart when I was between their heights, but they had a growth spurt and ended up slightly taller than me, but twin 1 was still the shorter sister.
As a parent of identical twins. I remember that on the old foto's THEN I could immediately say who's who. But after many years the tiny items that differentiate seem to get forgotten. And I now have a hard time to see who's who on the old pics.
I have absolutely no trouble identifying my twin sisters in baby photos. But I imagine that’s because I could consistency see both of them at the same time, whereas they could only ever see their sibling. (I don’t think looking in a mirror together on occasion would make a difference.) I am also usually able to identify them on the phone unless it’s a single word said in an atypical manner.
I had a coworker who was an identical twin, but one started losing his hair while the other kept his for longer. One was also noticeably plumper than the other.
One way twins are different from each other is that they must inhabit separate space from each other
there was a pair of identical twins in my secondary school. one of them was deaf from birth, and had a noticeable lisp/'deaf accent', and the other was fully-hearing.
i also have twin cousins; they're fraternal (one blonde, one brunette) but if you saw them, you'd think they were identical and one of them used hair dye. very much confused me as a kid
Very interesting. Do you think you'll do an episode about one twin absorbing the other in the womb and what can cause that?
A very good example of identical twins being not so identical is: Hank Green vs Muscle Hank
It sounds like your brothers aren't just identical twins, but mirror twins, which is a rare subset that can lead to opposite handedness and other related bilateral effects like glasses prescriptions.
Identical twins answer 1 interesting Sci-fi question for me. Your clone is not you! well not in the long run at least
Not to mention that an identical twin is the closest thing to a true clone that we will ever have. A cloned embryo made in a lab will develop in different womb conditions, have different diets, different environmental conditions, different childhood experiences, and will likely grow up in a completely different generation than the person they were cloned from.
Saw the Olsen Twins thumbnail and wondered why it changed but then I remembered that they’re fraternal twins and this is a video about identical twins 😂
My Aunt Verla tells about people asking, when they learned that she and Dad were twins, "are you identical?"
Reason 1: they occupy different locations in space
I used to be a Fingerprint Examiner, and while yes there *are* differences, they are very similar, and hard to distinguish from each other.
scent is another difference, while obviously not detectable by human metrics, dogs will always be able to distinguish between identical twins by scent, they are not fooled by a look-a-like.
It’s really cool that we can now see the difference because of advances in science
I know identical twins...2 sets. I defintely can tell one set apart from each other. The other set i sort of can. They don't dress too much the same and wear different glasses. The other set, one is shorter but they both ened up fat. On recently had weight loss surgery. I, besides their family, was the only one who knew which ine was which. But i also spent a lot of time together too. Both lacked oxygen in the womb and it shows (and that is all i am going to say about that).
"The other? Isn't a fan." - Ah, so that's the evil twin.
Oh I like Jaida! 😊
In fairness to her brothers, I doubt most people could reliably pick themselves out of a lineup of similar babies, without twins being involved.
My sisters are twins, and our best guess is that they're half-identical. While I have known them literally my entire life, as they're older than me, and they just look different to me, when they were younger and dressed and styled their hair similarly, people who didn't know them as well would confuse them, enough that they swapped places in high school for one class where they disliked the teacher, just to see if he'd notice. (On the first day he'd made them sit on opposite sides of the room.)
But they're slightly different heights, they look different (to me at least), and they have opposite handedness (one is right-handed, the other left-handed). Their voices sound different to me, and there are a raft of other differences I can identify.
But, for context, I have never been fooled by identical twins in real life; within a day of meeting a set, I can tell them apart effortlessly. In one case, I got to know only one twin because I worked with her, and then one day I randomly encountered her twin, and then rather than confusing her with her sister, I asked her if she had a twin. I'd immediately picked up on differences in her neck, her jaw, and her ears that told me it wasn't my work friend. (And those are just what I remember seeing.)
Another factor in twin size is the umbilical cord. My mother's umbilical cord went from her, to me, and then to my twin. I was born larger.
I’m now curious to know about Siamese twins. Would they have a different finger prints? Different DNA if you sampled skin from different limbs? You got my curiosity running now!