Review of Joe Rogan’s Interview with Telepathy Tapes Host Ky Dickens: The Stuff of Conspiracy Theories, Fantasy, and Urban Legends (Part 3)

FC in the MediaSpelling to CommunicateTelepathy Tapes Review
Written By Janyce Boynton

Today’s blog post is the third installment of my review of Joe Rogan’s interview with Telepathy Tapes host Ky Dickens. I’d intended for this to be the last blog post in the series but based on the feedback I received on the last two installments, I felt it was worth revisiting some of the issues I’ve discussed in previous blog posts.

Joe Rogan and Ky Dickens (from the Joe Rogan Experience, 2025)

When I reviewed the Telepathy Tapes podcast (links below), I mentioned that the podcast itself seemed like an advertisement for Spelling to Communicate (S2C) or Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), which are so-called “no-touch” forms of FC. Since then, one of our contacts (thank you!) sent me a link to a separate Ky Dickens interview in which she mentions she is (or was at the time of the interview) training to become an S2C facilitator. I find it curious that, in the first 10 episodes of the Telepathy Tapes podcast, Dickens fails to mention this fact. It’s not insignificant that her perspective as narrator of the podcast is that of a facilitator.

Regardless, this information—the fact that she’s a “trained” facilitator—explains, at least in part, why any sliver of skepticism Dickens had about FC (and perhaps about telepathy) at the beginning of the podcast seems to have been completely trained out of her by the time she finished Season 1. My experience with facilitators is the deeper they become entrenched in the FC belief system, the less likely they are to seek out information that threatens to challenge that belief (for example, the significant body of research that demonstrates facilitator authorship when facilitators are blinded from test stimuli—See controlled studies).

Dickens declares her unwillingness to acknowledge the science behind FC (or in this case, the lack of it) every single time she uploads a new episode:

“For decades, very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and their classrooms and nobody has believed them, nobody has listened to them, but on this podcast, we do.”

Here Dickens references telepathy (the main theme of her podcast) but the “very specific group of people” she refers to includes all the nonspeaking autistic individuals featured in Season 1 that are being subjected to some form of FC by their facilitators (sometimes parents, sometimes educators). Without the FC-generated messages attributed to the nonspeaking individuals that underly and bolster the facilitators’ claims of telepathic abilities, the whole premise of her show falls apart. None of the claims being made on behalf of non-speaking autistic individuals have been independently verified under reliably controlled conditions.

In my two prior blog posts on the Rogan-Dickens interview (links below), I highlighted some gaps in Dickens’ understanding of the history of FC. My comments received a bit of pushback on social media by proponents who, equally, do not seem to have a grasp on how FC has “evolved” over the past 30 years. Have they even read reports from their own sources? (Doubtful; the popularity of FC/S2C/RPM seems to spread largely through autism support groups and conferences initiated by people already using the techniques, where the urban-legend style word-of-mouth historical accounting of FC shifts and changes with the retelling).

Cover to Portia Iversen’s book “Strange Son” that recounts the early days of Soma Mukhopadhyay’s attempt to popularize her version of FC that she dubbed “Rapid Prompting Method” (RPM)

I suggest as a starting point that people read Portia Iversen’s book Strange Son (reviewed here and here) and/or Tracy Kedor’s book Ido in Autismland (reviewed here) to learn how facilitators originally using touch-based forms of FC were aware of and, perhaps, worried about critics’ concerns about touch-based cueing and, instead of responsibly addressing the problem, adapted their technique(s) to reduce the amount of physical touch they (the facilitators) were using during letter selection. I’m not saying these facilitators were being intentionally deceptive, but I do think they were, perhaps, unaware of (or uninterested/disinterested in) the extent to which visual and auditory cues can and do influence letter selection (just as many facilitators are unaware of how little physical touch it takes to influence letter selection—See What we can learn about FC, the pseudo-ESP phenomenon, and facilitator cueing from Kezuka’s “The Role of Touch in Facilitated Communication”).

Apparatus used in a 1997 study to test for facilitator cueing through subtle changes of pressure as the facilitator/client “searched” for letters on a keyboard. (Kezuka, 1997)

And, even if these attempts at “no-touch” forms of FC were successful at reducing or eliminating facilitator cueing, none of the promoters of these so-called “new and improved” forms of FC have subjected their technique(s) to reliably controlled testing. They’ve just forged ahead under the assumption that physical touch was the only way clients can be cued. But, Iversen’s book provides a first-hand account of how “inventor” Soma Mukhopadhyay failed two blind tests (first using touch-based FC and then later using her no-touch form of FC that she’d dubbed Rapid Prompting Method or “RPM”). She was caught off guard with the results (particularly with the second test involving RPM) and quite angry at the researcher who’d read her son (Tito) a paragraph from a book while she (Soma) was out of visual and auditory range. (She’d only left the testing room for a moment). How dare the researcher want to make sure Tito, not Soma, was answering the questions posed in the test situation! This experience is, I suspect, the reason why Soma trained her facilitators not to submit to such testing.

Note: This “no test” guideline was present when I was trained as a facilitator in the early 1990s, but has intensified over the years to an aggressive stance against testing for authorship.

A 1992 newsletter promoting FC and telling its users to “avoid testing for competence.” (Word of Mouth Newsletter, 1992)

I’ve also discussed how FC founder Rosemary Crossley and eight of her facilitators were among the first in the world to falsely accuse a client’s family members of abuse. (see Paul Heinrich’s articles in the false allegations of abuse section of our website). False allegations of abuse have plagued FC proponents since its inception and are not generally the result of “poorly trained” facilitators, as proponents would have people believe. Most of the reliably controlled authorship testing completed in the 1990s that raised serious concerns about facilitator control over letter selection did not involve false allegations of abuse claims. Since my last blog post(s), several of our contacts asked whether false allegations of abuse have reduced since many of today’s facilitators are parents using no-touch forms of FC. Anecdotally, I can tell you that false allegations of abuse cases continue to be a problem—especially for family members, caregivers and/or educators who express doubt about FC/S2C/RPM. (See Stuart Vyse’s A Life Shattered by Pseudoscience). Not all these cases achieve the level of national or international attention in the press. In at least a percentage of these cases, the facilitators prefer to drop the charges than participate in court-ordered reliably controlled testing for authorship. As Katharine wrote about in her “S2C on Trial” series (links below), today’s facilitators are being taught that it is unethical for them to participate in testing designed to separate facilitator behaviors from those of their clients and rule out (or rule in) facilitator control over letter selection.

A variety of ways facilitators cue their clients in FC/S2C/RPM (images from various pro-FC films and YouTube videos)

In the Rogan/Dickens interview I’m reviewing, Dickens set the tone for the interview by vaguely defining what she meant by “spelling” (e.g., the use of facilitator-dependent techniques such as FC/S2C/RPM) vs. what Rogan and 98% of his listeners consider spelling (e.g., the act of joining letters together to form meaningful words and sentences). I believe proponents deliberately blur the lines to make it sound like speech/language pathologists (SLPs) and others are somehow against allowing nonspeaking individuals access to letter boards, keyboards, or other communication devices that would enable them to communicate their thoughts independently (or in other words, without interference from a facilitator). Upon hearing that SLPs were “against spelling,” Rogan was, rightly, upset by the prospect of limiting individuals’ access to appropriate communication techniques and devices. But, as I pointed out, in framing the FC/telepathy “debate” in this way, Dickens (and other proponents) are misrepresenting the American Speech/Language/Hearing Association’s (ASHA) opposition to FC and to S2C/RPM. The problem critics have with FC/S2C/RPM and other facilitator-dependent techniques is (overt or covert) facilitator control over letter selection. I’ve covered ASHA’s position statements regarding FC and RPM in other blog posts, so I won’t go into detail here, but I strongly recommend that people interested in learning more about why ASHA and other organizations oppose facilitator-dependent techniques check out the Opposition Statements page of our website.

I named this series of blog posts “The Stuff of Conspiracy Theories, Fantasy, and Urban Legends,” which is what happens when an idea (like FC/S2C/RPM) captures people’s imaginations through anecdotes and testimonials (aka word-of-mouth) but is not grounded in rigorously controlled scientific evidence. I say this as someone who got caught up in the illusion of FC in the early 1990s, so I am not unsympathetic to those who’ve adopted FC/S2C/RPM with the belief that it works. But nonspeaking individuals with profound autism and other disabilities deserve more from their caregivers and educators than jumping on the bandwagon of pseudoscience just because (to the facilitators) it “feels” like or “looks” like it works.

Proponents of FC/S2C/RPM—and now ardent believers in telepathic abilities in these individuals—want us to believe FC “works” because they say so. They want us to believe, largely on faith, that these individuals have telepathic abilities when we (the critics) can observe in the snippets of testing sessions provided by Dickens on the Telepathy Tapes website (behind a paywall) that facilitators, not their clients, are controlling access to the letter boards (e.g., by holding them in the air) and/or are providing visual, auditory, and physical cues during letter selection. Admittedly, analyzing these videos can only take us so far. We don’t, for example, know how many practice sessions the facilitators had before capturing what to them was the most “successful” examples of facilitation in the carefully curated Telepathy Tape videos. We also don’t know if the FCed individuals have any independent literacy skills or the extent of their ability to understand and use spoken, written, or nonverbal language (without facilitator interference). We don’t have access to their medical records or the results of a complete speech/language evaluation by a licensed speech/language pathologist trained in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The only reliable way to test for authorship in FC/S2C/RPM is through reliably controlled testing, but proponents ardently (and aggressively) refuse to participate in such tests. (This type of testing, by the way, could bolster proponent claims of telepathic abilities by controlling for external influences that might influence the process of sending and receiving “telepathic” information, so I’m not sure why proponents are so resistant to it).

But, for now, we just have videos and other proponent-produced media (e.g., interviews, books, movies, news articles) to give us insight into the facilitators’ mindset. And, while facilitators are very good at marketing their FC/S2C/RPM “successes” through channels that (attempt to) bypass the scientific community, it seems to me there is a lot to learn by examining how misinformation and disinformation is propagated through these feel-good, miracle stories by believers in FC/S2C/RPM who are resistant to scientific inquiry.

In my next installment of this series, I will direct your attention to select statements made in the Rogan/Dickens interview that, to me at least, seem to be the stuff of conspiracy theories, fantasy, and urban legends.

Janyce Boynton
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Disability Scoop on “Communication Method Finally Gives Nonverbal Woman A Voice”