The Telepathy Tapes is
a seven-hour podcast series that takes listeners on an incredible journey. Here is a summary of the show. A journalist taps into a community of parents of nonverbal autistic children and discovers
that we all live in a simulation and the real world is Heaven, and these neurodivergent kids are actually gifted and they can visit Heaven at night, download infinite knowledge, and use telepathy to communicate.
No one is ever dead, and everything you have ever seen on The X-Files is real: energy healing, psychokinesis, and clairvoyance. These nonverbal geniuses, if we allow ourselves to believe in them, will usher in a revolution in both medicine and spirituality.
Does this sound believable?
You probably answered “no.” That’s because that bolus—a word used to describe a full dose of medication given to a patient at once—is too much to process. But if I drip-feed this magical thinking over the course of seven hours and build it up anecdote by anecdote, you might just start believing in it.
The Telepathy Tapes follows a reporter’s voyage from paper-thin skepticism to absolute credulity, and it becomes a cautionary tale for journalists who choose to investigate extraordinary claims. They may see themselves as skeptics but the urge to believe is hard to resist.
Mum’s the word on who does the pointing
The journalist behind the series, Ky Dickens, is not a disinterested party. By
her own account, her brother is a “high-functioning autist” and two friends of hers died in tragic and unfair circumstances a few years ago. Dickens felt broken and confused. She asked the universe why all of this had happened and started listening to the
Cosmos in You podcast, an esoteric programme on topics like astrology, intuition, and mediumship. That’s where Dickens heard Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell for the first time.
Dr. Powell becomes Dickens’ guide down the paranormal rabbit hole on
The Telepathy Tapes—the White Rabbit to Dickens’ Alice—putting her in touch with parents who believe their nonspeaking children are supernaturally gifted. Powell is described on the show as a neuropsychiatrist, researcher and author, and she tells Dickens that she went to medical school, worked with “some of the greatest minds in neuroscience,” and joined the faculty at Harvard. She is
no longer at the vaunted university. Additionally, in episode 6, she claims her medical board revoked her license after she published her book,
The ESP Enigma, which makes the case for psychic phenomena.
Powell asserts that members of the board hadn’t read the book; after they reviewed her research, they reinstated her license.
This story of censure in the face of paranormal beliefs is not supported by the information I found. According to
publicly available documents from the Oregon Medical Board, Powell’s license was indeed suspended around the time her book was released, but the reason was a pattern of practice including “poor management of therapeutic boundaries, incomplete chart notes […], a disorganized approach to treatment, a failure to respond to significant patient symptoms, and concerns over her management of patient medications.” She was accused of relying extensively on phone consultations to manage complex psychiatric patients without seeing them face-to-face, thus posing “a significant risk of harm to these patients.” When asked to stop practicing medicine during the investigation, Powell declined. Her licensing board also asked her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, which she did. She was subsequently allowed to resume practicing medicine under
a strict list of conditions, which were waived in April 2012. The medical board’s website now lists her license as “lapsed.”
When Powell introduces Dickens to allegedly gifted nonverbal autistic children, Dickens, to her credit, takes charge of testing their abilities “so it’s bulletproof.” She brings in multiple cameras and a cameraman who she says is “a huge skeptic, a materialist.” Her goal is to rule out any shenanigans, to the best of her ability, to see if these kids can indeed read minds. So far, I’m on board.
Thus begins a series of tests spanning multiple episodes, where Dickens generates words and numbers at random,
shows them to the mother, and the child is able to spell them out by pointing at a board
held by the mother.
Anyone who is familiar with facilitated communication (about which I’ve written
here) will be shaking their head in recognition.
Facilitators hold a nonverbal person’s arms or hands, thus pointing and typing for them, essentially ventriloquizing these individuals. 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. Defenders of these methods will argue they’re not touching the child’s arms or hands, but subconsciously moving the board results in the same problem: it’s not the child doing the selection.
Much like how intelligent design was really Creationism in a different guise, S2C and RPM are
variations of the discredited facilitated communication. In 2019, a
systematic review on the evidence for RPM being used with autistic people was unable to find a single English-language study published in a peer-reviewed journal with participants whose autism diagnosis was official. Not one.
Dickens tells us on the show that the raw video footage is available on the podcast website for us to scrutinize. This transparency, however, comes at a cost of USD 9.99. I paid the fee and viewed many of the videos, which are actually very short clips. Episode 1 of the podcast, for example, showcases Mia, who comes from a Hispanic family and whose telepathic gift is said to have 100% accuracy. One of the tests done has her mom opening a Spanish-language book that Dickens brought from home (to prevent cheating). The mom selects a page, says “Ooooh!” in excitement, and asks her daughter to name the character who is drawn on the page. The video clip posted to the website 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.
Crucially, although we are told that Mia can “see everywhere” and not just through her mother’s eyes,
she absolutely cannot do it when her mom is replaced by her dad, which we learn 40 minutes into episode 1.
Throughout the podcast, a laundry list of explanations is given as to why telepathy sometimes fails when tested: anxiety, negativity, hatefulness, skepticism, crowds. Mia is said to have written in her diary that she can read everybody’s mind but,
much like with Tinker Bell, you have to believe in her for her to do it. At this point, we might as well pretend there is a trickster god who teases us with proof of telepathy but turns it on and off during testing in order to mess with us, a theory that, believe it or not, has been
discussed in the academic literature.
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.
Upon seeing the tests with Akhil, Dickens’ “skeptical” cameraman, in utter amazement, says, “Do I have to believe in God now?” Dickens, meanwhile, is shocked when Powell tells her that these tests wouldn’t be believed by scientists.
Indeed, they
shouldn’t.
A psi of relief for scientific rigour
Research into parapsychology has been plagued by false positive results. Parapsychology is a grab bag of powers and experiences, like telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition, that involve some weird transfer of energy or information and that currently exist outside of our scientific understanding, if they exist at all. Looking back
almost 200 years, we can see that parapsychological claims have time and again been disproven by skeptics asking for better measures to prevent deception. The history of research into “psi” phenomena, as they are often called today, is the history of how scientific research became more rigorous. You say your client can see through envelopes? Let’s see if they can do so in front of a group of scientists, and let’s make sure those envelopes are opaque. You say they can read the mind of the person next door? Let’s make sure the room they are in is properly insulated so they can’t hear what their partner is saying. You say they can pick a card that was chosen by someone else? Let’s ensure the card-picker’s fingerprints aren’t visible on the card they chose.
As psi research became more stringent, the errors became harder to spot by the average person. They got buried in the statistics used to analyze the data and the minutia of the methodology used, and it made psi research look bulletproof. In 2011, Professor Daryl Bem from Cornell University published a
paper that received much media coverage. “Humans have some psychic powers,” clamoured the
Cornell Chronicle. “Could it be?” rhetorically asked
NPR, “Spooky experiments that ‘see’ the future.”
Scientific American had fun with
their headline: “Extrasensory pornception.” Indeed, in the biggest experiment reported in the paper—so big, the size of the effect was the largest in a
meta-analysis of multiple experiments testing psi abilities—regular people were shown two curtains on a computer screen and had to pick the one behind which an image, sometimes erotic in nature, would appear. The twist? The computer only randomized which image to show and where to show it
after the participant had picked a curtain, so the participant had no way to know in advance… unless they could predict the future. An average result of 50% accuracy is what you would expect by chance; Bem’s 863 participants had an average score of 53%.
That is the kind of sound scientific research listeners of
The Telepathy Tapes would point to as proof of these abilities.
But when 30 scientists—half believers in Bem’s findings and half skeptical of them—
replicated Bem’s experiment using 20 times more participants and, very importantly, tightening the rigour to a degree I have never seen before in scientific research, their result was 49.89%. Might as well flip a coin.
The tweaks were made with Bem’s blessing, by the way, who was one of several experts consulted on how the experimental setup would be strengthened. Data was directly entered into a third-party, open-access repository during testing. The research reports were automated as soon as new data came in. Experimenters were trained on how to test participants, and their videotaped training sessions had to be approved by the experts. There was extensive piloting of the study and external auditors, and the entire experiment was publicly preregistered: this is how we will collect data, the researchers described, and this is how we will analyze it. You may think they went overboard, but in the face of extraordinary claims, we need extraordinary research protocols.
You will not hear about this replication of Bem’s findings on
The Telepathy Tapes. You will, however, hear the story of
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (a popular paranormal researcher), who proved that half of all dogs and nearly a third of cats know when their owners are coming home,
possibly through human-to-pet telepathy. These findings were even reproduced by skeptics, says Dickens. I don’t know which skeptics she’s referring to because world-famous skeptic Dr. Richard Wiseman and colleagues
famously did replicate Sheldrake’s experiments but failed to show any telepathic ability in pets.
Improving the journalistic integrity of
The Telepathy Tapes would not be difficult. It would mean reaching out to magicians who excel at spotting fakery and to people who famously have been skeptical of psi claims and who have conducted replications of positive studies. (For example, Jim Underdown tests people who make these kinds of claims for
CFI Investigations Group in the U.S., and Christopher French, Richard Wiseman, and Michael Marshall do the same in the UK.) It would involve not showing a child’s mother the random number or word to prevent any conscious or unconscious cueing of their child, who should be able to read the
journalist’s mind. And it would mean not simply stringing together a number of wild anecdotes about parrots who can read their owner’s dreams and elephants who commemorate the day their rescuer died. If we approach any surprising event with the belief that some things simply cannot be explained by science, we will never make progress in understanding our world. By that token, earthquakes, electricity, even the moon would have remained mystical mysteries had we never interrogated them with science.
Instead, we are taken along on a reporter’s fantastical journey where every new belief begets a more extraordinary one.
First, she accepts that one-on-one telepathy is real; then, autistic children can see ghosts and communicate with ancestors; then, she learns that telepaths tap into a collective consciousness that forms the very fabric of our universe; then, these kids actually meet on “the Hill,” a spiritual plane of existence where they reveal themselves to be geniuses akin to aliens; then, materialism is simply wrong; and finally, these nonverbal children can actually predict the future, heal others, and usher in a paradigm shift, and their power is growing as more people listen to the podcast. All of this, of course, is being hidden from the mainstream because of some version of cancel culture. But fear not: a few brave mavericks are risking their careers to bring about this much-needed awakening. (Journalists, learn to recognize the outline of this story, please.)
And it sounds legit because the show is so polished, it could be the next
Serial. Dickens is a journalist and the people she interviews are calm and are treated the same way that any talking head on a documentary would be. But this slow-drip journey into esoterica is how we get to this whopper of a quote in episode 7 from Ky Dickens herself: “If I had a million dollars, I’d want to open a healing and education centre where nonspeakers could work with the best minds in science and math and, you know, healthcare, so they could heal the planet and people and relationships and animals.”
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—and it borders on the cruel—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?
This narrative isn’t new, however. In the 1970s, we learned of “
Indigo children,” kids who were beautifully strange, deeply spiritual, and gifted with an array of supernatural abilities. Back then, the concern wasn’t primarily autism, but rather attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. A diagnosis that made parents uncomfortable was replaced, through the magic of New Age spirituality, by an empowering label.
The Telepathy Tapes’ Indigo children will only pick up steam in the coming years. Already, a second season of the podcast has been announced which will focus on non-autistic telepaths, and Dickens is raising money to turn the whole thing into a documentary.
It’s important to maintain compassion for the parents who find themselves in the middle of this, but real answers on the topic of psi phenomena will not be arrived at through wishful thinking. Rigour should be
de rigueur. Everyone thinks they are appropriately skeptical. No one thinks they’re gullible.
We all want to believe.
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