i am you and you are me and we are all together

From: Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)

"Some years ago the British Journal of Psychiatry reported the case of a man who believed he had an extra head. It was an objectionable, hectoring presence that plagued him with abuse until, one day, he blew it away with a revolver. Unfortunately, the gun wasn’t seeing double. The face at the end of the barrel was his own.
     [...] His theory was that part of his brain had become functionally detached from the rest and was now semi-autonomous, issuing statements and streams of thought that sometimes mingled with the main flow, and sometimes just bubbled along in parallel. 'I’m neuronally possessed,' he said. It was a creepy thought.
     One body one brain, one brain one mind, one mind one self. That’s the convention. It is disturbing when nature and medical science challenge the prevailing view. I thought of Ron when I heard about Ladan and Laleh Bijani, the Iranian conjoined twins, and the ill-fated surgical efforts to separate them.
     The pictures were riveting. I saw two smiling heads in a single hood, tilted together as if posing affectionately for a photograph; I imagined the shared cranial cavity stuffed with misshapen brain. The images triggered an uncomfortable oscillation in the circuits of my own brain: one person, or two? It was my problem, not theirs. In their minds they were clearly differentiated. Extrovert Ladan the aspiring lawyer; soft-spoken Laleh, the would-be journalist. But then they were joined only at the skull. Their brains, though tightly packed and sharing certain vascular features, were anatomically distinct. For other conjoined twins the picture is less clear. There are rare cases in which areas of brain are fused. One report describes a pair with a single cerebrum and two brainstems converging at the midbrain: in effect, a single brain regulating the behaviour of two partially differentiated bodies. Then there are the extremely rare cases of 'dicephalic parapagus' (one trunk, two heads) and 'diprosopic parapagus' (one trunk, one head, two faces)."— Paul Broks, Prospect Magazine
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