ladbible logo

To make sure you never miss out on your favourite NEW stories, we're happy to send you some reminders

Click 'OK' then 'Allow' to enable notifications

Conjoined Twin Sisters Explain How They Drive A Car

Conjoined Twin Sisters Explain How They Drive A Car

They have learned to intricately coordinate their actions.

Mark McGowan

Mark McGowan

Anyone with a sibling will know the feeling that, as kids, you did everything together. Wearing the same clothes, playing the same sports, going to school together...

But imagine a world in which you were forced to do that all the time, long after you were too old to be wearing matching outfits. That's the world that Brittany and Abby Hensel, a pair of conjoined twins from Minnesota in the United States inhabit.

They've been minorly famous for a couple of years - they even had their own reality show on American telly - and now they have seemingly reached new heights in their lives attached to one another. They can drive a car. That's right: they can drive a car, in tandem.

Credit: TLC/Abby & Brittany

"We have two licences and when we got our driver's licence we each had to take the test and we both passed," said Brittany, the left twin in an interview with Naked Stories. "When we drive Abby is control of the gas and the brakes and we both steer, and I'm in charge of the blinker [indicator]."

Credit: Naked Stories

"I think we're good drivers!" said the girls in chorus.

The pair are totally independent of each other and have learned to intricately coordinate their actions to allow them to live relatively normal lives: they learned to crawl together, then to walk, then to swim and now to drive a car.

They share some internal organs - their reproductive system, parts of their digestive system such as their liver and their large intestine - but both have individual hearts, spines, lungs and stomachs.

This can have some very unusual effects on their physiology, as one can have a stomach ache and the other not, but with the pain occurring in the other twin. Brittany can only feel things on her right-hand side, while Abby only feels on the left.

Credit: Naked Stories

They walk with one set of legs and have two arms, but two heads, two brains and, of course, two personalities.

That said, they have spent so long together - their whole lives, of course - that they can finish each others' sentences when talking.

Doctors decided that it would be too dangerous to separate them when they were babies and thus they were raised conjoined. Now 27, they have graduated from college with degrees in teaching and have featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, The Learning Channel and their own show.

Featured Image Credit: Naked Stories

Topics: Twins, US