Let’s Talk About The Telepathy Tapes

Why We Need Industrial-Grade Skepticism Alongside Our Desire for Love and Belonging

Photo by Marek Pavlík on Unsplash

The Telepathy Tapes, a podcast so popular it briefly eclipsed Joe Rogan’s place as the most-downloaded show in the US, makes the claim that nonverbal autistic people have telepathic powers. It’s a claim I’d normally dismiss outright, but since the show has surfaced more than once in recent conversations I’ve had and since it’s tremendously popular, I gave it a listen.

The host, a self-described science nerd named Ky Dickens, starts the show by explaining that she used to be skeptical about telepathy — used to be skeptical, that is, until she discovered the work of Dr. Diane Powell, a neuropsychiatrist who has studied the phenomenon firsthand. In Powell’s studies, a facilitator is given a random word or number sequence that’s not visible to the nonverbal autistic person. Then the autistic person, with help from the facilitator, guesses the word or number sequence. More than 90% of the time, Dickens tells us, the autistic person guesses correctly.

Dickens is so impressed after watching Powell’s videos that she decides to gather some of her friends (including a cameraman who Dickens assures us is “a huge skeptic”) to record a handful of tests herself, both with and without Powell present. What follows is a series of scenarios, narrated by Dickens, along the lines of what Powell experienced with her test subjects. In each case, autistic people complete a variety of tasks that suggest they have telepathic powers.

Towards the end of the first episode, however, Powell makes a curious statement. She tells Dickens that despite all the lengths they went to in setting up their tests, their results would not be valid according to the general scientific community.

It’s a line that didn’t completely surprise me, as I’d read a few critiques of the show (including this one from Skeptical Inquirer) before listening. It turns out that the presence of a designated facilitator (who, it seems, is usually the mother of the autistic person) is a monumental red flag. It means that Dickens is witnessing a phenomenon known as “facilitated communication” (FC), which has been thoroughly studied in controlled settings for decades.

You can read the systematic reviews of these studies here and here to see that in every instance where facilitated communication has been studied in a setting with proper controls, it’s been disproven and labeled as “a technique that has no validity.” Why? Because in each case the facilitators end up giving subtle cues — whether through the way they hold a number board in the air, or through physical touch, or through some other means — that influence the actions of the autistic person. This means that the communication comes from the facilitator, not the test subject.

At first blush, this claim might sound every bit as outlandish as believing in telepathy itself. How can tiny, almost microscopic cues be picked up by these nonverbal autistic people who then translate the cues into answers?

What’s more, for those who have listened to the podcast, this critique doesn’t explain the story of Akhil, an autistic person who types his answers onto a digital tablet himself while his facilitator (his mother) is in a completely different room?

I’ll admit that the case of Akhil had me stumped when I listened to the show. I could understand how a facilitator might influence responses when physically touching the autistic person. But what was going on in the case of Akhil?

That’s when I decided I needed to see the videos of these studies, which are offered at TheTelepathyTapes.com for ten dollars. I had a hunch that if I could just see the videos instead of having everything filtered through Dickens, I could know what was going on. So I paid for access and started from the beginning. In case after case, the subtle cues from the facilitators are obvious — physical touch, moving a number board in the air, etc. The process is still remarkable, in the sense that these autistic people can pick up on these microscopic visual and tactile cues from their facilitator, but it’s clearly an instance of facilitated communication.

When I eventually got to the videos with Akhil, they were considerably less impressive than what I’d pictured in my mind while listening to the podcast. In all but one of the videos, Akhil’s mother sits next to or behind him making tiny hand gestures, giving physical touch, or making tiny vocalizations, or all three. In the single video where she isn’t physically right next to him, she’s just a few feet away, within eyesight, and she gives tiny auditory prompts before each letter. (This is far clearer in video format than in podcast format.) While I couldn’t translate those tiny auditory prompts into a word the way Akhil does, it’s not at all outside of the realm of possibility for an autistic person and their primary caregiver who have done this process for years together to have a mutual understanding — a shared language. That’s what I saw when I saw the video.

After reading the studies on facilitated communication and seeing the videos firsthand, my sense is that the Telepathy Tapes flatly exaggerate what’s happening. A true test would show unedited verified footage from multiple camera angles where the facilitator sits in an enclosed room and gives no cues. To prove that telepathy is real, Dickens would need to upload a series of videos with multiple subjects in a controlled setting like that. Then she could earn a $500,000 reward from the Center for Inquiry that’s being offered to anyone who can demonstrate psychic abilities under such settings. Easy money, if she had the proof! But she doesn’t.

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So, one might ask: Why all have all these people — Dickens, Powell, facilitators, parents, podcast listeners — gone to such lengths to promote the notion that telepathy is real?

As Dickens talks about in the show, facilitated communication often gives these families a sense of hope for the first time. They feel like they’re finally able to communicate with their nonverbal kids, who frequently say wonderful things about love and compassion. It really is beautiful. In addition, the families who ascribe to this worldview often find a sense of community and camaraderie with other families in similar situations, and this community gives them real comfort and a sense of purpose in the face of a desperately bleak life. And then there’s the fact that telepathy makes for a great story. It adds a sense of wonder to a sullen world of concrete and digits and bits.

I’m not unsympathetic to any of this. We all need wonder in our lives, and exploring strange occurrences like those that happen through facilitated communication are one way to do that.

Given this, why bring up all these criticisms of the Telepathy Tapes at all? If there’s no downside, why not just let people believe that facilitated communication is real?

Because there is a downside.

Over the past decades, a long list of lies, fraud, and abuse cases have surfaced around the use of facilitated communication. In many, a facilitator suspects that the subject is a victim of abuse and calls in the police for questioning. When the police show up and start asking questions, the facilitator reveals lurid details of abuse — so lurid that these children have been forcibly separated from their parents. But when the children are questioned by a different facilitator, the answers they give aren’t the same. It turns out that, again, the answers were coming from the facilitator, not the subject. The facilitator got it in their head that the subject was the victim of abuse and, when prompted with leading questions from police, they filled in the details. (“Were you hurt?” “Yes.” “Who did it?” “Dad.” “What did he do?” And so on.) They made up a story, ad-libs style, and tore families apart in the process. And that’s just one of many types of lies, fraud, and abuse stemming from this process.

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In the end, for me The Telepathy Tapes is a useful case study in how easy it is to go wrong in our thinking as human beings. We see something genuinely remarkable (a nonverbal autistic person picking up and interpreting microscopic cues) and we mistake it for something magical (telepathy). We see something we hope is true, and we ignore the red flags — or smooth over the bumps — that suggest it is not true. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s one way we find meaning and community. And heaven knows, being a lonely cynic about everything we see isn’t a good way to live. “Better to be crazy with the rest of the world,” the philosopher Baltasar Gracián wrote, “than to be wise alone.” We all must make concessions to belong to each other.

But wouldn’t it be best if we could find a way to belong without having to make so many concessions to pseudoscience? Wouldn’t we be even healthier as a species if our sense of belonging stemmed from a vibrant blend of love and skepticism?