How far would a parent go to understand their child? How much might a parent believe? A popular new podcast claims that some nonspeaking kids with autism can read people’s minds. But is it real? Or does it just come from a deep desire to connect? Read Dan Engber’s story at The Atlantic here. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/podsub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Telepathy Tapes podcast about?
On a long road trip over winter break, I listened to all 10 episodes of this podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. The show is about a group of non-speaking autistic kids who are able to communicate using a method sometimes known as spelling or facilitated communication. Essentially, someone, the facilitator, helps guide the kids using a keyboard or an iPad to spell out messages.
Chapter 2: Can non-speaking autistic kids really read minds?
That already is a kind of magic, because kids who have been unable to communicate can now share their thoughts. But this podcast takes it to a whole new level of magic. It's not just that they can communicate. These kids can read minds.
I'll bring Houston up to them and just tell them, hey, think of one little thing. And he writes it out on the board.
So he's read your friends' minds.
He has read my friends' minds before. I've seen it firsthand.
Chapter 3: What is facilitated communication?
By the end of the series, the kids are not just reading minds. They're commuting with the dead, predicting disasters, and generally outclassing the neurotypical mortals.
So again, she always tells me about these God visits, as she calls them, that happen at night. And so I said, did he talk to you again last night? And she said, yes, unfortunately. And then she does dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
On that road trip, my partner and I got into a big argument about this podcast. The mind-reading scenes sounded so believable on the podcast. But telepathy?
What is this phenomenon happening? Why are his mind and my mind completely connected?
Why were so many people buying into this? I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. Today, we're going to talk about how an idea like telepathy lands differently now. The cultural conditions that make this old idea that's almost too fringe to bother debunking take off.
And we're going to do that by looking at this blockbuster podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, which started out as this low-budget independent project. And then in December, Joe Rogan started spreading the word.
I think some telepathy is real. It is real. I think it is real.
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Chapter 4: How did the Telepathy Tapes podcast gain popularity?
And then the host of Telepathy Tapes, her name is Kai Dickens, got an agent, did an interview with Rogan, and then more interviews, and now she has a documentary in the works. From the car that day, I sent a Slack message to an Atlantic colleague who knows a lot about facilitated communication.
December 28th, 4 o'clock p.m. Not a time that I was on Slack.
That is Dan Engber, a science writer at The Atlantic.
I discovered that sliding my can of seltzer around on this table is sort of like an ASMR thing.
Dan started looking into facilitated communication about 10 years ago.
Was developed in the 1970s in Australia.
As part of the disabilities rights movement, a form of empowerment.
And it was seen in this, you know, in this whole tradition of liberating people with communication issues from, you know, basically the prison of lowered expectations just because, you know, they might not do well on an IQ test if they can't talk. But if you give them a way to communicate, they can reveal who they really are.
The way it works is a facilitator helps the autistic person spell out messages.
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Chapter 5: What experiments were conducted in the podcast?
Okay. And there's a mirror there. And there's a mirror there? Yes, that's got to be covered up as well. Or taken down.
So they're taking a lot of care to make sure only Mia's mom is seeing this number. And then Mia's mom, who is the facilitator, sits next to Mia, and Mia spells out, using, you know, her letter board, what her mom has just seen, or she says what the number is.
There could be numbers on the board, too.
So that's the test. That's the telepathy experiment as described in the first episode of the show.
And I have to say, listening to it, now just in the pure audio, obviously I can't see it, but I'm listening to it, it is like Like a magic show. I mean, when you listen to it, you do think, whoa, you know, how are they doing this in the way they're describing? Like, how is this autistic child doing this? Like how the mother hasn't said a word. You haven't heard the mother say a word.
So that's the feeling of listening to it. It is a little like watching a miracle. you know, listening to a miracle without watching it. And I think that's probably a key difference.
Well, I hate to say this to a podcast host, but, like, I think the problem here is there's sort of, like, a pernicious problem with audio that is in play here. Boo.
No, it's all right. Yeah, go ahead.
It's all about voices and people's impressions. And it's so intimate, right? And I think these are all things that are echoed in the people with telepathy, supposedly with telepathy as well. So I think it's worth talking this through. In listening to the podcast, you're hearing Guy Dickens, the host, just be so amazed by what she's seeing.
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Chapter 6: What are the controversies surrounding facilitated communication?
Facilitated communication found its way from Australia in the 70s to the U.S. by the 80s and the early 90s. In a PBS Frontline documentary called Prisoners of Silence that aired in 1993, Kathy Hayduke, the mother of a non-speaking autistic child, recalled the moment her daughter Stacey had a breakthrough, all thanks to FC and her daughter's new facilitator.
She said, Kathy, she's telling me this, and she's telling me that, and you've got to see it. So one day she came over to the house, and she said, Stacy, I know you're excited after all these years. You must have something you want to tell Mom. And Stacy types out, I love you, Mom.
I can understand a mom wanting to hear I love you from her child. So the relief was real. And the emotions around FC were deep. But soon after the method came to the U.S., it was debunked, or at least declared wholly unreliable.
a lot of tests were done of people using facilitated communication to see if they could ever spell out a message with information that their facilitator didn't know. So if the problem is maybe your facilitator is really the one writing the messages, well, there's an easy test for it.
Like, okay, let me show you a picture of a sandwich, and then while your facilitator's not in the room, bring him back in the room, tell me what you saw. And the reality was, few, if any, people using FC could pass that test.
To quote a program director in the PBS documentary who was involved in some of that testing, out of 180 trials, quote, we literally really didn't get one correct response. Are you suggesting manipulation? Or what are you suggesting exactly?
Definitely not manipulation.
As we mentioned before, FC in its original form was just holding someone's hand or arm or shoulder while the other person typed on a keyboard. Potentially, at least optics-wise, lots of room for subconsciously guiding the person to where you want them to type. But in Mia's case, on the Telepathy Tapes podcast, her mom just had a finger on her forehead or she was holding her chin.
I think this is really important. It is extreme. You could have read and reported on this at great length, as I have, and it's still extremely hard to tell what's going on when you're seeing it with your own eyes. So I think that's sort of how the podcast works.
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Chapter 7: What emotions are involved in the parent-child connection?
And she just says, the idea that the facilitators might be somehow creating these messages is, I forget the phrase, like, unambiguously false. Like, she just rejects outright the possibility that there's any unconscious influence from the facilitators, from the parents. And then she quotes one of the parents saying, the thing is, Kai, we can't all be lying. Right.
And the implication there is like, yeah, you know, okay, maybe you're so skeptical you think Mia's mom is a you know, a grifter or something. But like there are so many parents out here who feel that their kids have telepathy. Like it can't just be a whole army of grifters.
Okay. So what's in the mix then? Let me just try this and you see if I'm with you here. So it's not lying you think is in the mix between this parent and child. It's some form of communion, like love, maybe even connection. I would say like hope, like there's so much out there. I'm a parent of an autistic child, though, not a nonverbal one, but so much hope of, uh,
Like, inside the child, there's so much that this child wants to say and express with me and, like, a wish for connection. Like, there's a relationship or intimacy, and that translates into something, but it's not clear what it is. Is it something like that?
I think it is a profoundly intimate act. I've had facilitators facilitate me, and it is... I mean, you're sitting with a stranger, or I was sitting with a stranger, and she puts her hand on mine, and I don't know what to tell you. It's just like suddenly you're holding hands with someone, you feel close to them, right?
And...
There's just such a desire to, I think we all have a desire to connect and feel understood and feel like we're understanding people. Now, raise that desire to the hundredth power if you're talking about a mother or a father trying to connect with their child.
to the thousandth power if that child is non-speaking, and it's always sort of hard to exactly understand what's going on in your child's mind. I mean, the desire is even shortchanging it. It seems like the most urgent need I can possibly imagine is to find a way to communicate with your child, and here is this thing, and at first it's frustrating, it's not working, and then, wait, what?
What's that? A glimmer of something. Like we're doing this method and we spelled out a word and then it flowers from there, right? And then now we're spelling out short sentences and now my son is writing poetry and now I'm learning about all this stuff. Like, oh, he's got a girlfriend and he's telling me all about that.
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Chapter 8: How does skepticism play a role in the belief of telepathy?
Dan just spelled something that was in my head, right? It's just a natural effect of how you have this Ouija board illusion, right? Just eventually, I might type something or spell something that, you know, information that only you know that I shouldn't know. And so this is in some way just a byproduct of the Ouija board effect, right?
Oh, so the flaws that you've already described in facilitated communication, if you're not seeing them as flaws, the other word to call them is telepathy.
Exactly. So it's really, it's just like you hit this fork in the road early in the process, right? There's two problems here. If it is really true that the facilitator is the one who's actually creating the messages, there's two problems. One is If the speller knows something that the facilitator doesn't know, the speller can't spell that out. That's the message passing test.
That was the test that the scientists used to debunk this whole thing. So that's problem number one. So you have to deal with that problem. Problem number two, though, is exactly the opposite. Okay, why does the speller seem to know things that are in the head of the facilitator? Like they shouldn't, why can they do that?
And so you can either see that happen and go, you know what, I'm a little worried that this method doesn't work. And then you move on to other interventions to try to help the non-speaking person. Or you say, oh, I know what it is. The spelling is valid and they have ESP.
Yes. Oh, my God. That's so obvious. I don't know why I didn't realize that. That's exactly what it is. Of course, you would call that telepathy.
Yeah.
Because you are, in fact, reading the thoughts of the facilitator. It's literally just a synonym for the problems you were describing.
Yes, exactly.
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