"The Telepathy Tapes" is Taking America by Storm. But it Has its Roots in Old Autism Controversies.
"The Telepathy Tapes" is a very well-produced podcast. But even the top expert it relies on has her doubts.
The Telepathy Tapes a new podcast by veteran filmmaker Ky Dickens — who has rubbed shoulders with everyone from Elizabeth Banks, who starred in a recent film of hers, and clients like Google, Facebook, and McDonald’s — is taking America by storm.
As of this writing, it ranks third on Spotify’s rankings of American podcasts, just behind “Not Gonna Lie With Kylie Kelce” and “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
On Apple Podcasts, it’s the most popular podcast in the country:
(The most popular podcaster in the country, Joe Rogan, is a fan of it, too.)
As soon as you click play on Episode 1, It's not hard to understand.
“For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms. And nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on this podcast, we do,” Dickens tells us in the first minute.
Across ten episodes, we’re treated to a whirlwind journey through the lives of nonverbal autistic kids — children who cannot reliably speak like neurotypical people do — whose families claim that they can read minds.
Dickens travels all over the country to meet these children and witness their telepathy with her own eyes. She also recruits the psychiatrist Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell to conduct detailed telepathy experiments that her team records through audio and video.
All of it very well produced. If someone told me that I was listening to the latest season of “Serial,” I would have no problem believing them.
That’s why when Dickens and Powell arrive at the case of Mia, the first child profiled in the series, we’re already enthralled. They aren’t just taking people’s word for it — they’re ready to put these claims to test and broadcasting the results to the world.
Mia is a Mexican child, so her test is conducted in Spanish. Like many other nonverbal autistic children, she has never been able to reliably speak.
Instead she uses a process where she spells out her thoughts letter by letter by pointing to letters on a letterboard. This practice is informally referred to as “spelling,” and used by thousands of nonverbal kids worldwide, who are often referred to as “spellers.”
Mia conducts a range of tests with Dickens’s team.
First, they use random number generators to give Mia’s mother Iliana a number to think of. Then Mia, who can’t see the number, is then asked to spell out the number.
Mia gets the answer correct.
In countless additional tests, Mia gets the answer right every time.
The other tests they conduct with Mia go just as well. In another test, Iliana opens up a book to a random page and used that to display Mia’s prowess. Here’s how Dickens describes this test:
When Iliana landed on a page, we’d ask Mia the page number. And she would correctly state the page number that she’d flipped to. Sometimes, we’d point to a word on a page that we had just opened to. And she would correctly spell out the word. We do this a few times, with both Iliana opening up the book and some of the crew opening up the book.
(Remember this description vividly in your mind, we’ll come back to it soon.)
Mia aces the test.
Michael, a colleague of Dickens who she describes as a strict materialist — someone who only believes in the material world and not anything spiritual or religious — is blown away.
“After seeing this, I can’t — it’s hard for me to not believe this is authentic. I’m looking at everything. I’m watching her. I’m watching the mom. I’m watching everything. And from me, my perspective, it’s real,” he tells the audience.
In future episodes, Dickens and Powell visit with spellers from coast to coast, conducting similar tests.
In another test with a young man named Houston who lives in my state of Georgia, they held up Uno cards behind his back that his mother can see but he can’t. Houston nails the assignment. He can identify the number being held up every single time.
To Dickens, these experiences are transformative. She comes to believe that telepathy is real and after the first episode offers no real skepticism towards it at all.
“What I saw in that room twisted my mind and my heart and my soul into a pretzel. My entire worldview was shifted in one afternoon,” she said following the tests with Mia.
And the secret to tapping into this long denied superpower is America’s network of spellers — autistic, nonverbal children who everyone had wrongly believed had severely limited communication skills.
It turns out they were the key to tapping into a much broader collective consciousness, and maybe even speaking to the dead (a topic she gets into later in the series).
There’s one major problem with all this, and it doesn’t start with the telepathy. It starts with the spelling.
The origins of spelling to communicate
The communication technique being used by every single speller who Dickens tests in her series has its origins in something called facilitated communication.
In Episode 8, Dickens briefly explains to the audience the controversies around facilitated communication, but she does not go into detail where the practice comes from.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of educators and therapists who had worked with nonverbal kids with autism and similar disorders started helping them type out their thoughts. This was eventually formalized into a practice called facilitated communication.
The way it works is that a facilitator, usually a therapist or someone close to the child like their parent, holds their arm or wrist or applies some pressure to their shoulder as they tap their thoughts onto a keyboard or similar device.
The practice eventually made its way out of Australia, where it was popularized, and arrived on American shores.
One of the American facilitators who used the practice in decades past was Janyce Boynton, who was trained to use it in 1992.
I interviewed her over email for my piece on spelling that I did back in October, but the best recollection of her experience comes from a journal article that she published in 2012.
In that article, she documented her facilitating with a student named Betsy Wheaton, whose story was later captured in the Frontline documentary “Prisoners of Silence.”
“I passionately believed that, as a facilitator, I could help one of my students break free from her autistic, nonverbal existence,” she explained in the article.
She began to notice that Wheaton was acting out more than normal and even getting violent. She was horrified when Wheaton confirmed her fears by typing out accusations towards her family. She said they were sexually abusing her.
The accusations also horrified the local community. Wheaton was taken away from her family by the local authorities.
But her family was puzzled by the accusations that she had typed out. They hired a specialist named Dr. Howard Shane of Boston Children’s Hospital to try to debunk the messages Betsy had been writing.
He devised what’s called a “double-blind” exam to test the authenticity of the messages.
Wheaton and her facilitator would be shown a series of objects. When they were shown different objects, we could see if Betsy, with the aid of her facilitator, would type out the picture she saw or the one her facilitator saw.
When Boynton participated in the test, she realized she couldn’t get the answers right when she didn’t see the object that the evaluator showed only to Wheaton. Her faith in the entire process was shattered. She wrote in her journal article:
I felt such devastation, panic, pain, loneliness—a myriad of emotions difficult to put into words. The whole [Facilitated Communication] thing unraveled for me that day, and I did not have an explanation for any of it. Almost immediately, I started rationalizing away the truth. Though it was not true, I went away from the testing telling myself that the situation had been hostile, the evaluator had been hostile, everyone had turned against me. Incredibly, I even tried facilitating with the child in the week or two after the testing, resulting in more outrageous and false allegations. The parents, understandably, asked that I no longer work with the child. I felt tremendous loss.
The Wheatons were reunited and Boynton went from a staunch believer in facilitated communication to an ardent critic.
The test that Shane used became commonplace. In dozens of studies, facilitators and their clients failed it.
Without going into detail, Dickens does mention that there were real scandals with facilitated communication in the 1990s. But she chalks the whole thing up to poor training of facilitators.
“Thanks to these awful cases that really uprooted lives, facilitated communication took the blame, not the facilitators,” she laments in Episode 8.
What Dickens doesn’t tell the audience is that to this day, there has not been one study of facilitated communication that has passed the simple double-blind test devised by Shane.
The reason, say critics, is that facilitated communication works through something called the ideomotor effect, a psychological process where people involuntarily move their bodies in response to their thoughts. The effect could explain not only why facilitators were unwittingly authoring these messages but also how people operate devices like Ouija boards.
This is an important point. In my journey through this world, I found few claims that anyone is using these communication processes cynically. Everyone from therapists and facilitators to parents and loved ones really believe that these techniques help nonverbal individuals authentically communicate.
There is no cynicism required because what the studies of facilitated communication ultimately proved was that the facilitators were subconsciously influencing their clients, just like some people have always believed that Ouija boards or dousing rods work.
How were the spellers communicating their telepathy?
Dickens does not give us a ton of detail in the podcast about the various methods the spellers are using to pass the tests she and Powell devise. She mentions, correctly, that the letterboard methods go under different names — common ones today are called Spelling 2 Communicate and Rapid Prompting Method (I dive deeper into them in my October piece.)
But on the podcast’s website, you can see some of the footage they captured of the tests. The podcast was always intended to be a documentary series, and Dickens has paywalled the video clips to help raise money for the documentary.
I paid to access the clips and share them with autism and communication specialists who I interviewed for my previous piece and this one. I can’t post them here without violating Dickens’s copyright, but I will do my best to describe what’s happening in them.
Dickens is correct when she emphasizes in the podcast that in some instances the children are not being physically touched by their parents or facilitator (even if in some instances they clearly are).
To her, this is evidence that this approach is, at least sometimes, completely unimpeachable. Actually, it’s even worse than that.
“When it comes to day-to-day communication, it feels kind of ableist and silly for anyone else to dictate how someone else should be communicating in order to have their words counted,” she tells us in Episode 2.
But there are reasons why we want to make sure that a child’s communication is authentic.
As demonstrated above by Wheaton and Boynton’s story, there can be terrible consequences when we’re not sure that someone’s communication is authentic. And that’s not the worst story out there.
The documentary Tell Them You Love Me, which can now be watched on U.S. Netflix streaming, documents the case of a man being sexually abused by a professor named Anna Stubblefield who used facilitated communication with him to gain his consent. In another case, a woman actually killed her son because she believed that he was typing out that he wanted to die.
Would it have been ableism to question these communication methods and prevent these tragedies? (Stubblefield, the professor who sexually abused a nonverbal man, like Dickens would frequently use social justice language to defend facilitated communication.)
But what actually was happening in the experiments that Dickens shows us?
Let’s look at two examples.
First, with Mia, the website features a video clip where Iliana is conducting the book test with her daughter. Iliana is sitting right next to Mia while the test is being conducted.
She looks at a page in the book and then she puts the book aside. It’s true that there’s no way for Mia to see the book. But then you’ll notice something about how Mia communicates what she thinks is in her mother’s head.
Iliana is grabbing Mia’s face with her entire hand; her palm is cupping Mia’s chin and her thumb is on the side of her face. Iliana’s other hand is holding the letterboard as Mia points to each letter.
Amy Lutz, an historian of disability at the University of Pennsylvania who has written multiple books about autism and disabilities and has a minimally speaking autistic son herself, argued to me in an interview that there were multiple ways Iliana could’ve influenced the answers.
“If Mia’s mom is taking her face and pointing it at a letter while she’s holding the letterboard there, she could be moving the letterboard to meet Mia’s fingers. She could be exerting pressure on the jaw when Mia’s in the vicinity of the right letter. There could be these subtle physical cues,” Lutz, who has spent years analyzing these communication techniques, told me.
Even in cases where the children are not being touched, there are still possible cues that could be guiding them.
When autism and speech specialists advise parents on what kinds of communication techniques they should use, their goal is to give the kids independence — make sure that they can communicate without the help of any partner who could be influencing them through touch, visual cues, or audio cues.
The specialists I interviewed suggested that the video clips posted on the website of The Telepathy Tapes don’t meet this criteria.
For instance, in the case of Houston’s experiment that I described above, his mother is sitting right next to him and holding the letterboard up as he points to the numbers.
“I [noticed] that when she saw the card that said +2, the letterboard drops so that the level of line of text that the son is kind of poking drops. So it could be his finger going to the same spot, the letterboard could be moving,” Lutz noted.
Indeed, if you watch the video, you’ll see the letterboard constantly moving as Houston is typing. This makes it impossible to rule out that his mother’s moving of the board is giving him cueing as to where he should type.
In another test, where Mia is blindfolded and identifies colors that she didn’t directly see but her mother does, you can see her mother holding her hand over her face the entire time. One way to look at this is that it helps make the blindfold extra effective — nothing can be seen. But it’s also a way to deliver subtle pressure that could serve as a cue (and when Mia tells us the color at the end, she’s once again using a letterboard her mother holds up while simultaneously touching her forehead with her other hand.)
It’s worth reiterating that Lutz and other autism specialists who criticize these methods don’t argue that those who deploy them are intentionally trying to trick people. The ideomotor effect is subconscious.
Katharine Beals, an autism researcher at Drexel University and the mother of an autistic child, agreed with Lutz’s view of the tests posted on The Telepathy Tapes website.
She has been documenting facilitated communication and its variants for years and has watched scores of similar videos herself. She is currently serving as an expert witness in a court case involving a student who uses Spelling 2 Communicate, a popular brand of spelling.
“What you see happening generally is that despite the fact that many of these people have been doing this for years, their fingers don’t go straight to the letters,” she explained. “They wander…they wander around the board like they don’t know where they’re going. And then there’s some sort of subtle cue, presumably, that happens that tells them when to stop moving their finger and maybe move it forward toward the board — plus the board may subtly move towards them.”
Lutz suggested that adding a simple step could’ve improved the tests, even if they didn’t go all the way to a double-blind experiment that has been used for years to prove authorship:
As you saw, the mothers were shown something and then their minds were allegedly read by their nonverbal autistic kids who were spelling it out on the letterboard. A lot of these spellers do spell with multiple people. Whether it’s like both parents or a therapist who kind of taught them. All you have to do is bring in a second familiar facilitator and say alright we’re going to show the mom this Uno card, but this teacher is facilitating with you. Or the therapist, or the dad, or somebody else. You just have to separate those two — the [Facilitated Communication] and the telepathy — and see if that holds up. So it would’ve been so easy. You don’t need any extra equipment. You just need like one other third person who is also an experienced speller in the child’s life.
But throughout the podcast, Dickens is dismissive of autism and speech specialists who argue that Spelling 2 Communicate and Rapid Prompting Method are both vulnerable to facilitator influence and fail to prove authorship. She portrays the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) as unreasonable and cowered by stigma for advising therapists not to use these methods.
What she doesn’t tell her audience is that after the initial wave of studies debunking Facilitated Communication, advocates for spelling no longer participate in serious authorship research. They actively refuse to get involved in double-blind studies like the ones that Shane pioneered.
(There is one study advocates for spelling frequently cite that was performed by a University of Virginia academic who used eye-tracking to try to prove authorship but did not conduct a double-blind test.)
There was even an instance where a researcher at the University of Georgia convinced a parent to take part in double-blind testing but then exposure to activists in favor of these communication methods convinced that parent to pull out after the study was conducted, which meant that it could no longer be published.
To this date, there has not been one double-blind study anywhere in the English-speaking world that proves that the clients are the ones actually authoring the messages using any of the current spelling methods like Rapid Prompting Method or Spelling 2 Communicate.
The horse who did mathematics
Is it really possible to nudge human beings — with audio, visual, or physical cues — into typing out messages that you yourself are thinking?
I’m sure some people will watch the videos assembled by The Telepathy Tapes or other documentaries about spelling — Dickens promotes the recent flick Spellers, which was co-produced by activist JB Handley, who is most well-known for his claim that vaccines cause autism — and come away with the impression that seeing is believing. How could that possibly not be legitimate?
But if you’re skeptical that humans can be cued into doing something as complicated as typing, consider the case of a horse.
In the late 19th century, a horse trainer named Wilhelm von Osten regaled audiences in Europe with the talents of his performing horse, who was called Clever Hans.
Hans enthralled onlookers with his talents: he could do everything from simple arithmetic to identifying colors. He would communicate this information with simple movement like hoof taps or by nodding his head.
Prestigious officials set about to try to explain how Clever Hans was doing it. The German board of education conducted testing and came to the conclusion that there were no tricks involved. Maybe Hans really was Clever.
But then a psychologist like Oskar Pfungst got involved in the case. He noticed things like when Hans’s owner stood further away from him, the accuracy of the horse’s responses dropped.
Eventually, he figured out that the horse was actually reading subtle cues being transmitted by Hans’s owner or by others who asked him questions. Even the posture or breathing of a questioner helped guide Hans as to whether he should keep tapping his hoof or whether he should stop.
“Once Pfungst learned to read these barely perceptible cues as good as Hans did, he carried out further tests in which he played the part of the horse,” reads one summary of the examination. “Pfungst asked his subjects to concentrate upon a particular number. Pfungst would then tap out the answers solely by observing the body language of his human subjects. Even more incredible was that the subjects seemed unable to suppress these subtle cues, even when made aware of them.”
Importantly, it’s likely that nobody involved in this scenario knew that they were giving these cues to Hans. The horse had simply learned how to read other people’s body language and give them the answer they knew was correct.
If even a horse can pretend to do arithmetic by reading cues in body language from onlookers, why should we be surprised that humans can tap the correct number when their facilitator is sitting right next to them, giving them a range of audio, visual, or physical cues?
What The Telepathy Tapes doesn’t tell you about nonverbal communication
In the first two minutes of the series, Dickens sets up a playing field for her audience that has a stark binary: on one side is a scientific community that refuses to believe that nonspeakers have any worth at all; the community of spelling advocates, on the other hand, wants to give them the gift of communication.
“For decades, parents of nonspeakers have been told by doctors, educators, and scientists that their kids are not in there. They are not capable of communication or competent of learning,” she says in the first episode.
But this isn’t what the scientific community has said at all. While ASHA and other mainstream speech language groups have warned against the use of the various spelling methods, they have also spent years promoting alternatives.
For my October piece, I covered the use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices and techniques designed to help nonspeakers communicate to the world.
These can include writing, drawing, using gestures or facial expressions, pointing to pictures, or using apps on a tablet. Stephen Hawking, the brilliant scientist, used an AAC device.
Ralf Schlosser, a communication disorders specialist at Northeastern University, told me in that article that what they typically do with a nonspeaking child first is give them what’s called a “feature matching test.”
This test helps them understand the client’s individual needs.
“We look at the characteristics of the child…and then come up with a match. What’s the best match for this child? And that’s how we would select technology for a trial period,” he told me.
The goal of AAC technology is to give nonspeaking individuals an opportunity to communicate in a way that’s best for them. But how they differ from the spelling methods is that they don’t rely on a communication partner who could be guiding them and influencing what’s being communicated.
“When we’re teaching initially, we’re doing some prompting there may very well be also some physical prompting, but as soon as possible, we remove those prompts,” Schlosser explained. “We fade out the physical guidance and the prompting so that really the goal is independent communication.”
It would actually be very hard to meet an autism specialist who would claim there is no way for a nonverbal person to communicate.
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When I interviewed Lutz over video chat — someone who agrees with the scientific consensus about the lack of validity with spelling methods — her own nonverbal autistic son would occasionally come up to her and she would communicate with him right in front of me. She obviously believes that these kids can communicate.
But the difference between the spelling methods and the tools you’ll find in AAC devices is that the spelling methods come with a promise of transforming a child’s vocabulary into that of a well-educated adult in no time flat.
AAC devices tend to allow for simple communication that meets individuals where they are. One common one is the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS), where nonspeakers can use pictures to communicate.
The spelling methods on the other hand, carry with them the promise to transform children who had been diagnosed with severe cognitive impairments into almost overnight scholars.
Take, for instance, the case of Sabrina Guerra. Guerra is a nonspeaking autistic child who in 2023 won Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy’s annual essay contest. That essay, which was posted in full here was typed through the use of spelling methods. It includes the paragraph:
Ableism is a damaging force in society, destroying souls and sowing division. Ableism looms over America’s education system, saturates our medical institutions, and shrouds our media. In my lived experience ableism usurped my right to an equal education.
Out of curiosity, I put her essay through what’s called a readability formula. Teachers use these formulas to figure out what’s age-appropriate for kids. The formula I used said that a text like this would be appropriate for a tenth grader to read. Guerra was just ten years old when she wrote this. She only began typing words in 2021.
If you believe that these spelling methods are authentic communication, you also have to believe that children who had never written anything before are suddenly writing at the level of advanced high schoolers shortly after being taught how to use a letterboard.
Where did they learn how to spell, how to read, how language works in the first place? It takes years of instruction, practice, and assessment to get kids up to speed so that they can read and write at grade level.
The spellers movement has always argued that that the spellers absorb all this information like osmosis — but that they have no way to show it until they’re handed a letterboard. They can never quite explain how this osmosis works.
The Telepathy Tapes completes the circle. The children are taking in all of this knowledge through telepathy. The letterboards are just letting them express it.
A revealing interview with “The Telepathy Tapes’s lead expert
“Dr. Powell seemed smart and ethical and clearly wanted to conduct sound research on this topic,” Dickens tells us in the first episode of the series about the medical and scientific expert she teams up with to conduct the experiments.
My conversation with Powell, which lasted about an hour and a half, led me to agree.
The first part of our conversation covered her scientific background and how it is she got involved in parapyschology issues.
She explained that she had long been interested in savants — people who have amazing skills in one very specific area — as a college student.
Then one day she met a woman at a hospital where she was working who miraculously seemed to know all sorts of things about her, from her husband’s profession to where they would end up moving in a few months.
Although she lost touch with the woman, the impact of this experience on Powell made her a believer in parapsychology.
She came to believe that autistic individuals were the key to understanding telepathy a little more than a decade ago.
What was most promising about telepathy, unlike traditional savant skills, was that she could set up experiments to prove it. She set about to visit with autistic children who would serve as subjects for her experiments, and she eventually caught the attention of Dickens, who wanted to produce a documentary about telepathy among nonspeakers.
To my surprise, the conversation took an interesting turn here that I never expected.
When I raised the criticisms put forward by Lutz and Beale of the methodology used for Mia, she was actually sympathetic to their concerns.
She told me she regularly gets emails from families who use facilitated communication with their nonspeaking autistic children and turns down the opportunity to do her experiments with them because of all of the controversies around this communication method.
“I’d say that until the child is able to type independently, that they couldn’t be a subject in my research,” she told me. “This is controversial enough…it detracts from the phenomenon itself if everybody is talking about that.”
The main subjects captured in the podcast don’t provide what Dr. Powell considers to be the strongest evidence for telepathy.
“Ky has included people in the podcast that she sort of on her own talked with who used [Facilitated Communication] and included them in. And there’s information to be gained there, but that’s not, to me, you’re not going to be proving telepathy if that’s what you’re doing,” she acknowledged. “You need something to be independently typing, and that’s what I’m interested in. And that’s what she has yet to film.”
Dr. Powell said she does know people who could pass an independent typing test, but that they haven’t been included in the podcast yet.
This was a curious revelation to me. Dickens put so much faith in Dr. Powell’s expertise.
And yet here was Dr. Powell telling me that the very first person who convinced Dickens that telepathy was real — the case of the Mexican girl, Mia — didn’t really meet her evidentiary standard she’s aiming for.
“Some of the people like Mia, I would never have included in the documentary. She probably is telepathic…I’m not doubting it, it’s more the visual if you’re trying to convince other people for whom this is just so hard to accept,” she said.
I suggested Lutz’s experiment — where they could give the mother a prompt and then let a facilitator who has not received the prompt help facilitate the spelling — to Dr. Powell and she was actually in complete agreement.
“That’s exactly the kind of experiment…that I wanted to do with Hailey [one of the children Dr. Powell has worked with in the past], because I had two therapists that she was telepathic with,” she said, telling me that the parents thought it would be too confusing at the time.
Dr. Powell also indicated that she wants to do more experiments with non-spelling methods and that she’s done experiments elsewhere like those.
So why did none of this make into season one?
“The way that this started out, she was just getting something that she could then use as a pitch to then get the funding so that we could get a documentary and do it right,” Dr. Powell told me. “Then what happened is after she pitched it to the networks she became concerned that they might try to modify it.”
That isn’t what Dr. Powell envisioned happening.
“My intention was for the initial thing that went public to be the experiments properly done. So in a way the project kind of got away from me,” she said. “But on the other hand it’s created more of a buzz and more of an interest and created more opportunities to have the proper funding.”
Ky Dickens’s response
There are good reasons to not “presume competence,” the mantra of the facilitated communication movement that has been batted about for decades until it ended up in “The Telepathy Tapes,” where Dickens herself tells us many times that we should adhere to it.
I sent Dickens a few questions that included the following scenarios:
You have said on the podcast that doubting the veracity of messages produced by these techniques is ableism. But would Ky trust this method if one of these individuals were to write a will or confess an intention to marry and run away with someone through these methods? Is it really ableist to make sure these individuals are really saying what we think they're saying?
Would it really just be prejudice to dot every I and cross every T in these situations?
Understandably, Dickens was traveling for the holidays when I wrote this and was unable to offer a full interview (I don’t celebrate Christmas, so I’m the odd one working this week).
She did however offer a response to my questions, including the ones above. I’ve included her response in full below:
Dear Zaid,
Thank you for your inquiry and for taking an interest in exploring this important subject in a deep and nuanced way. Diane and I share your desire for greater examination, as this is precisely what Diane hopes to achieve through her goal of establishing a dedicated center to study these phenomena. She is actively working to secure the necessary funding to conduct the rigorous research that this field demands.
About The Telepathy Tapes
The Telepathy Tapes is only the beginning of this conversation. The series reflects my experiences as a filmmaker who has become deeply engaged with families and teachers seeking answers for what appears to be widespread telepathy happening in their classrooms and homes. My role as a storyteller has been to accurately and sensitively convey the experiences, challenges, feelings, and questions presented by the podcast’s subjects. While the podcast was never intended to serve as a rigorous scientific study, I fully agree that the next step is a robust and peer-reviewed scientific inquiry now that these extraordinary capabilities have been presented.
Protecting the Families
As we move forward, respecting and protecting the families involved is of utmost importance. It’s critical that any non-speaking individuals who agree to participate in research communicate as independently as physically able on an AAC device, talker, or iPad to ensure that the rigorous controls are in place. Most importantly, the non-speakers' consent is essential, and creating a safe, supportive environment is imperative—one that minimizes psychological stress and honors their unique needs. Logistical challenges, such as travel, time away from home, parental work obligations, and balancing caregiving responsibilities, also require thoughtful consideration.
Verification of Spelling and Communication
Your concern about verifying the spellers’ words is an important one, and I share it. Everyone involved in The Telepathy Tapes is dedicated to ensuring that spellers are communicating their own thoughts and words. Verifying spellers’ words and ensuring there is no influence when communicating via a letter board or talker is a value shared by every parent, teacher, and therapist I’ve interviewed for my project.. Most who work with spellers go through great pains to ensure their words are their own and this rigorous, thoughtful approach was employed by my team as well as the parents and teachers we worked with. While many of the spellers featured in the podcast use AAC devices or iPads to communicate, some use letter boards, and most use a combination of both—depending on whether they’re at home, traveling, or on the go.
When we gear up for university-backed, peer-reviewed tests for the film, any telepathy tests involving spelling will ensure communication is as independent as physically possible. This commitment to verification is central to both the integrity of the research and the respect we owe to the non-speaking community.
Broader Challenges and Future Research
Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) play a key role in the communication journey of non-speakers, and I’ve spoken with many while crafting the podcast and preparing for the feature film project. Unfortunately, many SLPs feel constrained by ASHA (the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association), which accredits them, and are unable to freely speak about the life-changing benefits of spelling to communicate. This dynamic is a critical challenge for advancing widespread acceptance of spelling-based communication methods
Moving Forward
We’re hosting Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and then my family is heading out of town so I must sign off now but I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you for your efforts to bring attention to this critical topic. Advancing research in this area is essential, and I’m grateful for your interest in exploring it thoughtfully. Diane remains committed to inviting outside experts to collaborate on studies, and I’m eager to see her work published and peer-reviewed. However, securing funding is a necessary step to ensure the quality, scale, and rigor that these studies require.
Wishing you a joyous holiday season and a wonderful New Year!
Warm regards,
Ky
My response to Dickens: We all want to believe. But we have to be careful when vulnerable children are involved.
When I was reading into Dickens’s backstory, something caught my eye: she’s no strange to suffering, including among people with disabilities.
During an appearance on the “Neon Galactic” podcast a few weeks ago, she explained how her brother is a high-functioning autistic man and she worked as an aide to disabled classmates when she was in high school (she and I actually have that latter fact in common).
Tragically, around six years ago she had a friend killed in a car wreck that took place right after feeding a group of homeless people.
“I was mad, I was angry. I just didn’t understand how this type of stuff could happen. I felt broken in — I just felt confused. And I thought I want to understand the nature of reality, why this stuff happens, why we’re here, where we’re going, what we’re doing. And whatever I do next, I want it to be something that focuses on this,” she told the hosts.
The death of her friend set her on a journey that led her to Powell and her theories about telepathy.
“This is fascinating, because if this is real, this could be the key to understanding everything,” she said.
My conversation with Dr. Powell and the email exchange with Dickens as well as the general tone of the podcast convinced me that they really do want to believe in the phenomena they are describing in this podcast; this is no cynical grift.
Dickens is a sort of real-life Fox Mulder, one of two protagonists who starred in the X-Files drama about an FBI special agents who investigate paranormal events.
She wants to believe, and who can blame her?
The world we inhabit is often bleak and distressing, and Dickens’s many monologues against materialism — the belief that nothing really exists except for the matter we can detect all around us — serve as hope in the darkness.
Maybe there really is something greater out there: a collective consciousness and an afterlife — and maybe these children are the key to unlocking these prizes for all of us.
But Dickens, who invokes ableism repeatedly throughout the series — which is a common refrain from defenders of spelling — should think long and hard about how to avoid ableism herself.
The vast majority of subjects in her series are children. All of them are intellectually disabled. They don’t have the capacities to push back against the parents, teachers, therapists, and well, podcast hosts, who are positing that their spelled messages are the key to understanding the universe itself.
I think back to Jason Jacoby Lee, the young man who I reported about in my October piece. Jason is the nonverbal autistic son of two Columbia professors who have been documenting his spelling journey online.
His mother, Marie, is particularly media-savvy and had been writing about Jason for years before they ever discovered spelling. (In one 2012 piece for The Atlantic, she had no problem accepting that he was severely intellectually disabled.)
When I asked Marie about the letterboard communication technique that they were using with him — officially, it was Rapid Prompting Method, but they almost always hold his arm, making it more of a hybrid with Facilitated Communication — she refused to consider the possibility that it was flawed.
She — or Jason, if you believe in the method, as this was delivered through the spelling — also more or less accused me of calling into question his intelligence.
But I wasn’t really questioning Jason’s intelligence. I was questioning the merit of spelling techniques that have never passed a double-blind test, that trap individuals into reliance on another person in order to type out thoughts we really don’t even know are their own.
Last week, Marie posted a photo of Jason outside a community college on Instagram.
“Big next steps for our buddy,” she wrote.
But if we can’t trust the veracity of Jason’s messages — and there’s a mountain of scientific evidence that tells us we should at least be skeptical — how do we know that’s even what he wants do? Maybe he wants to spend his days skateboarding, dancing, or drawing.
Instead, his mom and dad have been using the Facilitated Communication/Rapid Prompting Method hybrid to have him write op-eds, audit college classes on poetry, and even try to land a memoir — all of which are the kinds of activities you might expect from Columbia academics like his mom and dad.
Something you notice about these high-profile cases of spelling is that the spellers often turn into activists — they want to tell the whole world about how they’re breaking out of their shell. They do media, write treatises, and become iconoclasts. But anyone who’s worked with kids knows that the vast majority of children don’t want to do any of this. Their media-savvy parents, on the other hand, might.
In the comments on the post about him attending community college, an Instagram user asked Marie about the Telepathy Tapes, explaining that they may be the key to understanding why Jason has developed so much writing talent so quickly with little formal instruction:
Marie, I'm curious to hear you and hubby's thoughts as intellectuals/educators. Have y'all been introduced to TheTelepathyTapes.com ? (All episodes are free under "listen") Your son already has the essential skill (spelling!) needed to unlock it. I thought it was nutty when I first heard but after seeing how the neuro scientist proved it with many tests, I'm sold.
... "It" being that all nonverbal autistic kids are telepathic, and they tap into a non physical space called The Hill where they congregate with like-minded peers to socialize, learn, etc. and have a rich social life.
That "Hill" may explain how your sweet son knows advanced spelling, grammar, etc without being directed taught. Just some hypothesizing after being engrossed in that site.
“hm someone else just told me to check it out. i should listen to it w him,” Marie replied.
Here’s what I would say to Ky:
Take this advice from someone who respects the work that Dr. Powell is trying to do and the quest for meaning that you’re on. You have to be careful when you’re dealing with vulnerable children. There have been countless abuses as a result of the use of spelling pseudoscience and I can’t even imagine the kinds of horrors we could unleash if we rush to proclaim that children have telepathic and precognitive abilities that they don’t actually have.
If you really want to avoid ableism, why not use your neurotypical privilege to tread more carefully from now on?
You can do much more careful and rigorous experiments in the next season and in your documentary — and there are plenty of specialists ready and willing to help you, like the ones I quoted in this piece.
And if you find that these experiments don’t validate telepathy after all, have the courage to tell your audience the truth. The quest for meaning will go on, and we can walk that path without exploiting vulnerable children.
UPDATE: I wrote a follow-up piece that includes another brief exchange with Dr. Powell where she reveals her belief that autism is driven in part by vaccines. Read it here.
My son is semi-verbal at 9 (echolalia and wants and needs, with the latter really being three-word sentences. He just started using the "I" pronoun a few months ago.) Really appreciate your reporting here. When autistic kids are being routinely abused by the for-profit autism care complex, (not to mention being incredibly underserved by the fact that special education teacher pay is pitifully low) it's hard to not see podcasts like these as adding to the problem.
I’m a parent of a minimally speaking 5 year old who uses an AAC device. I looked into s2c because he loves letters and I believe he will learn to spell and read. What I saw in the spellers groups was confusing and very different than the AAC groups - missives of activism, spirituality, ramblings, etc. The telepathy tapes have left me uncomfortable. I think they’re dangerous to the nonverbal community. My child is wonderful but he is not telepathic. On his AAC he discusses Mario, candy, cookies, and people at school - typical things for a 5 year old. I have watched videos of spellers and the children and young adults often appear distressed as they are spelling, and, as you mentioned, protest. It’s very confusing to me as the first rule of AAC is to model but not force.