If Ever There was a Time for Materialism, It’s Now: Thoughts about the Telepathy Tapes (Episode 7)
As I sit down to write a review of Episode 7 of the Telepathy Tapes (links to my previous blog posts below), I can’t help but think that if there was a time for a so-called “materialistic” approach to investigating the claims in this podcast, it’s now. In discussing the Telepathy Tapes with my friends and colleagues, the overriding emotion they’ve expressed is outrage that the nonspeaking individuals and their families featured in this series are being exploited and their life experiences are being co-opted by proponents of Facilitated Communication (FC)—a technique that was discredited over 30 years ago.
Image by Braňo
The academics featured in the series, arguably, have dedicated their careers to promoting the idea that people with profound autism have telepathic abilities. They’re making these claims with faith-based anecdotes (stories) that contain not one shred of scientifically rigorous evidence and are totally ignoring the fact that systematic reviews conducted throughout the past 30+ years show no reliably controlled evidence to prove the FC-generated communications (telepathic or otherwise) are originating from the individuals being subjected to the technique. In fact, under test conditions where facilitators are blinded from test stimuli (e.g., pictures, words, numbers), the FC-generated output tends to be either unintelligible (e.g., the student can’t spell) or the answers are spelled correctly but are unrelated to the questions being asked in the testing session (e.g., facilitator guesses). On the other hand, when facilitators are shown test stimuli (e.g., pictures of common items) that are different from what is shown to the participant, the FC-generated answers are based on images the facilitator sees, not what the participant sees. In other words, all reliably controlled tests to date rule facilitator influence in, not out.
Most of what Telepathy Tapes host Ky Dickens calls “data” and “evidence” falls within the categories of anecdotes and testimonials—or (often sincere) stories and opinions from those who believe the phenomena to be real. For someone who describes herself as a “science nerd,” Dickens seems to have fallen into the trap of “believing what she’s seeing” without the apparent ability to step back and objectively consider the extraordinary (and sometimes outrageous) claims her interviewees are making.
More than any other episode in the series thus far, Episode 7 has the feel of a recruitment campaign for Facilitated Communication, Spelling to Communicate, Rapid Prompting Method, Spellers Method and other facilitator-dependent techniques. It makes me wonder just who is behind the scenes supporting this effort.
Image by Gabriel Ghnassia
Dickens and some of the people she features as experts in the series want their listeners to believe in some outlandish things, like a cosmic library or psychic chatroom that only nonspeaking individuals can access. They say this is “just the tip of the iceberg.” And they frame it in a way that if you don’t take their claims on faith, you are materialist, ableist, and against people with disabilities. In other words people who speak up against the promotion of FC/S2C/RPM or question the legitimacy about their claims of telepathic abilities in non-speaking individuals with autism, or ask them to back up their ideas with reliably controlled evidence are the “them” in their “us” against “them” world view.
Note: This way of thinking puts tremendous stress on families who, for example, have one parent believing in FC and one parent doubting the claims. We’ve seen this dynamic in families play out where the doubting family member is alienated from the child and/or falsely accused of abuse based on FC-generated messages facilitated by the other (believing) family member/facilitator. (See False Allegations of Abuse)
Critics of FC/S2C/RPM are characterized as being against people with disabilities simply because they want facilitator influence to be ruled out before the FC-generated messages are attributed to the individuals being subjected to the technique. Proponents believe that organizations such as the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) are conspiring against individuals with complex communication needs to prevent them from accessing letter boards, keyboards, and other equipment to allow them to spell independently. Nothing could be further from the truth. These organizations aren’t against using typing as a legitimate means of communicating, provided that the individual has the cognitive ability to understand and use the symbolism of written language. (It’s called feature-matching). Adaptations can be made for mobility issues with technology that does not require facilitator interference. The problem with FC/S2C/RPM is facilitator control over letter selection, not the high- and low-tech equipment used to type. (See Opposition Statements)
The average listener to the Telepathy Tapes may not fully realize that most claims being made in the podcast are generated via FC/S2C/RPM. Dickens often describes the nonspeaking or minimally speaking individuals as “talking” or “spelling” when, in fact, they’re being “facilitated” (e.g., an assistant holds onto their body and/or holds a letter board in the air to “support” their typing). The source for the so-called telepathic information in the series is
information the facilitators have access to (e.g., test stimuli such as pictures, words and numbers), or
information the facilitators believe to be true about their children but cannot be confirmed independently (e.g. without the use of FC/S2C/RPM (speech is often discouraged, not encouraged during facilitation—See Katharine’s blog post here).
In other words, the facilitators are, through physical, visual, and auditory cueing and with varying degrees of awareness, writing down their own thoughts during FC sessions but attributing the FC-generated messages to their client or child.
I’m not saying all facilitators are consciously cueing their clients all of the time. As difficult as it may be to believe, the research to date shows that, due to psychological factors such as motivated reasoning and non-conscious muscle movements (e.g. the ideomotor response), many facilitators are unaware of the extent to which they control letter selection. It is, however, getting harder to argue that these cues are “inadvertent” as we see different facilitators using the exact same hand signals and verbal cues with their clients (especially with S2C and RPM-style FC).
Facilitators are also taught in FC workshops not to test for authorship and to “presume competence” in their clients. So, even if the cues were inadvertent, it’s unlikely the facilitators would ever be made aware of just how much they were influencing letter selection. Whether by default or by design, this focus away from facilitator behavior discourages facilitators from noticing errors in their own “facilitation” skills and/or expressing doubt about the technique. Facilitators, instead, focus on the “hits” or times FC seems to be “working” and forget or downplay the “misses” or times when the FC message are incorrect or can be explained through other means.
Image by Taylor Wright
Let’s look at some examples of “telepathic” transference from Episode 7 as reported by the facilitators featured in the podcast:
The child literally wrote (via FC) what the mother/facilitator was thinking.
The student typed out (via FC) the paraprofessional’s password.
The teacher/facilitator thought a question and the student (via FC) answered the question without the teacher talking aloud.
The child typed out (via FC) that she liked to listen to music., a behavior easily confirmed by watching the child’s non-verbal communication and behaviors when music is played in her presence (e.g., they put on a song and the child claps, dances, or smiles).
The facilitator (who doesn’t live in the same household) burned a cake and the child (via FC) wrote that there was a fire in the facilitator’s apartment.
The facilitator arrived late to school and the child typed (via FC) the reason why (e.g., there were three turkeys in the road).
The child typed (via FC) in several different languages (Portuguese, English, Hebrew, Spanish, hieroglyphics). She also worked with several different facilitators. It would be interesting to know what languages the facilitators speak and which of the facilitators knew enough about hieroglyphics to decipher them in an FC lesson. (They didn’t disclose this information in the episode)
The facilitated messages reflected religious beliefs or prophesies that can’t be confirmed independently (e.g., without facilitation) with the child, but either directly or non-directly reflect the facilitator’s outlook. Facilitators are taught in FC-workshops to look for “unknown” or unusual content to confirm authorship, but anyone who’s done a crossword puzzle or attended trivia night with friends will know that sometimes we “know” information without remembering where we acquired that information or that we even knew the information in the first place. That applies to facilitators during FC sessions as well. Katharine talks about a facilitator who, purportedly, didn’t know the word “Shabbat” in a blog post titled I’ve Been Buried Under Years of Autism Miracle Stories.
The child, purportedly, received and/or sent telepathic messages from individuals all over the world. This cannot be confirmed by the child independently (e.g., without facilitation) but it does seem to reflect facilitator beliefs in this idea of “The Hill” being perpetuated by Dickens and Diane Hennacy Powell. “The Hill” is, purportedly, an invisible gathering place where nonspeaking individuals meet telepathically to help each other out and exchange ideas. Marvel Comics also has a place called “The Hill.” I wonder if that’s where the idea came from? (Or something similar from popular culture that’s captured the imaginations of facilitators to explain this inner life they believe nonspeaking individuals with autism have).
The person put his hand on an open book and absorbed all the information in it. He then explained the contents of the book to the facilitator. The facilitator claims the person told her the information verbally, but I find this very difficult to believe. The facilitator also stated that she was reading esoteric, metaphysical books at the time and that she was able to “receive” telepathic messages from some of her students, so, to me at least, this person is an “unreliable” narrator. I am, however, not doubting that she’s sincere about what she thinks happened during the exchange.
I believe it’s possible that most facilitators are sincere in their belief that the source of the FC-generated messages is other-worldly, but, I find it infuriating that the “experts” featured in the podcast (everyone from Dickens and Powell to Joe, the former lawyer, in Episode 7) appear to have no interest in disavowing their clients of their belief that facilitator-dependent techniques can lead to independent communication. The scientific community recognized FC almost from its inception (as early as the 1970s) as a form of automatic writing originating from and representing thoughts not of the individuals being subjected to the technique but of the facilitators. (See the references listed in the Ideomotor Response section of our website) It’s not like today’s Telepathy Tapes “experts” are peddling their pseudoscientific wares 30 years ago when there were very few reliably controlled studies of FC to read and consider. FC was discredited in the United States by the mid-1990s. I believe proponents’ ideas about and promotion of FC and telepathy comes at the cost of ignoring the existing body of research into these phenomena.
Rather than tell parents the truth about FC and provide them with the appropriate support to access legitimate evidence-based Augmentative and Alternative Communication methods and techniques for their children, Dickens and the rest of the “experts” featured on the podcast avoid asking the one question that could absolve these parents of their superstitious belief in FC and telepathy: who is controlling letter selection?
There must be better ways to help parents cope with what must be at times the overwhelming task of raising a child with profound autism than leading them on a wild goose chase about FC-generated stories of supernatural gifts that only nonspeaking individuals with autism can possess.
Authorship testing doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does have to be rigorously controlled. Here, Howard Shane from Boston Children's Hospital uses pictures and a file folder to test for authorship. (From Prisoners of Silence, 1993)
Given my personal experience with FC (see Boynton, 2012), I don’t understand why authorship testing isn’t the first thing on people’s minds rather than the last. Except, I guess, that the promoters of FC (or the Telepathy Tapes for that matter) don’t want people looking too closely at the facilitators’ behaviors.
I find it ironic that in January 2025, the International Association for Spelling as Communication (I-ASC) posted a statement on their website distancing themselves from the telepathy claims. This was, in my opinion, an attempt to position themselves as an organization that supports evidence-based, science-based methods. I find this a bit hypocritical since the promoters of FC/S2C/RPM have, largely, resisted testing for authorship under conditions that blind facilitators from test stimuli since the mid-1990s.
And, while Joe from Episode 7 boldly claims FC methods have improved since the early 1990s (most likely referring to S2C/RPM-style FC where the facilitator holds a letter board in the air while the client extends a finger toward it), a systematic review completed in 2019 shows that there is no evidence to prove proponent claims of communication independence for those being subjected to RPM. This is not surprising, since proponents of RPM refuse to participate in the studies. As far as I know, proponents have not produced any reliably controlled evidence to back up their claims of communication independence in the intervening years (e.g., 2019 to 2025), even though we are assured by our commenters (almost weekly) that there are many people who’ve graduated from FC and can type completely independently.
I keep asking proponents for the links to reliably controlled studies that address facilitator cueing and document these successes, but, so far, no one has been able to provide me with that information. My own searches (and those of my colleagues) have also come up empty.
Image from “Tell Them You Love Me” (2023)
In Episode 7, we learned that proponents of FC/S2C/RPM are encouraging the families of individuals being subjected to the techniques to make medical and relationship decisions based on FC-generated—and now telepathic—messages.
This isn’t altogether new.
Besides a cringe-worthy film (called “Influence”) promoting “facilitated” intimate relationships between nonspeaking individuals and an even more disturbing song (called “Four in the Bedroom) that has the facilitators acting as “chaperones” even in the bedroom, there is a documented history of false allegations of abuse and facilitator crimes, which the FC community seems to ignore or rationalize away, but that major organizations warn against.
Most organizations with statements opposing FC caution that messages obtained using the technique should not be used to make major life decisions. I think encouraging people to treat FC-generated messages the same way they would treat messages independently produced by individuals using speech, typed messages, or legitimate forms of AAC sets a dangerous precedent. (See links below to the Anna Stubblefied case and reviews of the film “Tell Them You Love Me”).
And, while proponents have already been successful in getting FCed individuals through university (e.g. Oberlin College, Rollins College, Syracuse University, UCLA, Vanderbilt), the parents of FCed individuals in Episode 7 seem to have their sights set on Harvard and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I can only hope that these institutions have policies in place to test authorship for individuals being subjected to facilitator-dependent techniques. Otherwise, how will the professors know who is completing the coursework and earning the degrees? (See The Case of the Disappearing Opposition Statement for an example of a college policy regarding FC that ensured students—and not their facilitators—were completing the coursework).
In closing, as the claims being made in the Telepathy Tapes drift off into the realm of unbelievability and fantasy, I can only hope that, rather than heeding Dickens’ call to reject scientific inquiry (aka “materialism”), that listeners will recognize that the extraordinary claims of supernatural powers in nonspeaking individuals with autism require scientifically rigorous evidence as proof of the existence of telepathy (and FC authorship). Anecdotes and feel-good miracle stories are not enough to “shift the paradigm.” And by evidence, I mean the kind that can only come through rigorously controlled testing. To me, this issue is too important to take an “emperor’s new clothes” approach to the stories being told on the behalf of the nonspeaking individuals who, in many cases, cannot advocate for themselves.
If researchers want to explore the concept of telepathy, fine, but do it responsibly and first rule out facilitator interference with letter selection in all forms of facilitator-dependent techniques: FC, S2C, RPM, Spellers Method, Supported Typing. I suspect that, if they do the authorship testing under reliably controlled conditions before expanding their research into telepathy, the results of the authorship testing may lead them in a whole different direction.
References and Recommended Reading
Boynton, J. (2012). Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6:1, 3-13. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.674680
Hemsley, B., Bryant, L., Schlosser, R.W., Shane, H.C., Lang, R., Paul, D, Banajee, M., Ireland, M. (2018). Systematic review of facilitated communication 2014-2018 finds no new evidence that messages delivered using facilitated communication are authored by the person with disability. Autism and Developmental Language Impairments, 3, 1-8. DOI: 10.1177/2396941518821570
Schlosser, R.W., Hemsley, B., Shane, H. et al. (2019). Rapid prompting method and autism spectrum disorder: Systematic review exposes lack of evidence. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 6, 403–412.
Reviews of “Tell Them You Love Me:
Batey, Eve. (2024, June 15). Tell Them You Love Me tells a complicated and painful story with grace. Reality Blurred.
Kennedy, Julian. (2024, June 23). Tell Them You Love Me (2023) Review. Cinematic Diversions.
Latif, Leila. (2024, February 5). Tell Them You Love Me review - this chilling documentary is vital, challenging TV. The Guardian (Online)
Mercuri, Monica. (2024, June 19). The Bizarre True Story Behind Netflix’s ‘Tell Them You Love Me’—Where is Anna Stubblefield now? Forbes.
Phillipson, Daisy (2024, June 18). True crime fans struggle through “hard to stomach” Netflix documentary. Dexterto.
Schager, Nick. (2024, June 13). Did a white professor sexually abuse her disabled black patient - or was it love? Daily Beast.
Shane, Howard. (2024, July 7). Netflix’s hit documentary ‘Tell Them You Love Me’ highlights a misleading promise. MSNBC.
Vyse, Stuart. (2024, June, 24). When Silence Speaks: The Harmful Pseudoscience of Facilitated Communication. Reality’s Last Stand.
Wallace, Lindsay Lee. (2024, June 17). The chilling story behind the documentary Tell Them You Love Me. Time.
YouTube Video Review
Grande, Todd. (2024, Jun3 19). ‘Diaper-Dodging’ Professor Arrested After Sex with Disabled Man | Anna Stubblefield Case Analysis.
Reporting Live From My Sofa (2024, June 27). Reviewing and Reacting to, “Tell Them You Love Me,”…Absolute Cringe Fest
Van der Vaart, Andrew. (2024, June 22). Anna Stubblefield and the Pygmalion Delusion.
Blog Posts in this series
Channeling lies on the Telepathy Tapes—including lies about autism and lying
FC’s Lesser Known Side: Thoughts about the Telepathy Tapes (Episode 1)
Fighting FC pseudoscience requires a broader critique of paranormal beliefs—here’s mine
Proving Facilitator Authorship in FC/RPM Messages: Thoughts about The Telepathy Tapes (Episode 3)
Open Skepticism of FC or Willful Ignorance? Thoughts about the Telepathy Tapes (Episode 4)
What Did Bernard Rimland Actually Say about ESP and Savant Skills?
Inside the Minds of Facilitators: Thoughts About the Telepathy Tapes (Episode 5)
Evidence or Anecdote? Thoughts About the Telepathy Tapes (Episode 6)