One indeed gets no hint of any depths unless one ceases to test the twins, to regard them as ‘subjects’. One must lay aside the urge to limit and test, and get to know the twins - observe them, openly, quietly, without presuppositions, but with a full and sympathetic phenomenological openness, as they live and think and interact quietly, pursuing their own lives, spontaneously, in their singular way. Then one finds there is something exceedingly mysterious at work, powers and depths of a perhaps fundamental sort, which I have not been able to ‘solve’ in the eighteen years that i have known them.
Oliver Sacks on the autistic twins John and Michael of the 1950s-60s with reference to observational rather than experimental psych assessment.
