Review of Diane Hennacy Powell’s Interview with Scott Barry Kaufman: Open Skepticism (Part 1)
One of our contacts (thank you!) brought to my attention an interview Diane Hennacy Powell did with Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast, in February 2025. In the interview, Diane Hennacy Powell, a self-described neuropsychiatrist, talked about her belief that extra-sensory perception (ESP) is a savant skill and that all nonspeaking individuals with profound autism have telepathic abilities. I first learned about Powell from the Telepathy Tapes podcast which I have reviewed (links to prior blog posts below). Powell traces “evidence” of ESP as a savant skill back to Bernard Rimland but, as I covered in a blog post called “What did Bernard Rimland Really Say about ESP and Savant Skills?” it seems Powell greatly exaggerated both the prevalence of and proof for ESP in nonspeaking individuals with autism.
The Kaufman-Powell interview took place just as the Telepathy Tapes was at the height of its popularly in the United States. Powell played a predominant role as an expert in the podcast, especially in the earlier episodes of Season 1. As followers of our blog already know, all the nonspeaking autistic individuals featured in the Telepathy Tapes podcast are being subjected to some form of FC (including what seems to be a hybrid form of FC where the mother/facilitator holds a letter board in one hand and her daughter’s face in the other during letter selection to get the girl to reach toward the letter board and “independently” select letters).
I say this in pretty much every blog post I write, but considering that many people apparently don’t know (or know, but prefer to downplay) this fact, it bears repeating that to date there are no reliably controlled tests that prove facilitator dependent techniques produce communications that are free from facilitator influence and control. (See Controlled Studies and Systematic Reviews). In fact, FC authorship tests that control for facilitator behaviors (e.g., visual, auditory, physical cueing) consistently show that the facilitators, not their clients or loved ones, are producing the messages. But this niggling fact doesn’t prevent Powell (or the other experts featured in the Telepathy Tapes podcast) from believing—or wanting to believe—that the facilitator-dependent, FC-generated messages represent the thoughts of the individuals being subjected to FC. To proponents, FC “works” because people being subjected to FC say it works (as long as the facilitator is within visual and auditory range).
In the Kaufman interview, Powell refers specifically to Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), which is (supposedly) a no-touch form of FC where the facilitator holds a letter board or stencil in the air while the individual extends a finger (or pencil) toward it. But all the Telepathy Tapes videos (tucked behind a paywall) show that the facilitators are using visual, auditory, and physical cueing (with, I suspect, varying degrees of conscious awareness) to “receive” the so-called telepathic messages from their clients or loved ones. In fact, the facilitators are given the target answers in each of the tests conducted by Powell and others throughout the episodes. In the Kaufman interview, when Powell talks about how the nonspeaking individuals have disclosed to their parents that they can read their parents’ minds, she fails to mention that theses disclosures are the result of facilitator-generated FCed communications. In other words, the messages reflect the facilitator/parents’ thoughts and not those of the nonspeaking individuals.
The Psychology Podcast episode is titled “Does Telepathy Exist?” and in the introduction to the podcast, Kaufman promises that he and Powell will discuss “evidence suggesting that telepathy might actually be real.”
The interview with Powell hadn’t even started and I had questions:
What evidence would they use to answer the question “does telepathy exist?” I’ve listened to, taken notes on, and reviewed Season 1 of the Telepathy Tapes (all ten episodes that ran about 45-50 minutes each) and found that Powell and the podcast host, Ky Dickens used a lot of anecdotes and testimonials to weave their (often anti-scientific) tale, but failed to produce any scientifically rigorous evidence to prove their claims of telepathic abilities in nonspeaking individuals with autism. Unless I missed it, I couldn’t find any podcast notes from the Kaufman interview that listed reliably sourced information backing up the claims Powell made during the show. I’d really hoped that Kaufman and/or Dickens would follow through as promised.
Why did Kaufman say, in his introduction to the episode, that the evidence he and Powell discussed in the interview “suggested that telepathy might actually be real” (italics mine). Wouldn’t the existence of scientifically rigorous evidence prove telepathy is real (at least in the instances where the “telepathic” individuals had passed the rigorous testing)?
Both Kaufman and Powell described themselves in the interview as middle-of-the-road, open-minded skeptics. I Googled the term “open skepticism” for a definition. There were several variations, but here’s the definition I liked best: “being open-minded and critical, requiring strong evidence before accepting claims, and being willing to change one’s views based on new evidence.”
I suspect most people like to think of themselves as “open skeptics” even if, in practice, they are not. But, for me, the key phrase in that definition is requiring strong evidence before accepting claims. And, by evidence, I don’t mean anecdotes and testimonials, which, as I’ve stated many times before are valuable in their own way as the beginning of the scientific process but are not reliably controlled evidence. I also don’t mean ignoring existing evidence just because it doesn’t fit in with a dearly held belief.
What I was hoping for in the Kaufman-Powell interview was evidence that alternative explanations had been ruled out—e.g., facilitator cueing and control in the so-called telepathic FC-generated messages, and/or outside influences, tricks, or coincidences in telepathic exchanges..
Powell and Dickens, in the Telepathy Tapes, make it sound like the scientific community isn’t interested in the study of telepathy, but without much effort, I found a bunch of articles on the topic. One article, written by psychologist Joseph Jastrow was published in 1938 and was titled “ESP, House of Cards.” The article critiqued a series of telepathy tests conducted by J.B. Rhines who Kaufman mentioned in his interview with Powell. Rhines’ book The Reach of the Mind, apparently is one of Kaufman’s favorites.
In his critique of Rhines’ telepathy tests, Jastrow mentions that the study of telepathy had been going on for at least 50 years prior to his writing the article and that despite an accumulation of “a vast amount of evidence” regarding the topic of telepathy, most of the evidence collected was “anecdotal, dubious, biased, and the issue of faulty observation and familiar human frailties.” (Jastrow, 1938, p. 13) Rhines’ tests, Jastrow went on to explain, were riddled with errors. He wrote:
To ascribe any results, even speculatively, to an extra-sensory source one must rigorously exclude all sensory clues—and that is not as simple a matter as it seems, for human eyes and ears and fingers are amazingly keen where interest is enlisted in deriving impressions from levels far below clear awareness.” (Jastrow, 1938, p. 16).
In my mind, anyway, Jastrow’s admonishment applies to the topic at hand and makes me wonder if, in 2025, we’ve evolved in our thinking at all. (Doubtful. Human beings, even highly educated and intelligent human beings, continue to fall for the illusion of FC, telepathy, and other tricks of the heart and mind).
Using Jastrow’s comment as a guide, for Powell to prove her claims that telepathy is a savant skill in nonspeaking FCed individuals with autism she would have to both:
Rule out all sensory clues provided by the facilitators during the FC sessions: visual cues (e.g., body movements and hand signals by the facilitators), verbal cues (e.g., changes in vocal inflection, the addition of the target letter at the end of words), and physical cues (e.g., touches to the wrist, elbow, shoulder, face or other body parts), and separate facilitator behaviors from those of the individuals being subjected to FC. (How else can researchers know the FC-generated messages are truly the independent thoughts of the non-speaking individuals?)
Exclude any other sensory clues that might occur between the senders and receivers of the supposed telepathic messages.
But Powell consistently rejects the idea that facilitators can cue their clients or loved ones during letter selection, particularly when they are using the so-called no-touch forms of FC like RPM. But as subtle as the cues can become over time, facilitators can and do cue their clients or loved ones during letter selection, often without directly touching them. Powell claims in the Kaufman interview that the autistic individuals have such highly developed hearing that they can pick up on the vibrations of their facilitators’ vocal cords as they (the facilitators) read the facilitated letters, numbers, and words to themselves, which is a highly imaginative explanation for verbal cueing. But, as an analysis of this RPM session featuring RPM inventor Soma Mukhopadhyay shows, the vocal inflections often aren’t that subtle. In lieu of reliably controlled authorship testing, observers of FC sessions just need to learn where to focus their attention to detect facilitator cueing.
In the interview, Kaufman reveals to his audience that he, Powell, and a colleague (Simon Baron-Cohen) intend to set up controlled testing—presumably to test the telepathic abilities in nonspeaking autistic individuals. Powell credulously supports the idea that FC-generated messages represent the independent thoughts of nonspeaking individuals, I’m hoping Kaufman, at least, will bring a level of skepticism and adherence to the scientific process that seems to be lacking in the others and include authorship testing of FC before moving on to tests of telepathic abilities.
Note: As of the writing of this blog post, I haven’t been able to track down any telepathy testing associated with Powell, Kaufman and Baron-Cohen. If anyone can confirm that testing has taken place and/or has links to journal articles discussing reliably controlled testing of the telepathic abilities of FCed individuals with autism, please let me know.
I’m going to end this blog post here, but in my next blog post I want to circle back to the idea of open skepticism and better define “strong evidence” by fact-checking some of the claims Powell made in the Kaufman interview. She sounds science-y and authoritative in her responses to Kaufman’s questions, but do her responses stand up to scrutiny?
References and Recommended Reading:
Hemsley, B., Beals, K., Lang, R., Schlosser, R. W., Shane, H., Simmons, W., … Todd, J. (2025). Safeguarding the communication rights of minimally- or non-speaking people who are vulnerable to Facilitated Communication, Rapid Prompting (Spellers Method) and variants. Research and Practice in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/23297018.2025.2544116
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
Jastrow, Joseph. (Winter 1938-1939). ESP, House of Cards. The American Scholar. Vol. 8 (1), 13-22.
Saloviita, T. (2018). Does Linguistic Analysis Confirm the Validity of Facilitated Communication? Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities. 33 (2), 91-99. DOI: 10.1177/1088357616646075
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 the Telepathy Tapes podcast are available here.