Podcasting is an incredibly odd medium. It’s more intimate than video, in that it mostly finds you in passive moments, occupying your ears while you commute, work out, do your food shop, or while you drift off to sleep. Yet, it feels more authentic and immediate than traditional radio – even as the podcasting industry increasingly centres around legacy media producers and celebrity vehicles – perhaps because you consume it on your schedule; it’s not for everyone all at once, it’s for just you, right then.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, when a podcast rushes from obscurity to become the next big thing. We saw it in 2014 with Sarah Koenig’s Serial, and the last decade or so has seen the rise to dominance, ubiquity and mass fortune of The Joe Rogan Experience – both shows that truly dominated and changed the podcasting standards, and shows that have been heavily criticised for their veracity (for an ongoing critique of the inaccuracies and pseudoscience of Rogan’s behemoth Spotify-backed podcast series, check out my new weekly show, The Know Rogan Experience).

The most recent show to emerge from nowhere and rise meteorically to the top of the podcasting pile, knocking even Rogan from his perch, has been documentary film maker Ky Dickens’ 10-part series, The Telepathy Tapes. Released in September 2024, Dickens sets out her stall in her very opening line, from episode one:

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

As Ky Dickens explains, the show ventures into claims of widespread telepathy via a group that is systematically dismissed: “non-speakers who often have autism”:

For decades parents and speakers haven’t told doctors educators and scientists that their kids are not in there. They’re not capable of communication or competent of learning. Imagine being one of those parents and discovering that everybody has been wrong about your child – they are in there, they are competent, and they can communicate. But then also discovering that your child can read your mind. Would you expect to be believed?

The makes some truly extraordinary claims about autistic people – we hear that people previously deemed to be non-verbal are, actually, capable of communicating perfectly well; in fact, not only are they able to answer questions that are put to them, they can accurately recount details of objects and pictures they haven’t actually looked at, and can answer questions not yet asked aloud.

In one episode, we’re told about an autistic child who put their hand onto a new book their teacher had recently read, and could tell their teacher exactly what happens in the book, by touch alone – that the child was effectively reading or ingesting the book by touch alone. It’s the kind of detail that would lead most people to ask follow-up questions and to probe deeper; in Dickens, we simply get a gasped “Wow!”.

If these feats sound like parlour tricks, reminiscent of a mentalism show, don’t worry: we’re told the purported telepathic abilities of autistic children and adults go much further.

According to the show, autistic children are able to see and speak to ghosts. They’re also able to project their consciousnesses out to a metaphysical place called The Hill, where thousands of telepathic non-verbal children from around the world gather to chat, exchange ideas, form friendships, and even have relationships with other non-verbal autistic people. The Hill isn’t exclusive to the non-verbal living; we’re told visitors are able to converse with and learn lessons from the greatest writers and thinkers of times gone by.

Dr Diane Hennacy Powell

From the very first episode, Ky Dickens and her production team – which includes the obligatory materialist skeptic who is converted by the feats they’ve witnessed – are led through a series of interviews, encounters and scientific tests by Dr Diane Hennacy Powell. Dickens explains, she discovered Powell on a podcast called Cosmos in You – it seems likely that it’s the May 2017 episode. There, in a clip that’s reproduced in The Telepathy Tapes, Powell is introduced as “a Johns Hopkins-trained neuropsychiatrist, speaker, researcher, and author” who joined host Suzannah Scully to “discuss the research she’s currently working on to study autistic savant and their telepathic abilities”.

Powell claims that her medical license was revoked after she published her 2009 book The ESP Enigma: the scientific case for psychic phenomena, but that she was reinstated after members of the board actually read the book. As Jonathan Jarry at McGill’s Office for Science and Society notes, publicly available documents from the Oregon Medical Board seem at odds with that interpretation, with the board’s concerns focusing more on her “disorganised approach to treatment” and “concerns over her management of patient medications” than any issues with her ESP research.

Powell’s work has continued in the time since her censure by the Oregan Medical Board, and her website includes a summary of her beliefs around psi phenomena:

Telepathy has been deemed impossible by most scientists, except for modern physicists who have observed far stranger phenomena at the quantum level of reality.

Psychologists and magicians know how easy it is to fool us, which is why they routinely attack the idea. This is ironic when neuroscientists are the only ones who have the credentials to really say if our model for how the brain functions would allow for direct mind-to-mind communication.

Her point here isn’t wholly clear, but it is true that magicians and psychologists have been highly critical of psi research, precisely because many of the purported demonstrations share resemble the kind of techniques they know can be used to fool people, or even to fool ourselves. She’s correct in saying that neuroscientists would have some insight into whether telepathy could be explained by the biology of our brains, but it’s first of all important to establish whether telepathy is real. Thus far, there is no compelling evidence to believe it is, and so the neuroscientists can stand down. Powell continues:

Because of our brain’s electromagnetic properties, I believe telepathy is possible.

Hundreds of studies on telepathy have shown positive results. These statistical studies aren’t taken seriously because their effect size is too small to prove something labeled “impossible.” Science has remained stuck with this circular reasoning for over a century.

This isn’t a fair summation of the scientific position on ESP. A study with a small effect size would still be accepted as ‘proof’ if the study were well-controlled, large enough to have sufficient statistical power, and its effects were reliably demonstrated. As it stands, we have hundreds of small-scale studies with flawed methodology, offering small effect sizes that don’t hold up to replication – in which case it is reasonable to conclude the effects are generated by noisy data, rather than a clear psi signal.

Rather than confront the inadequacies in psi research, Powell has developed her own hypotheses about who might be best placed to embrace their natural telepathic tendencies:

If anyone could prove telepathy, I predicted it would be non-vocal autistic children with savant skills.

Being incapable of speech from an early age increases their motivation to find an alternative means of communication with their caregivers, but that isn’t all. Autism expert Bernard Rimland, PhD reported “ESP” as existing in a small percentage of his patients, and considered it to be a savant skill.

As anyone who has a non-verbal person in their life will confirm, it isn’t a matter of motivation. But, tellingly, people who are non-verbal and unable to communicate would, necessarily, also be incapable of disconfirming Powell’s contention about their telepathic abilities. ‘The people most likely to prove me right are the ones incapable of telling me I’m wrong’ is, sadly, a recipe for self-deception. As is, in my opinion, a reliance on the autism expertise of Dr Bernard Rimland.

Rimland, chelation, and vaccines

Dr Bernard Rimland did indeed spend his career researching autism. However, the fruits of that research have not withstood the test of time. In 1964, he published his book, Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior, which claimed that autism was “triggered by environmental assaults” and could “be treated—or at least ameliorated—with biomedical and behavioural therapies.” Those behavioural therapies included “aversives” –  unpleasant stimuli designed to punish unwanted behaviour via negative reinforcement.

In 1995, he founded the Defeat Autism Now! campaign, which advocated for using chelation therapy to treat autism. Rimland maintained that the rise in autism was caused by the MMR vaccine – in particular the preservative thimerosal – and remained an ardent supporter of Andrew Wakefield even after his Lancet study was revealed to be fraudulent.

Powell’s citation of Rimland as her go-to expert on autistic children might seem like a coincidence – effectively cherry-picking the autism researcher who agrees with her on the possibilities of ESP – were it not for a speech she made in March 2017, at a “Revolution For Truth” rally, alongside Judy Mikovits, Del Bigtree, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In it, she described the need to “stop the insanity” of damaging children with vaccines:

I go to these medical meetings, I just got back from one. These are medical meetings where I’m getting continuing education. And there are doctors saying that vaccines are oftentimes the final straw that tips a kid over the edge.

A woman who is a neonatal nurse, she said to me — and she’s Jewish, her parents escaped the Holocaust — she said to me I pray every day that I go to work that I don’t go to Hell for what I do.

…

About 20% of children who get diagnosed as autistic have reversible symptoms, but we need to admit that what they have is a neuro immunological problem… it’s not only the toxins that are in our food, it’s also the nutritional deficiencies, and yet doctors are not allowed to order tests for deficiencies, they’re not allowed to order tests for toxicities.

Zaid Jilani, a writer at The American Saga, put these comments to Powell last month, to ask her if they reflect her current thinking on autism and vaccines. Powell replied:

The majority of people diagnosed as autistic do not have vaccines as the cause. The problem is that several of the children being diagnosed as autistic actually have sensorimotor issues that are related to toxic overload and brain inflammation that was often triggered by a vaccine.

Perhaps Powell no longer considers the vaccination program to be ‘insanity’, and no longer claims so strong a causal role for immunisation in the development of autism – but even her current position, that children diagnosed as autistic have ‘toxic overload’ that is ‘often triggered by a vaccine’ is far from a conventional view that would be accepted by experts in the field.

Spelling boards and facilitated communication

Still, while Powell may or may not still be on the same page as her cited autism expert when it comes to alleged vaccine damage, she does diverge from Dr Rimland in at least one very significant way: despite being an early proponent of facilitated communication, late in his career he became a vigorous critic of using spelling boards to help non-verbal autistic people communicate. Indeed, in 1995 he questioned why children would need to be given physical help to type, saying: “How is it possible that an autistic kid can pick up the last tiny crumbs of potato chips off a plate but not have sufficient motor coordination to type the letter E?”

For Powell, spelling boards are a valid tool. In 2015, she penned an article for Edge Science about her most impressive experiments, explaining:

Months later psychiatrist Darold Treffert referred a nine-yearold mute autistic girl nicknamed Hayley for my evaluation. She is an American child who doesn’t use FC. Hayley communicates by either pointing at letters and numbers on thick plastic stencils, or typing into a device called a “talker” that converts text to speech.

However, she does appear to have recognised, even back then, the objections to facilitated communication:

In January 2013, I evaluated several savants in India. One was a six-year-old boy with an encyclopedic knowledge of science, reportedly without having studied. Another was a girl who always knew exactly how many potato chips her father had reserved for later. One boy had accurately predicted several of his teachers’ promotions and transfers. I also learned of a boy who may have saved a life. He had a history of touching people, but only if and where they had physical problems. One day he tapped a woman’s breast. As a result, his psychiatrist recommended she get a mammogram, and it revealed breast cancer.

None of these Indian children could be used for formal experiments at the time. The most promising of them used facilitated communication (FC), involving physical touch to support the autistic child’s movements while they type. That doesn’t necessarily mean the typed words aren’t their own. Some learn to type independently, demonstrating intact language skills. Skeptics regard all writings obtained from FC as tainted—wishful thinking on the part of parents who desperately want to communicate with a child—and are concerned about unconscious cueing.

Spelling boards are one of the most relied-upon tools for Powell and Dickens’ experiments in The Telepathy Tapes. Proponents would argue that they differ from traditional Facilitated Communication because, unlike with FC, the sitter doesn’t need to hold the subject’s hand while they spell. The podcast takes great pains to tell us as much, making clear that they are not holding the child’s hands. However, video footage of the tests show that other sources of inadvertent interference are readily apparent.

In one experiment, a mother holds the spelling board up as her son guesses Uno playing cards held behind his head. He can’t see the card, but his mother, who is holding the target board, clearly can. As his pencil moves towards the board, the board moves too, as his pencil finds the correct answer.  Given that the camera is static, the subtle repositioning of the board is evident in screenshots.

These are the experiments that make it into the glossy documentary trailer – from hours of footage shot, these are presented as the best examples of the telepathic successes. It’s hard to imagine what footage didn’t make the cut. Ky Dickens assures us in the podcast that raw footage is available on her website – however, what footage is there costs $9.99, and consists of a further series of short clips. As Jonathan Jarry explained:

Episode 1 of the podcast, for example, showcases Mia, who comes from a Hispanic family and whose telepathic gift is said to have 100% accuracy. One of the tests done has her mom opening a Spanish-language book that Dickens brought from home (to prevent cheating). The mom selects a page, says “Ooooh!” in excitement, and asks her daughter to name the character who is drawn on the page.

The video clip posted to the website clearly shows the mom not only holding the letter board in front of Mia but holding Mia’s jaw as Mia points to the board. Mia does spell out “pirata,” Spanish for “pirate,” which is the correct answer, but the mother’s influence cannot be ruled out: move the head and the finger will follow. In a different test, Mia’s mother is touching Mia’s forehead during the spelling, where it would be easy to subtly press down whenever Mia’s finger hovers over the right number.

When talking about this experiment during the show, Dickens narrates: “We tried to see if Mia could do telepathy tests with her father. We tried random number generators, random picture generators… and she could absolutely not tell us what her dad was looking at. Sometimes we show her dad a flash card or number, and Mia would start typing and then stop. And sometimes she wouldn’t even type at all. The test with her dad wore Mia out.”

The justification given? “She wrote in her diary that she can read everybody’s mind, but you have to believe in her for her to do it.”

At this point it’s worth remembering that if Mia isn’t actually the one doing the writing here, it wasn’t Mia who wrote that in her diary, because Mia doesn’t have a diary.

Interestingly, Mia’s father isn’t interviewed for the show, despite being willing to sit tests, so we never know whether the diary entry’s warning that “you have to believe in her for her to do it” is as pointed as it sounds.

Powell’s 2015 article contains further indications of other issues with such tests, involving another test subject, called Hayley (this account is distressing):

Hayley started practicing telepathy with therapists, taking pride in her ability and squealing with glee when she heard the “talker” speak the correct answers. Hayley became so excited during testing, her therapists started touching her shoulder to calm her down. By 2013, Hayley had become psychologically dependent upon being touched during testing. This was a problem for research.

My experiments were delayed while Hayley was weaned from this contact. I also needed the therapists to work with a divider between Hayley and themselves. Autism makes any change challenging and, as anticipated, Hayley’s behavior regressed. There was no way to predict what form it would take. It could have been anything from soiling her pants to refusing to enter the room. Instead, she stopped typing her answers.

Therapists have to think on the fly and will try a variety of techniques to get a client back on track. When they returned to her initial method of communication, Hayley started participating again. She selected her answers from cut-out letters or numbers on stencils by pointing to them with a pencil in her right hand, then typing them with her left.

It’s hard to read this with skeptical eyes and not see it as an indication that, when you introduce controls like removing physical touch, the apparent telepathy goes away… leaving you with the distressing reality that all you might actually be doing is upsetting a non-verbal autistic kid. That’s easy to overlook when the ‘communication’ is flowing, because if they were distressed, they’d tell you. However, in reality, your subject is telling you what you want to hear – or, rather, you’re telling you what you want to hear, and attributing it to them.

Given that the Telepathy Tapes is (beyond the odd paywalled video clip) an audio medium, even outside of the selective editing that can turn random chance into a miracle story, it is easy to gloss over the realities of what is actually happening in the tests, and to wave away any issues.

We’re told during one episode that this has to be real, because “Neurodivergent people don’t like lying, so it’s not possible that the autistic child is lying about what they can see.” Elsewhere, we’re told “It takes so long and so much effort to get a full sentence out, they’re not going to go through all that just to lie.” These justifications wholly miss the point: nobody is accusing the autistic child of lying; the criticism is that they’re not the ones speaking at all, and that telepathy is a far less plausible answer than poor test methodology and the overwhelming desire to believe. Rather than consider these serious criticisms, Dickens writes off naysayers as ableist gatekeepers.

However, if – as seems vastly more likely to be the case – the communication featured in the show comes not from the child but from the person holding the board, many of the miracles showcased in The Telepathy Tapes make a great deal more sense. A child doesn’t need telepathy to tell their teacher the contents of a book the teacher has read, they only need their teacher to not realise they’re talking to themselves.

It’s easy for a child to communicate in a language they don’t speak (as happens in one episode of the show) if they’re not the ones communicating. And it’s easy for tests to show that lots of non-verbal children have heard of The Hill in the spiritual plane, if the person asking them questions and holding up boards has heard the rumour of a metaphysical meeting place and is looking for confirmation. It is little more than a Ouija board, but with a disabled child as the planchette.

Disabled lives matter

The degree to which the adults in The Telepathy Tapes buy into these ideas of telepathy uncritically is genuinely extraordinary. In Episode 5, we meet Jes Kerzen, a teacher from Somerset who now runs ashertree.com. She explains that she had a telepathic connection with a non-verbal pupil called Asher, 25 years ago, and that he continued to communicate with her telepathically long after he left her school. She explains that she has notebooks of messages he’s communicated to her telepathically, including successfully diagnosing her friend’s illness, despite the two of them not having seen each other since he left her school.

Kerzen, in my opinion, has been in a quarter-century long penpal relationship with a persona she has inadvertently created, one that is in no way related to the disabled child formerly in her care. In doing so, she may feel that she has elevated that child into something wonderful and otherworldly, but in fact she has only erased who he actually is, in favour of who she wishes he was.

This, for me, is one of the real harms of The Telepathy Tapes. By sending the message that non-verbal autistic people are remarkable savants with psychic powers and an access to otherworldly stores of knowledge and wisdom, we’re sending the message that the lives these disabled children lead aren’t enough; that disabled children don’t have value unless they’re hyper-intelligent, visionary, and more enlightened than the rest of us.

In one episode, one of the featured children writes out a eulogy to a friend who died – a friend who, I believe we’re told, they knew only from their time on The Hill together in the metaphysical plane. The eulogy is an uplifting message of hope and enduring love. As Dickens notes, the fact that the child had to spend all day spelling out the message only makes it more evident of the bond that existed between the two.

An alternative explanation is that a disabled child was made to spend their day tapping a pencil on a board filled with letters, because their parents believed they had a deep psychic connection to a child they’d never met. And if the child acted distressed or upset during that process, that just shows how grief can affect even those of us who can communicate with the dead.

Podcasting is an odd, intimate and very effecting medium – it can elicit strong emotional responses. Because of that, it’s easy for us to assume that what we hear in podcasts is somehow more likely to be true than in other forms of media, especially when the production values are as high and the storytelling as deliberate as in The Telepathy Tapes.

Dianne Powell has been telling stories of these experiments for over 15 years, but they didn’t break into the mainstream when she was appearing on Cosmos in You. We’re at a point in audio media where the skillset and the tools and the polish that used to only come hand in hand with editorial oversight are now available to almost anyone, and as a society we have to get better seeing through slick and compelling productions.