In the past week, on social media apps like TikTok and Youtube there have been multiple mentions of a new podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, in revered and awed tones. In this podcast, the parents of non-verbal autistic children lay out their beliefs that non-speaking autistics are telepathic. Yes, telepathic!
As a parent of 2 autistic children who sometimes have an uncanny intuition, this had to be investigated further.
The Podcast
The podcast is co-hosted by journalist and filmmaker Ky Dickens and psychiatrist Dr Diane Hennacy Powell, and explores the “profound abilities” of people with autism who can't speak. Those abilities, according to Dickens and Dr. Powell, include telepathy, access to infinite knowledge and the power to visit heaven.
They claim to prove this through a series of experiments in which the children correctly guess numbers and words their parents are thinking. Parents on the podcast also share anecdotal evidence of their autistic children reading their minds, with Dickens claiming, "If what the families were saying was true, this research could completely shift our paradigm, how humanity sees itself and consciousness.”
The Telepathy Tapes, which released the first of its 10 episodes in September, even knocked Joe Rogan out of the No. 1 spot on Spotify's podcast chart briefly at the beginning of the year and has remained in the No. 2 spot ever since.
It also has published videos (behind a paywall, of course) claiming to show telepathy in action, where children are able to spell out words and numbers their parent is thinking by pointing at a board held by the mother. For example, in episode one, listeners are introduced to a nonverbal autistic girl from Mexico named Mia, whose telepathic abilities have “100 percent accuracy,” her family says.
Mia's family explains that she can communicate mind-to-mind with her mother, and Dr. Powell leads Mia through a series of exercises to test her mind-reading skills. She is asked to use a letter board to spell out the number or word her mom thinks of and name the correct number or word every time.
According to Dickens, the fact that she could do this in a controlled environment suggests she can read her mother's mind. But, while she had 100% accuracy with her mother, Mia fails to replicate her abilities in tests with her father.
The problem with facilitated communication
According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), facilitated communication is a technique that involves a person with a disability pointing to letters, pictures, or objects on a keyboard or on a communication board, typically with physical support from a "facilitator." This physical support usually occurs on the hand, wrist, elbow, or shoulder or on other parts of the body.
They state that: “It is the position of ASHA that Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used. There is extensive scientific evidence that messages are authored by the "facilitator" rather than the person with a disability. Furthermore, there is extensive evidence of harms related to the use of FC. Information obtained through the use of FC should not be considered as the communication of the person with a disability.”
In a review of Dickens and Powell’s techniques by McGill University's Office for Science and Society, what Dickens witnesses in The Telepathy Tapes are offshoots of facilitated communication, namely Spelling to Communicate (S2C) and the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). Often, the facilitator holds the board up in the air and can, either consciously or subconsciously, move it to make sure the speller points at the right letter or cue the speller in ways they may not be aware of.
According to their review, the video clip of the first episode clearly shows the mom not only holding the letter board in front of Mia but holding Mia’s jaw as Mia points to the board. Mia does spell out “pirata,” Spanish for “pirate,” which is the correct answer, but the mother’s influence cannot be ruled out: move the head and the finger will follow. In a different test, Mia’s mother is touching Mia’s forehead during the spelling, where it would be easy to subtly press down whenever Mia’s finger hovers over the right number.
Another nonverbal autistic participant is Houston. His mom is shown Uno cards and she clearly lines up the board in front of her son’s pencil to make sure he chooses the correct number, as with Mia. Akhil from episode 2 is a stronger case. He uses an iPad to type and the tablet is on the floor. But here again, the word he needs to type is shown to his mother who very noticeably in the video points with her index finger at the iPad keyboard and leans her body in different ways from letter to letter, thus feeding her son clues. (This kind of clueing is well known in facilitated communication and can take many forms.) We are only shown short clips on the site, so it’s impossible to confirm how many hits and misses there were in total.
Dickens is shocked when Powell tells her that these tests wouldn’t be believed by scientists. Indeed, they shouldn’t.
In the Skeptical Inquirer article, The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience, Stuart Vyse breaks down the evidence of facilitated communication in the videos on offer and shows how the parents are guiding their children. Dickens, never questions the veracity of these communications, and like many advocates, she and her guests repeatedly accuse critics of facilitated communication and the letter board methods of ableism and attempting to silence autistic voices.
Vyse asks why these critics are not invited on the program to speak for themselves. They are merely characterized by the believers. All the voices on the podcast are of true believers, and the importance of believing is repeatedly stressed, as is the mantra of facilitated communication, “presume competence,” a hopeful sounding phrase that introduces an explicit bias in favour of belief and against doubt.
We want to believe
For the non-speaking children and adults, the stakes are very high. On the one hand, if they are really the ones speaking, then they deserve to use these methods in school and work settings if they wish. However, if—as the empirical evidence suggests—they are not the ones spelling and typing, then they are being manipulated by others. How often are the non-verbal autistic children and adults who are supposed to be at the center of the story merely incidental to a narrative that is all about the parents and adults.
It would be wonderful if what these people believe were true, and the evidence is so easy to obtain. Given the prejudice and push-back these parents and teachers have endured, which they express quite movingly in The Telepathy Tapes, you might imagine they would leap at the chance to prove that their children and students are the ones communicating, but this has not been the case. They have chosen belief over evidence.
On the Autism Café’s blog, Eileen Lamb sympathises with parents of non-verbal autistic children who want to believe. According to her, it’s not about gullibility; it’s about being human. They want answers. They want something to work. And when science doesn’t have all the answers, the idea of magic can be incredibly tempting.
She says: "We owe it to ourselves—and to our kids—to keep fighting for solutions rooted in evidence. To push for research and progress that can stand up to scrutiny. I understand the need for hope. I do. But hope without truth isn’t hope at all. It’s a distraction."
According to McGill University's Office for Science and Society, the worst part of this story is what is happening to the parents and to their children. It’s easy, and necessary, to highlight what Ky Dickens got wrong in her reporting. It’s harder to place any blame at the foot of the parents of these children. They were told that their child might never speak or have a normal life. Then came along a narrative that flipped the script: their child was actually profoundly special and could communicate in a way they had never thought possible. From being considered disabled, their child was suddenly humanity’s saviour.
Wouldn’t you want to believe that as well?
Read More
The Telepathy Tapes on Spotify
The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience
“The Telepathy Tapes” Podcast: Misguided Hope or Calculated Pseudoscience?
Let’s Talk About The “Telepathy” of Non-Speaking Autistics
Podcast About 'Telepathic' Autistic Children Briefly Knocks Joe Rogan Out Of No. 1 Spot