The Perplexing Appeal of The Telepathy Tapes

The Telepathy Tapes claims that autistic children have the ability to read minds. Where do their claims come from — and why do so many people believe them?

Ky Dickens, the director of The Telepathy Tapes, repeatedly describes her findings — namely, that non-verbal autistic people can read minds — as “paradigm-shifting.” This is not a cherry-picked hyperbole: at the official Telepathy Tapes website, t-shirts bearing the phrase “paradigm shifted” are on sale for $40 USD (plus shipping & handling).

The series is a roughly 500-minute explanation, spread across 10 episodes, of a silent revolution taking place among autistic individuals. One by one, the program presents the charged testimonies of families crushed by bleak diagnoses deemed “severe” or “profound,” peppered with recollections of callous doctors who suggest letting go of hope for the future. Defiant parents and teachers refuse this fate, and against all odds, manage to help the nonspeakers in their lives find some means of communicating.

It’s easy enough to understand the appeal of such accounts, in which extraordinary individuals triumph over seemingly insurmountable adversity. But The Telepathy Tapes aims to do more than share feel-good stories. It seeks to lend credence to a truly radical claim that nonspeakers — not just the few featured on the show, but all nonspeakers — have tapped into something the rest of us have allowed to atrophy, a part of the mind capable of accessing a universal collective consciousness.

Farfetched as it may sound to the uninitiated, it’s a notion that’s garnered enduring appeal among a widespread audience. For a brief period at the start of 2025, the series eclipsed podcast juggernaut Joe Rogan on Spotify’s top podcast charts. In February, Rogan invited Dickens onto his show to speak at length for an audience of millions. By July, Spotify’s editorial team named The Telepathy Tapes one of the “best breakout series of 2025.”

Beyond the less-than-reliable realm of The Joe Rogan Experience, the possibility of psychic thought transmission has captivated individuals not usually prone to magical thinking. Dickens’ truth-seeking odyssey stems from informal, unreviewed research conducted by Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a Johns Hopkins-educated neuropsychiatrist and former Harvard Medical School faculty member. Despite the unsubstantiated nature of her findings — Powell has never submitted her telepathy work to peer review — frequently cited and highly respected professor of psychology Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman sat Powell down for an interview, in which he expressed earnest interest in conducting further experimentation on the subject of telepathy.^¹ In the same exchange, Kaufman also revealed that prominent autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen had expressed a similar interest in working alongside Powell.

The message has found still more purchase outside of the sciences. Influencer and entrepreneur Packy McCormick praised the series to a readership of over 250,000 people. “[We are] moving past the stranglehold of the dogmatic rational materialist paradigm…and towards something both ancient and cutting-edge,”he wrote in a glowing review of the series. Author and investor Scott Britton, following a conversation on Telepathy with Ky Dickens, boldly claimed that “we will reach a tipping point in collective belief during this lifetime that will open up the aperture for much greater human capacity.”

Most recently, NewsNation — a scrappy, centrist cable network that deems itself “​​America’s source for fact-based, unbiased news” — featured an hour-long promotional interview with Ky Dickens and cognitive neuroscientist parapsychologist Dr. Julia Mossbridge. There’s also a feature-length documentary currently underway, said to premiere sometime in the spring of 2026.

But amidst all the chatter about paradigm shifts, the voice I’ve found myself reflecting on most is my grandmother’s.

In life, she was a devout Catholic, with the same steadfast faith that guided Acadian ancestors. For her last three decades on Earth, night after night, she punctually prayed that God would grant her one simple request. Though the act of prayer itself was a private matter, she candidly spoke of what she asked for one hundred thousand times over: that my eldest brother, Chris, would speak to her.

When initially presented with the possibility that my brother might be telepathic, I thought immediately of her kitchen table in the soft morning light, where my family would sit, and my grandmother would tell us that her prayers had been answered overnight in the form of a dream. While she pieced together the conversation she supposedly shared with my brother, Chris would sit silently beside me, stabbing at the stack of brown sugar flapjacks in front of him or fiddling with the loose knob of a pot lid.

If anyone else had doubts about the recollections she shared with such conviction, they were suppressed. Who were any of us to claim to better understand the nature of dreams, or to challenge a belief that brought her such unbridled delight?

Since discovering The Telepathy Tapes, I’ve frequently found myself revisiting this composite memory. In many ways, my brother resembles the non-speakers featured on the podcast. Despite being a few years shy of his 40th birthday, Chris would likely neglect many of his most basic needs if not for the gentle, constant patient prodding of my mother and father. He expresses himself through gestures, a few simple signs, and an occasional monosyllabic utterance, but he never truly talks. It has been this way since before I was born, and I’ve fully accepted that it will likely always be this way.

Though the nuances of a highly variant neurodevelopmental condition like autism are difficult for a child’s brain to comprehend, I managed to discern two laws concerning Chris early on. Firstly, there is an enormous divergence in the way Chris and I understand the world, and this results in a struggle for him to accomplish things that come naturally to most, including communication. This is the basis of the second law: There will always be depths to my brother that I cannot know.

Acceptance of these statutes have guided me through the most challenging parts of our strange and wordless relationship. They have explained his howls that occasionally rip through the chatter of restaurant dining rooms, his fixation with the flow of running water, his tendency not to react at all when I talk to him. When he flips through the pages of books, I am not sure if he is reading or up to something else entirely. The countless uncertainties become far easier to embrace and appreciate with the laws in place.

But recently, I’ve been forced to question the laws that have long guided me. Something about The Telepathy Tapes — and, by extension, the suggestion that my brother and grandmother did find some impossible way to speak — rings true to a surprising number of people. It’s enough to make me wonder, if only for a moment, whether I somehow missed a sign of recognition all those years ago at the kitchen table, in the twinkle of my brother’s eye, or deep within the hint of a smile.

My fleeting moments of self-doubt are always quieted by the stark juxtaposition between the idealistic claims presented by The Telepathy Tapes and my own lived experience, never mind the lack of compelling scientific evidence. Autism is a magnet for pseudoscientific theory, and I’ve formed skeptical calluses in response.

All the same, I’ve found myself vexed by the tight grip these psychic notions have, particularly on otherwise skeptical individuals and organizations. When something strikes so close to your heart, you have no choice but to dig for answers — not just about the nature of telepathy, but of the cultural movement that wants to believe it’s real.

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The strongest pieces of evidence for autistic telepathy are the anecdotal accounts shared by the caregivers, case workers, and educators who work firsthand with nonspeakers. Their stories are captivating, all the more because they are perfectly suited for audio. Naturally, The Telepathy Tapes leans heavily on these testimonies. From the opening of the first episode onwards, Dickens implores her audience to not only listen, but to believe the words spoken by oft-ignored parents and teachers.²

Unshakable faith is an absolute necessity moving forward with the series, because the fantastic claims that follow defy rational explanation.

Dickens and her crew travel the United States to both meet nonspeakers who have found means of communicating and — crucially — conduct tests to verify their supposed abilities. To do this, nonspeakers are presented with stencil-like boards bearing numbers and letters, which they use to meticulously spell out messages. This in itself is remarkable, but The Telepathy Tapes takes things a step further. Dickens proceeds to ask nonspeakers to identify numbers drawn from a deck of UNO cards, or write words generated at random on an out-of-sight iPad. The podcast’s carefully curated sound bites suggest that the nonspeakers respond with astounding accuracy. Ever-present caregivers, always privy to the correct answers, enthusiastically encourage their sons, daughters, and students. Dickens posits that this astounding precision is attributable to the crystal-clear line of telepathic communication nonspeakers share with those they’re closest to.

After establishing the infallibility of the nonspeaker’s mind-reading abilities, Dickens teases that telepathic communication merely represents “the tip of the iceberg” of autistic superpowers. By episode three, tales are told of non-speakers from across the world gathering on an astral plane called “the Hill” to chat. In episode seven, a little girl named Emelia exhibits an ability to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. When asked how she learned to decipher the symbols, Emelia matter-of-factly spells, one letter at a time, that God taught her. Some nonspeakers are said to be able to predict the future. Others can confer with the dead.

Disparate findings from a variety of “scientists” are strung together in an attempt to make further sense of some (but not all) of the extraordinary assertions. Electrical engineer turned parapsychologist Dr. Dean Radin describes the methodology of Ganzfeld experiments, an ESP assessment conducted for the sake of those seeking “proof-oriented research”. Cambridge-educated Dr. Rupert Sheldrake recounts a series of past experiments on potential telepathic bonds shared between humans and dogs. At one point, the notion of quantum entanglement is introduced as a possible explanation for telepathic communication. It’s disjointed, and The Telepathy Tapes knows it. However, definitive scientific proof isn’t really the point. Dickens posits that the majority of phenomena featured on the show lack a concrete explanation because our perception of reality itself is deeply flawed. We, as a species, cling too closely to materialism, the concept that our world is built upon energy and matter alone. Ultimately, the argument for autistic telepathy relies on faith. Specifically, faith in a single assumption: that every thought communicated through nonspeakers is accurate.

Early in the series, Dickens insists that telepathy is a pure form of communication, because the autistic nonspeakers themselves are pure of heart. Throughout, The Telepathy Tapes works hard to establish that all statements fit into a binary of truth and lie. And, as Dickens explains in episode seven, there’s a universal unwillingness to lie among nonspeakers. Why would they tell anything but the truth, given the intense effort it takes for them to produce sentences at all? “We can’t all be lying,” one exasperated mother partway through episode eight sighs.

And she’s right. They can’t all be lying. Decades worth of documentation suggests that the messages coming from nonspeakers are something else entirely. In fact, the communication methods employed by the nonspeakers of The Telepathy Tapes are incompatible with intentionality at all.

For individuals with speech difficulties, there exists a range of reliable augmentative and alternative communication techniques. In some cases, nonspeakers are able to use AAC techniques that are familiar and straightforward, such as sign language or a simple pencil and paper. Others with profound, comorbid intellectual or physical disabilities require supplemental aids or devices, like tactile and digital picture boards or text-to-speech apps. Such aids take individual impediments into account and allow users to independently convey messages using whatever the skills they have.

That said, aided AAC can sometimes feel hollow and unsatisfying. Particularly if you are working with a nonspeaker who may not know how to read or write, messages can be practical but limited. Throughout the years, my brother has sporadically used the Picture Exchange Communication System, or PECS®, which consists of picking out and placing simple laminated picture cards sequentially on a velcro-laced sentence strip. If the mood suits him, he responds to concrete requests, such as what he’d like to eat for dinner, with vague, terse responses such as “CHICKEN” or “SHRIMP”. Rarely are there hints regarding how he’d prefer those dishes be prepared, or what he’d like on the side, or whether he’d like to stay at home or go out to eat. They’re the sort of answers that leave you craving further detail.

The communication techniques featured on The Telepathy Tapes participants are something else entirely. They go by several different names: Supported Typing, Typing to Communicate, Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), and Spelling to Communicate (S2C). Dickens uses the catch-all term “Spelling” to refer to them from episode two onwards.

Spelling techniques, in theory, offer a degree of communicative freedom, and the deep, insightful, detailed correspondences reflect that. It’s wildly appealing to those who have spent lifetimes making educated guesses regarding the needs and wants of their loved ones.

However, the Spelling utilized by the nonspeakers on The Telepathy Tapes is collaborative in a way that spelling, in the traditional sense, is not. Spelling is very much dependent on neurotypical communication partners, who prop up unfixed letter boards, assist in interpreting messages, and occasionally, correct perceived mistakes in messages. They act as guides, and are often (understandably) deeply biased and deeply invested in the success of the nonspeaker. In the case of The Telepathy Tapes, they are the very people claiming to share telepathic connections.

Modern Spelling methods are uniformly rooted in a contentious technique called Facilitated Communication (FC). It’s a term most people aren’t familiar with, because the practice fell out of favor before it had a chance to sincerely take off. Dickens herself readily admits that Spelling is a spiritual successor to FC, which she nonchalantly suggests was unfairly dismissed by the ableist masses. Conveniently left out of The Telepathy Tapes story are the uncomfortable controversy that led to the denouncement of FC, and the grueling trials that caused many to lose faith in it entirely.

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When Australian educator and disability advocate Rosemary Crossley first developed Facilitated Communication, her initial reports were nothing short of miraculous.

As a hospital assistant in the mid-1970s, Crossley met Anne McDonald, a nonverbal teenager diagnosed with cerebral palsy and severe intellectual disability. Since age 3, Anne had been institutionalized at the St. Nicholas Hospital in Melbourne. The facility was understaffed, its conditions horrendous, and Anne spent much of her time writhing on the floors. Nonetheless, Crossley thought she sensed something special in Anne, a hidden potential that belied all of her previous diagnoses.

To realize this, Crossley developed a means of communication centered around pointing out word and letter blocks. However, due to her profound motor and coordination issues, Anne struggled to point. At some point, Crossley thought to support her client’s unsteady arm. Immediately, Anne’s messages became much clearer.

Anne lacked any formal education, yet within the span of about three weeks, she was spelling in complete sentences. As time passed, she expressed familiarity with topics ranging from advanced mathematics to international nuclear policy. Crossley speculated she’d picked all this up through overheard conversations and the TV. Eventually, Anne spoke out about the abuses she faced in the institution that housed her, and expressed her desire to escape the substandard living conditions. At one point, she even accused a St Nicholas’ pediatrician of attempting to smother her with a pillow. A subsequent investigation ultimately dismissed these claims, but Crossley did manage to convince a court of Anne’s competency. Anne won her freedom, then went on to earn a humanities degree and pen a memoir, co-written by Crossley.

Beautiful, poetic, and — above all — hopeful, the story spread across the country. All along, the only thing Anne needed was for someone to reach out and, quite literally, lend a helping hand. Her newfound words convinced many to reconsider decades’ worth of human rights violations occurring in state-run asylums and psychiatric hospitals.

Australia’s scientific community was skeptical. However, their misgivings were largely kept private, fearing that to cast doubt on Crossley’s methodology would unintentionally jeopardize the promising strides toward civil liberty the story inspired. It wasn’t until 1987 that the country’s top communications specialists banded together to publish a statement of concern. Specifically, they cited a significant risk that the thoughts and biases of facilitators might muddle the messages of nonspeakers.

Even so, Crossley shared her breakthrough technique with other nonspeaking clients. Soon, FC was applied as a blanket treatment for nonspeakers facing a variety of physical and cognitive diagnoses, particularly autistic children.

Eventually, word of facilitated communication reached Doug Biklen, a Syracuse University professor researching intellectual disability.

Astounded by the extraordinary outcomes Crossley’s method yielded, Biklen traveled to Australia to record a series of qualitative observations detailing her technique, which were published by the Harvard Educational Review in 1990. Biklen presented a theory that autistic difficulties in communication stemmed from “praxis rather than cognition”. Put simply, he believed autism might be a problem of physical expression rather than cognitive understanding.

Word of FC’s efficacy spread through North America with fervor. Biklen touted it as a universally applicable communication aid guaranteed to bring out the locked-away thoughts of nonspeakers. Diane Sawyer described FC as “an awakening.” The New York Times, in a 1991 article, mused that the technique “could upset a half-century of thought” concerning autism treatment. In 1992, Biklen founded the Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse University. Students, parents, and clinicians, eager to serve as a conduit for the voiceless, clamored to be trained as facilitators. Story after story emerged of children with limited vocabularies expressing literacy and intellect far surpassing previous expectations.

Then a disturbing trend emerged.

Letter by letter, a rapidly growing number of newly communicative FC users described graphic accounts of sadistic sexual and physical abuse. Almost always, these accusations pegged loved ones and caretakers as victimizers.

Compared to the general population, rates of abuse run markedly higher among those facing intellectual disabilities.³ It’s also true that a significant number of perpetrators are primary caretakers or disability service providers. Even so, the rate of new allegations was staggering, considering the relatively small number of people practicing FC. By the end of 1994, at least 60 such cases were reported across the United States — which, seasoned AAC professionals were quick to note, far outpaced rates of abuse reported by nonspeakers communicating through independent means.

Trusted teachers faced termination and permanently tarnished career prospects. Devoted parents were caught entirely off guard by brutal rape allegations. Some cases culminated in criminal charges. Accused parties faced harsh consequences, including decades of jail time and staggering legal fees.

In one exceptionally extreme case covered in a 1993 FC-centered Frontline report, 16-year-old Betsy Wheaton accused everyone in her family – father, mother, brother, even grandparents – of sexual abuse. As a precaution, Betsy was thrust into the foster care system. While separated from her family, Betsy lost ten pounds, suffered two black eyes, and developed a severe ear infection that went undetected for weeks before rupturing.

Betsy’s physical deterioration signaled to investigators something very wrong was afoot. Despite enduring excruciating physical pain, Betsy never used FC to express her discomfort. The local attorney covering her case then began to question whether Betsy was as capable of communication as she seemed.

The court had a moral dilemma to untangle. If Betsy’s communications were accurate, sending her home would be unconscionable. If they weren’t, keeping her in the foster system would be unjust. All parties agreed to consult with an expert in communication. Betsy was brought to Boston Children’s Hospital, where Dr. Howard Shane conducted a series of tests to determine Betsy’s true communicative prowess. Frontline described them as follows:

Shane had devised a double-blind test…to objectively determine who was authoring the messages, Betsy or the facilitator who transcribed the allegations. He showed both a series of pictures and asked them to type what they saw. When both Betsy and her facilitator saw a picture of a key, the letters K-E-Y were typed. But Shane wanted to discover what would happen if each saw a different picture. When Betsy saw a cup, she didn’t type “cup,” she instead typed “hat” — what the facilitator saw. So too when she was shown a boat but spelled “sandwich,” or was shown a dog but spelled “sneakers.”

The findings were bittersweet. Betsy’s family was cleared of wrongdoing, but the determination brought with it broader, disturbing insinuations regarding FC. The results of Dr. Shane’s testing suggested that, whether intentionally or not, facilitators were influencing facilitated messages. They cast doubt on the driving philosophy of FC: the idea that “good” minds are locked behind faulty, apraxic, inherently uncooperative bodies.

The unsettling discovery kicked off a series of similar controlled studies testing for evidence of independent authorship through FC, conducted between 1992 and 2014. The results they yielded were unequivocal: across thousands of hours of experiments conducted on more than three hundred and sixty participants, just six showed evidence of independent communication through FC.⁴ In simple message-passing and double-blind tests, study participants almost uniformly failed. Conversely, whenever facilitators knew the right answers, participants consistently provided accurate responses.

Most taken aback by these results were the facilitators themselves. Despite having good intentions, facilitators were unwittingly falling victim to the ideomotor effect; automatic muscular movements, tainted by unconscious thought.

This phenomenon was first identified in the mid-19th century, at the height of the Spiritualism movement. Nearly two hundred years before the recording of The Telepathy Tapes, scientists were puzzled by lost souls channeled through planchette-wielding mediums. Rigorous testing led inquiring minds to conclude that simple suggestions can oftentimes influence minuscule, involuntary motions.

Part of caring for a nonspeaker is to be vigilant and attentive. Family members and care workers cooperate in the interest of loved ones, but also often maintain a healthy degree of suspicion in one another. After all, abuse is most likely to happen in the home or classroom, and nonspeakers cannot easily advocate for themselves. It’s entirely possible that small grains of unconscious mistrust, fed by nightmarish hypotheticals, were the catalyst that sparked the slew of graphic allegations. Through the ideomotor phenomenon, FC contorted legitimate devotion and love into something monstrous..

Still, some families and educators weren’t ready to give up on FC. Accepting the nature of the ideomotor phenomenon is easy enough when it’s used to rationalize the realm of Ouija boards, hypnotists, and carnival bits. But FC felt real. It was the answer to a million desperate prayers. No parent wants their child’s declarations of love compared to a show pony trick. No teacher wants their valiant efforts likened to the mechanics of a children’s game. Scientific findings become secondary when you’ve seemingly seen a miracle happen before your eyes. The idea of letting go was unbearable.

So instead of fading into obscurity, FC quietly continued. The pain of past tragedies dulled, and advocates, unconvinced of the risks, perpetuated the practice.

In their eyes, little harm could come from trying.

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30 years have passed. Surface-level changes have obscured FC just enough to hide its ugly past. But for those intimately familiar with the practice, it’s all too obvious that little has effectively changed.

A cosmetic rebrand has partially allowed FC to avoid further scrutiny. As early as 2014, John Hussman – a hedge fund manager turned FC philanthropist – emphasized a need to phase out the term “facilitated communication.” While speaking at an FC conference held in Syracuse, he called for advocates of the technique to “come up with some other name to fly under the radar and maintain credibility.” Spelling — again, Dickens’ preferred term — has since taken its place.

Spelling skirts FC comparisons due to a single fundamental difference. To avoid accusations of outside influence, communication partners are discouraged from touching nonspeakers during sessions. Instead, communication partners are instructed to suspend a letter board in front of nonspeakers. It’s argued that the lack of physical contact makes it impossible for facilitators to influence messages.

In practice, however, touch often plays a role in the Spelling process. The very first example of telepathy in an autistic nonspeaker, introduced 15 minutes into the very first episode of The Telepathy Tapes, featured a 12-year-old named Mia whose mother held her head as she pointed to her letter board. “I’m one of these people that thinks whatever the individual needs to help them communicate, it’s okay,” Ky Dickens later divulged in her interview with Joe Rogan. “If you need a little touch so you know where your arm is, or sometimes it helps you go faster if there’s a little push, I think, go for it.”

Even in ideal scenarios where there is no physical contact between nonspeakers and communication partners, the danger of message interference still exists. Facilitators still maintain control of the letter board they hold. Even the steadiest hands are wont to drift, no doubt driven by conscious or subconscious desire for there to be some profound meaning in the words-in-progress. The slightest inadvertent slip is all it takes to move a board just enough to change the meaning of a message entirely.

This tendency is perhaps best illustrated in a 2024 documentary simply titled SPELLERS THE MOVIE. Around the four-minute mark, a nonspeaker named Aiden selects GQREKA, which is interpreted as GREA, before the facilitator shifts the board to better position the letter T in the path of Aiden’s pointer.⁵ The same subtle mid-word movements can be seen around the 11-minute mark, when Jamie points to characters on a laminated alphabet held out by his father, and again at the 21-minute mark, when Cade spells with a facilitator after a day spent at the beach.

It’s difficult to rule out influence, even in scenarios where communication partners aren’t touching letter boards at all. The involuntary blinks and twitches of a communication partner several feet away might not register to an unfamiliar onlooker, but provide a wealth of information to a nonspeaker with an intimate bond and a lifetime of experience interpreting body language.

These blatant perils are still largely unknown. Stories glorifying FC and Spelling sporadically attract mainstream recognition. As recently as October 2025, the New York Times published a letter to the editor which is very likely a facilitated message claiming that profound autism does not exist. Doug Biklen has co-produced at least two feature-length documentaries on the subject, one of which, Autism is a World, received an Academy Award nomination in 2005.

Communication “success” stories have found a niche in short-form, feel-good formats that don’t bother to dig deep into difficult details. Now and then, you’ll find inspirational speech journeys featured as a human-interest puff piece for a local news station. And sometimes, there’s reason to believe that the subjects have in fact found a voice. But little effort is made to distinguish the differences between the child who independently expresses themself through an image-based AAC iPad app and the child who relies on facilitator intervention heavily susceptible to bias. Messy histories, efficacy rates, and complicated ethical considerations are elided in favor of a five-minute snippet of hope.

As cable television has atrophied, these incomplete narratives have migrated to the feral internet, to platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where they’ve found larger audiences than ever. There, they are entirely unbound by any semblance of journalistic integrity. Under tags like #s2c and #rapidpromptingmethod and #autismodyssey are posts akin to diary entries, chronicling efforts to reach nonspeakers.

It’s hard to be angry with such content creators, or the vast majority of people who turn to Spelling as a means of support. Few are dishonest or seeking clout. Instead, most feel that documenting their experience is a means of giving back to the community. Without trudging through the damning findings, the reports that explain the mechanical risks, a speller in action is an incredibly convincing sight — the sort of wonder you’d be crazy not to evangelize. In all likelihood, some Spelling advocates aren’t aware that there’s any reason to be cautious at all.

And they never learn, because skeptics generally don’t care to push back. They face the same dilemma that Australian speech pathologists faced in the 80s, when FC was first unleashed. At best, poking at the truth risks dismantling the dreams of people who have endured struggles unimaginable to most, who have done nothing wrong, without so much as a promising alternative. At worst, doubting capability can be misconstrued by bad actors and defensive caregivers as an attack on the very humanity of a nonspeaker.

And in the collective, comfortable silence, nothing has changed.

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The Telepathy Tapes claims to be a paradigm shift. In actuality, claims of an autism and telepathy link have festered for decades. In 1960, child psychologist Dr. Mira Rothenberg, in her book Children with Emerald Eyes, described the “penetrating unconscious communication” shared between autistic individuals and their mothers as telepathic. Archived Usenet forums dating as far back as 1992 speak of links drawn between FC and paranormal phenomena. “Telepathy is another mode of expression bonded in intimacy…while many of our loved ones with autism may be blessed with the gift of telepathy, they may not yet fully comprehend it. A gentle and loving caregiver will need to explain it,” author William Stillman wrote in a 2006 publication titled Autism and the God Connection.

Stillman’s words touch on a long-established trope of caretaker as savior, of “something more” being reached through the arduous efforts of someone who believes hard enough. It’s the overarching theme that colors FC since the first dialogues between Rosemary Crossley and Anne McDonald.

Should you choose to pay $9.99 and gain lifetime access to footage depicting uncontrolled tests conducted by The Telepathy Tapes crew, you’ll witness the same red flags indicating ideomotor interference that have long troubled psychologists. Supportive hands, unstable letter boards, and anticipatory mothers an arm’s reach away link together The Telepathy Tapes “evidence”, and serve as visual confirmation of the complete lack of care concerning potential facilitator bias.

It’s all part of an endless cycle of fallacy, sustained by inaction. Even so, Dickens is not entirely off when she presents a tectonic shift in reality. Or rather, a wholehearted rejection of it.

For months, I was puzzled as to why a great number of listeners wholly ignorant of the autistic experience were so enamoured by The Telepathy Tapes. Those seeking to navigate relationships with nonspeakers do not have the luxury of ignoring reports that might offer some sliver of insight into their loved ones, but everyone else has a sea of content to sift.

With the October 2025 premiere of the second season, though, I feel I’m finally starting to understand. Moving forward, the series has expressed a desire to explore the wider nature of consciousness and explore topics outside of the autistic community. No longer is the focus on the voiceless. As much as it might try to convince audiences otherwise, The Telepathy Tapes was never about disability advocacy or propelling the stories of marginalized caretakers. It’s always been a larger call to rebel, and to disregard everything you think you know in favor of a defiant unknown.

This is the selling point that caught the attention of Joe Rogan and sent the podcast soaring to popularity. It’s a message that speaks to a wide range of people newly discontented with consensus reality: the psychonaut whose epistemics have been permanently disrupted by ego-death, the post-rationalist convinced that “magic” is just the term we use for phenomenology we don’t understand, the meditators who’ve touched something transcendent and abandoned skepticism in favor of a more open and permissive worldview. The notion of telepathy is beguiling to wildly successful innovators who grew up on sci-fi and refuse to be limited by outdated standards and reasoning in their efforts to push forward. Last year, Elon Musk proclaimed that the first Neuralink brain implant would quite literally be marketed as “Telepathy”, and this past spring, the company filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office for exclusive ownership of the term. Meanwhile, Dr. Julia Mossbridge, who is collaborated Dickens in the second season of The Telepathy Tapes, has toyed with the development of AI agents capable of unconditional love. Telepathy is irresistible to those who view themselves as boundary pushers who spend their days trying to defy what’s possible.

Non-speakers and the ones closest to them simply serve as the emotionally-charged lynchpin that holds the anti-establishment romance together.

It’s impossible to say whether or not The Telepathy Tapes would have resonated with audiences ten years ago, before COVID, when truth felt a little less fragile. Perhaps the siren call to suspend disbelief is one we’ll always be drawn to. After all, if the content of The Telepathy Tapes proves anything, it’s that we’re fated to repeat ourselves, no matter how detrimental the end results may be. We are — have always been — desperate to believe that we are something more than meets the eye.

All the while, promises to “Make America Healthy Again” imply that we are all somehow profoundly sick; frequently, it’s been implied that autism is one of the primary culprits holding us back from greatness. With autism rates rising to 1 in 31, anxiety is at a fever pitch. It hardly matters whether the uptick is due to some environmental epidemic or complex genetics or a change in diagnostic criteria, just that we find a way to reverse course.

When RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz talk of “cures”, I recoil, because my brother’s autism is so deeply ingrained in his identity that imagining him otherwise is impossible. The notion of somehow erasing autism is one both deeply unrealistic and not particularly comforting to those who live within and alongside it each passing day.

The Telepathy Tapes offers something slightly more attainable than a mythical cure. It presents a reality where nonspeakers, beneath their perceived deficits, are the same as, if not superior to, everyone else.

The first thing Ky Dickens claims, at the opening of her podcast, is that the loved ones of nonspeakers are being ignored. As one of those loved ones, this is what I’d like the world to hear: my brother’s greatness is not conditional on being just like everyone else. He is representative of everything fearmongers catastrophize. There are things that he will always struggle with, and parts of him I’ll never know. And that’s okay. None of that matters. He is fascinating and wonderful, challenges and all.

My greatest desire is that he somehow finds a way to say everything he might want to say, not for my sake, but his own. I think this was all my grandmother wanted, too, when she spoke of conversing in dreams. To hear him state in eloquent, unambiguous terms that he thinks about me as much as I think of him, that he’s always cared for me in his own quiet way, would be phenomenal.

Even so, my love for him — not my idea of some trapped, imaginary, internal him, but the wordless him that physically inhabits this world — trumps that pining. There is no need to demonstrate “something more” than I can see and hear. He is inherently worthy of respect and dignity, not something to be feared. I want the world to know that my brother is human, no more, no less. And should he ever find a way to share the things I long to hear, I want there to be no questions of where they’re coming from.

1. It is worth noting that Kaufman has also made note that many of the claims made by The Telepathy Tapes simply do not hold up to scientific scrutiny and “way oversells the reality.”

2. The belief of caregivers being disregarded is a popular one among the larger anti-science autism movement. At a September 2025 press conference on suggested links between acetaminophen usage and autism, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. echoed this sentiment: “President Trump believes that we should be listening to these mothers instead of gaslighting and marginalizing them like prior administrations. Some of our friends like to say that we should believe all women. Some of these same people have been silencing and demonizing these mothers for three decades.”

3. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated in 2020 that the rate of sexual violence is about five times higher among those with an intellectual disability, but there are some variances between sources.

4. This is not to say that the 350+ participants unable to communicate through FC were unable to communicate independently at all. At least one participant who produced inconsistent answers through FC was shown to be able to communicate clearly and accurately through PECS. The disturbing implication here is that, in some cases, nonspeakers capable of some degree of independent expression were robbed of the opportunity to do so in favor of FC, primarily because neurotypical facilitators viewed the method as more effective and communicatively satisfying.

5. This is to say nothing of the numerous other red flags seen throughout. The facilitator blatantly substitutes indecipherable selections for logical nearby neighbors, frequently prompts Aiden to “make it make sense”, and at least once forces Aiden to start over entirely after he makes selections the facilitator can’t make sense of.