Today’s blog post is a continuation of my review of a February 2025 interview Joe Rogan did with Telepathy Tapes host Ky Dickens. The Telepathy Tapes is a popular podcast series trying to bypass the scientific community to advance the idea that nonspeaking individuals with profound autism have telepathic abilities. (See links below for critical reviews of the Telepathy Tapes podcast).

Ky Dickens on “The Joe Rogan Experience” (February 2025)

Despite claiming to be a “science nerd,” Dickens seems to have an extremely poor understanding of the difference between (opinion-based) anecdotes and (evidence-based) reliably controlled testing. She also has a limited understanding of the history of FC and its evolution from touch-based FC to the so-called no-touch forms of FC being featured in the podcast (e.g., Spelling to Communicate/S2C and Rapid Prompting Method/RPM). In the Rogan interview and the Telepathy Tapes podcast itself, Dickens chooses to completely ignore or downplay the existing reliably controlled evidence that demonstrates facilitator control over letter selection. She demonizes organizations like the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) as being against people with disabilities and rejects the scientific evidence outright as being “materialist.” According to Dickens, anyone who questions FC/S2C/RPM authorship (or thinks critically about her claims of telepathic abilities in nonspeaking autistic individuals) is ableist and against people with disabilities.

I ended my blog post last time saying I would touch on three claims that Dickens made in the Rogan interview that caught my attention:

That S2C and RPM are not FC
That the FC movement was derailed in the 1990s primarily because of a spate of false allegations of abuse cases, and
Groups opposing FC, like ASHA and some educational systems, are against spelling.

Note: I’m only going to highlight a few key points about the history of FC in this blog post, but anyone looking for a deeper analysis can check out the Critiques of FC, Systematic Reviews, and/or Controlled Studies sections of our website. Another good resource is the 1993 documentary Prisoners of Silence which is still relevant (though it would be great if someone of Jon Palfreman’s caliber would revisit the topic of FC/S2C/RPM).

Some of the information included in this blog post may be repetitive for regular followers, but I felt like it is worth repeating given the amount of misinformation and disinformation currently being published about FC/S2C/RPM.

Claim #1: S2C and RPM are not FC.

Proponents would like people to think that the so-called newer, no-touch forms of FC are not related to the original touch-based form of FC that was introduced to the United States by Douglas Biklen in the late 1980s/early 1990s. While Rosemary Crossley is credited for “inventing” FC in Australia, Biklen is credited with spearheading the movement in the United States at Syracuse University’s “Facilitated Communication Institute.” The institute has undergone several name changes since 1990, but until recently remained ground zero for FC.

Syracuse University (Image by Kiran891 Wikimedia Commons)

Note: I haven’t checked lately, but last winter, I was alerted by one of our contacts (thank you!) that Syracuse has dropped its official FC program. The skeptical part of me wonders if they’ve gone underground, since I also found out that if someone asks about FC, the staff will direct people to a local facilitator—someone who they’ve hired in the past to help train facilitators on campus. So have they really abandoned FC?

Anyway…

By 1994-1995, researchers in the United States had conducted reliably controlled studies into FC authorship and found that when the facilitators were blinded from test stimuli (e.g., pictures, words, numbers), the FC-generated messages were either unintelligible (e.g. indicating the clients couldn’t spell) and/or the words were spelled correctly, but had nothing to do with the content being tested (e.g. indicating that facilitators were guessing at the answers). Some tests involved the use of pictures where the facilitator and client were individually shown pictures and then asked to spell out the name of the picture. Neither the facilitator nor the client could see the other’s pictures. In every instance, the FC-generated message was based on the picture(s) the facilitator saw and proved that the facilitators, not their clients, were controlling letter selection. Hundreds of facilitator-client pairs were tested in educational and institutional settings across the country with thousands of trials—all with the same result. (See Controlled Studies)

I’m going to jump to claim #2 before weighing in on whether S2C and RPM are forms of FC.

Claim #2: The FC movement was derailed in the 1990s because of false allegations of abuse.

Excerpt from Paul Heinrich’s Suffering at the Hands of the Protectors (Sydney Morning Herald, February 16, 1992)

Proponents claim that the sole reason FC got a bad name in the 1990s was because of a handful of “poorly trained” facilitators who misused FC and brought false allegations of abuse against the family members of their FCed clients. When I hear this, I like to point out that Rosemary Crossley (the founder of FC) and eight of her facilitators were among the first ever to bring false allegations of abuse charges against a family member of one of their clients. (See Paul Heinrich’s articles below). Surely the founder of FC was not poorly trained. I’ll also point out that most of the authorship tests conducted in the United States in the 1990s did not involve allegations of abuse and included many facilitators who were trained directly by the staff at the Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse University. (See Controlled Studies)

The false allegations of abuse cases (which, by the way, are still happening) may have expedited reliably controlled testing of what was then being marketed as a “new and revolutionary” technique, but if the FC movement was “derailed,” it was because the testing showed, time and again, that facilitators, not their clients, were controlling letter selection. To date, proponents still have not been able to offer any reliably controlled evidence to prove their claims of communication independence when clients are subjected to FC/S2C/RPM.

As a result of the controlled testing, organizations like ASHA, as well as the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, came out with statements opposing FC use, citing lack of scientific evidence, prompt dependency, facilitator cueing, and potential harms (such as false allegations of abuse) among the reasons they recommended not using the technique. Since the mid-1990s, dozens of other organizations have followed suit. In addition, most opposition statements also warn against using FC-generated messages in courts or to make major life decisions (e.g., health/medical, relationships/marriage, housing, guardianship or other legal decisions).

Rather than abandoning FC when faced with scientifically rigorous evidence that facilitators, not their clients or loved ones, were producing FC-generated messages, proponents developed variants of FC that reduced facilitator touch (e.g., Rapid Prompting Method, Informative Pointing, Spelling to Communicate). By 2010, Syracuse University had changed the name of the Facilitated Communication Institute to the Institute on Communication Inclusion (ICI) to “fly under the radar” (See Engber’s The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield) and proponents had started substituting terms like “supported typing” to mask the fact they were using FC. We’ve collected over 20 different names for FC and have listed them on the homepage of our website.

It should be noted, too, that the ICI underwent yet another name change a few years ago and is considered currently part of the Center on Disability and Inclusion (CDI) at the university. I’m curious why now (in 2025) Syracuse University has (at least publicly) distanced itself from FC by dropping the program, which included bi-annual training sessions for its facilitators. What’s changed? Christine Ashby, a disciple of Biklen and director of the CDI has championed FC since Biklen’s retirement in 2014. I find it difficult to believe someone as indoctrinated as Ashby would drop the FC program without political and/or financial pressure to do so. (I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in that meeting).

S2C/RPM proponents claim they never touch their clients during letter selection, but a closer look at many S2C/RPM videos shows that facilitators do, indeed, touch their clients on the shoulder, neck, back, and other body parts during facilitation. And, while physical touch may indeed be reduced significantly (as compared with traditional no-touch forms of FC), facilitators rely heavily on verbal cues and on visual cues to “support” their clients in finding the target letters on a letter board or keyboard.

Listen to how Soma Mukhopadhyay trains one of her clients to respond to the verbal cues she adds to the ends of words. (FCisNotScience, YouTube 2025)

Technically, there is no reliably controlled evidence to prove or disprove communication independence with S2C/RPM, (See Systematic Reviews) but only because current-day facilitators refuse to participate in reliably controlled testing. Some facilitators claim it’s unethical for them to participate in authorship testing (See Katharine’s series: Spelling to Communicate Goes on Trial). But, thanks to pro-FC literature, including books, movies, podcasts and YouTube videos, facilitator behaviors can be analyzed enough to raise red flags about facilitator cueing and control over letter selection. (See Actually there are published authorship results for S2C/RPM…and they aren’t good). And, based on these informal observations, there is enough of a concern about facilitator interference with letter selection and enough similarities with touch-based FC for groups like ASHA to oppose the use of S2C/RPM. ASHA’s stated on their website that if proponents can produce reliably controlled evidence to prove communication independence, they will revisit the topic. To date, proponents have failed to take ASHA up on its offer.

Now, to answer claim #2: The common denominator with all facilitator-dependent techniques, whether they are touch-based or not, is facilitator interference with letter selection through physical, visual and/or auditory cueing. And, for that reason, we use FC as an umbrella term that includes S2C and RPM.

And finally…

Claim #3: Groups opposing FC, like ASHA, and some educational systems are against spelling.

*A list of no-tech, low-tech, and high-tech types of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) from ASHA’s website.*

When proponents use the term “spelling,” they aren’t talking about the act of learning how to identify the symbols of written language (e.g., letters and their sounds) to use in the formation of words and sentences. Rather, they mean the techniques of FC/S2C/RPM. They use “spelling” interchangeably with Spelling to Communicate or Supported Typing or Rapid Prompting Method to, in my opinion, purposefully hide the fact that they’re promoting FC.

Spelling and/or typing is a recognized and legitimate form of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) for nonspeaking individuals—if the client has the prerequisite skills to understand and use written language. I’ve chosen an excerpt from the Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication at the University of Pretoria by way of explanation, but ASHA and the other organizations that oppose FC/S2C/RPM are in agreement:

From the outset, we want to clarify that spelling, as a form of communication, has long been an accepted AAC method. However, it should only be recommended and used if based on a feature matching process (McMahon et al., 2023), which determined that spelling is the best way for an individual to communicate. Also, as with all other AAC methods, the messages generated should be those of the person using AAC and not those of the facilitator.

A critique of just one of the “telepathy tests” from The Telepathy Tapes (2025). The Telepathy Tapes and Facilitated Communication (IZARD): cueing in a no-touch form of FC.

Before I close out today’s blog post, I want to say that I don’t expect listeners of The Telepathy Tapes or the Joe Rogan Experience to have as deep an understanding of FC/S2C/RPM as I do—or that many of my colleagues do. However, when online influencers decide to promote FC/S2C/RPM, I expect them to have done their homework—homework that goes beyond just talking to a few proponents of FC. Based on the hours I’ve spent listening to Dickens on the Telepathy Tapes and this (the Rogan) interview, I feel confident in saying that Dickens is not interested in hearing from the critics of FC. She’s only interested in surrounding herself with people whose critical thinking skills on this topic are functionally non-existent (like Joe Rogan’s credulous acceptance of Dicken’s outrageous claims in this interview).

In my next (and hopefully last) installment in this series, I’ll focus on some of the specific examples Dickens mentioned in the interview that proved to her that telepathy in these individuals is real and discuss why I think the Rogan-Dickens interview falls into the realms of conspiracy theories, fantasies, and urban legends.

Review of Joe Rogan’s Interview with Telepathy Tapes Host Ky Dickens: The Stuff of Conspiracy Theories, Fantasy, and Urban Legends (Part 2)

Facilitated Communication: a thoroughly discredited yet persistent technique

Review of Joe Rogan’s Interview with Telepathy Tapes Host Ky Dickens: The Stuff of Conspiracy Theories, Fantasy, and Urban Legends (Part 2)

FC/RPM/S2C News Roundup: January to July, 2025

Facilitated Communication: a thoroughly discredited yet persistent technique