Channeling lies on the Telepathy Tapes—including lies about autism and lying

Why is a podcast on telepathy doubling as an infomercial for facilitated communication? I’ve just finished listening to and then reading transcripts of all 10 episodes of the first season of the Telepathy Tapes podcast, and I think I have the answer.  You can’t have telepathy without FC and you can’t have FC without telepathy. This co-dependence works as follows.

First, the only instances of purported telepathy that the podcast has been able to come up with are instances involving FC: instances, that is, in which the purportedly telepathic messages are channeled through facilitated communication. Every single purportedly telepathic individual on the podcast is a non-speaker with autism who only communicates through facilitated communication; in particular, through Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) and, especially, Spelling to Communicate (S2C). This even includes an individual who is described as being “completely blind” and yet still able to spell messages on a letterboard. There are, in other words, no telepathic individuals who channel the telepathy through speech, sign language, Morse code, semaphores, or, even, ordinary ten-finger typing—not on the Telepathy Tapes, and, I’d venture to add, nowhere else on planet Earth.

Second, all the available evidence on planet Earth strongly indicates that the messages generated from non-speaking individuals with autism through RPM and S2C are authored, not intentionally by the individuals with autism, but unwittingly by their facilitators. This makes it inevitable that, every so often, facilitators will notice they’ve facilitated messages that express their own private thoughts or other information that their client couldn’t possibly know. And since most of the thousands of facilitators who stay in the business long term (parents included) are convinced that they aren’t influencing their clients’ letter selections, at least some of them will decide that it’s more plausible, when their own private thoughts and knowledge leak out onto the letterboard, that their clients are telepathic.

In short, the co-dependence between FC and telepathy stems from the fact that (1) it’s extremely hard to find examples of seemingly convincing telepathy that don’t involve FC, and (2) that most facilitators and family members would much rather believe that clear instances of facilitator control over messages are the results, not of prompts and cues from the facilitator, but of telepathy.

Put another way, for those of us who know about Ouija board effects, nonconscious muscle movements, Clever Hans, and the empirical studies of facilitated communication dating back to the 1990s, the Telepathy Tapes podcast offers a treasure trove of examples of facilitator control over messages. For those who want to believe in FC, RPM, and S2C, it instead offers a treasure trove of examples of telepathy.

That is, one person’s evidence against FC/RPM/S2C is another person’s evidence for telepathy.

As an infomercial for facilitated communication, the Telepathy Tapes podcast makes all the usual claims about FC and autism, dishing out large servings of pro-S2C advocacy. It also makes additional claims about autism that provide additional, indirect support for both FC and telepathy—claims about savant skills and truthfulness that haven’t come up in previous material we’ve discussed on this blog. Before I get to these, here’s a quick recap of the usual pro-FC claims and advocacy statements that have made their way onto the Telepathy Tapes.

First, host Ky Dickens and her collaborators, like all FC-promoters, are convinced that there’s no cueing going on between the facilitators and the autistic non-speakers. In Episode 2, one of Dickens’ collaborators insists, in reference to one of show’s telepathy “experiments,” that the facilitator’s finger is “just on her head. It’s not moving.” In Episode 3, Dickens assures us that another mother “holds the letter board perfectly still” while her non-speaking son points to letters.  In Episode 8, Dickens states:

The accusation that most spellers are not actually communicating, that someone is pushing their hand around or moving around the letterboard, is unabashedly, unequivocally false. I have filmed dozens of spellers, and I have never witnessed such a thing. You can watch the clips of the spellers you've met at the telepathytapes.com.

We and others have watched these clips, and we have found evidence of subtle facilitator cueing throughout. See, for example, Janyce’s analysis here and Stuart Vyse’s analysis here.

Dickens goes on to state:

I also recommend The Spellers Movie, which you can watch for free on YouTube. It follows many incredible spellers who are communicating independently.

In fact, none of the individuals in The Spellers movie, which we reviewed here, are able to communicate spontaneous messages without their facilitator within auditory or visual cueing range. And, indeed, Dickens herself acknowledges as much about the spellers she’s met:

If the skeptic were to test a speller, which they have, they might find it surprising or even disqualifying that a trusted partner's presence must be in the room. And it helps them to communicate. Even if they're not being touched at all, even if this partner is 10 feet away, just having them there is necessary.

The only type of possible facilitator influence acknowledged by Dickens et al. isn’t the behavioral influence on FC-ed output of facilitator muscle movements, verbal prompts, and other cues, but the telepathic influence on FC-ed output of facilitator thoughts. Referring to it as a “telepathic link”, Dickens states:

The people who I've interviewed for this project, however, are aware of it, and do a lot of creative things to make sure the non-speakers are typing only their own thoughts.

But let’s return to the podcast’s FC advocacy. Besides assuring us that there’s no facilitator cueing, Dickens et al. also repeat the pro-FC talking points about why we should presume competence and not question non-speakers’ abilities. She berates people for assuming that “because a child can't talk, or has a difficult time controlling their body, that they're not competent.” She and others repeatedly assure us that these kids, despite what their bodies can’t do, are wise and gifted. She tells us that she’s “heard from scores of parents and teachers that spellers need to be believed and trusted to allow their gifts to shine.” One of the non-speakers is reported as having written in her diary “that she can read everybody’s mind but you have to believe in her for her to do it.” Many parents, Dickens tell us, are discovering that “if you believe and trust in your child, in their abilities and enable them to spell, you won't be disappointed.” She doesn’t mention that assuming that people are competent, while a good tactic for warding off authorship tests, is a poor tactic for ensuring that people actually become competent.

Dickens also repeats the usual, pro-FC justification for why non-speakers can only communicate by slowly pointing to letters on held-up letterboards: namely, that pointing to letters involves gross motor skills and thereby bypasses the purported challenges non-speakers have with fine motor skills. She doesn’t mention that pointing to letters is actually a fine-motor skill. Second, she and others claim that sometimes non-speakers require physical touch in order to regulate their bodies and locate their hands and fingers in order to type. She doesn’t mention that touch opens up additional opportunities for facilitator cues about which letters to touch. Third, she explains that “motor planning issues” cause the pointing to be slow. She doesn’t mention that slow, single-finger letter pointing is also much easier to cue than ten-finger typing (or speech, or sign language, or Morse code, or semaphores). Nor does she mention that slow letter selection reflects the uncertainty about what letter to type next that comes from not knowing what message you’re typing and waiting for a cue from the person who does know the message.

Dickens and her participants also repeat the usual, pro-FC justification for why non-speakers are more competent than they appear and urgently need to be unlocked through FC: namely, that purported mind-body disconnect that’s been around almost as long as FC has and still has no evidence backing it up. One facilitated message, for example, conveys that the non-speaker “didn’t realize he had a body” and later, when his mother helped him feel his body by touching him, “Oh, I have a body, but the body in my mind doesn’t move.”  An S2C practicing speech pathologist states:

We know that autistics have difficulty knowing where their body is in space. I've had kids who told me they don't feel their hands. They don't feel their arms.

We also learn how this mind-body disconnect has caused people to deny non-speakers an education. As Dickens tells us, “if you have a hard time coordinating motor function and regulating your body, testing behavior is not a good way to test intelligence.” Worse, we hear repeatedly how this mind-body disconnect has caused non-speakers to feel trapped inside their bodies, which are alternately described as “uncooperative,” “unruly,” and “betraying” them. Worse still, we hear how this mind-body disconnect has led to an epidemic of loneliness among non-speakers. As the infomercial revs up in the final episodes, we learn that “spelling” on letterboards is the solution to all of this. As Dickens puts it:

There is an epidemic of loneliness plaguing so many non-speakers. I've observed different extremes of this isolation. But the most unbearable is for those who never learned to communicate via spelling, who are trapped inside their own bodies, unable to share their thoughts, personalities or intelligence with the world.

Given this:

I wish[] a wise adult could just drop into the hill [the place where the purportedly telepathic, autistic non-speakers purportedly meet up at night], make a list of all the people that need help and then find a way to get all those people on letter boards.

These statements highlight a baffling contradiction in a podcast that simultaneously tries to demonstrate that telepathy is real and to promote facilitated communication: if non-speakers are telepathic, and therefore can communicate with one another telepathically (as many showcased here purportedly do), how is there an epidemic of loneliness that can only be resolved through RPM/S2C? All Dickens has to say is:

So yes, telepathy may be the best way to open up this incredible group of people so that they can share all that they know and have access to. But until society catches up with them, spelling to communicate will still be critical. 

By episode 10, Dickens sometimes sets telepathy aside completely to urge all concerned listeners to become S2C practitioners:

To listeners who want to get more deeply involved, you can look into getting trained in spelling to communicate or the rapid prompting method, because to meet the spellers where they're at, more people need to be trained and willing to work with them on the board.

Nowhere else have I heard such vehement pro-FC advocacy.

But now let’s move past the FC infomercial aspects of the podcast and turn, as promised, to some additional claims about autism that provide indirect support for both FC and telepathy.

First, there are claims about savant skills. An interest in autistic savant skills was what purportedly led the podcast’s main “expert,” Dianne Henacy Powell, to the belief that non-speaking autistic individuals are telepathic. Powell is a psychiatrist and the author of the 2008 book The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena. While I haven’t read the book and therefore have no idea what kind of “scientific case” Powell makes, I do know, from an online Google Scholar search, that she has published no peer-reviewed research that indicates that non-speakers are telepathic. But Powell has apparently spent time with autistic savants, and based on what she observed, she has decided that savant skills are more likely the product of telepathy than of brain power. As she puts it on the Telepathy Tapes podcast: “Savant syndrome is when someone is able to do something that knows something that is not explainable by the traditional ways of acquiring knowledge.” In Episode 4, she and Dickens elaborate:

Powell: Savant syndrome really stood out to me because it can’t be explained by the materialist model [of the brain] that we have in mainstream medicine.

Dickens: But savant syndrome challenges this because how can you be great at calculus or piano or various languages if you haven’t been taught them

Dickens: And this is how everything ties back to telepathy.

Powell: When I thought about savant syndrome, I thought that is so similar to what we call ESP or extrasensory perception

Dickens: Because ESP means you know things you haven’t been taught via your five traditional senses.

In fact, it isn’t necessary to invoke any mysterious psychic processes to explain the specific savant skills/types that Powell lists: “calendar calculation, mathematical savant, musical savant, foreign language/hyperlexia, prime number generation.” These skills, which correlate with the “restrictive interests” that define autism, are readily explainable by a combination of precocious development in specific areas; rote memorization skills; eidetic (“photographic”) memory; fixations or obsessions with letters, numbers, and/or calendars; perfect pitch; detail focus; and/or an ear for languages. Dickens, for her part, seems unaware that it’s entirely possible to teach yourself calculus (assuming you’re mathematically inclined), piano (assuming you’re musically inclined), and other languages. What would be miraculous is learning calculus without any math texts (or within the space of a day, as J.B. Handley’s facilitated son is alleged to have done), or learning another language without any text-based or auditory input. But there is also no evidence that anyone—autistic or not—has actually accomplished these things. Meanwhile, peer-reviewed research finds no reported savant skills that rise to anywhere near this level of miraculousness (see Park et al., 2023), and the cognitive processes for specific savant skills (e.g., calendrics) have been successfully modeled (see Heavey et al., 2012).

Powell’s most compelling case for telepathy-based savantism is a boy named Ramses Sanguino. Ramses, Powell claims, “was able to read eight different languages at the age of two.” But I watched a few videos of this boy, and what I saw was a combination of precocious hyperlexia vis a vis Chinese characters and Japanese hiragana (a recognition of the symbols and an ability to read them out loud); a precocious ability to recite specific sentences in Chinese and a couple of other languages; and a curious dysfluency with spontaneous spoken English. There is no need to invoke telepathy for any of this.

Another claim has to do with truthfulness. It is repeatedly suggested, throughout the podcast, that individuals with autism are incapable of lying, or at least find it really difficult to do so. If true, this claim might allay suspicions on the part of some listeners that some of the more fantastical messages facilitated out of the non-speakers—for example that they tele-travel at night to mystical realms where they meet up or imbibe wisdom from rabbis and other sages—might be, shall we say, a tad unreliable.

While there is some evidence that autistic individuals lie less often and with less sophistication than the rest of us do (see Bagnall et al., 2022), there’s no evidence that autistic individuals can’t lie. Anecdotally, consider Temple Grandin, who looked her teacher “straight in the eye” and lied to her about ruining her garden (Grandin, 1986, p. 37). Or consider John Elder Robison, who regularly embellished the academic knowledge he imparted to others with made-up factoids like the existence of a star named the “Cow Star”; who tricked his mother into thinking his younger brother had been kidnapped by a stranger; and who raised money for a prank on a teacher by soliciting donations for a made-up orphan’s relief fund (Robison, 2007; pp. 36-40).

Grandin and Robison might be considered to have Asperger’s Syndrome rather than autism, but lying extends to individuals with unequivocal autism. One mother reports that her moderately autistic son regularly impersonates other people on his cell phone; once presented her with a doctored report card that reported As and Bs instead of the Cs and Ds he’d actually earned; and, through an elaborate web of deception, got her permanently banned from Twitter. Another mother reports that her profoundly autistic, non-speaking son pretended to comply with a request to go to bed, shortly afterwards escaping out of his bedroom through a door on the other side.

All this is quite magical, in its own way. So are savant skills—the precocious reading and arithmetic, the foreign language skills, the ability to recreate elaborate songs on the piano that one has heard only once, or to recite hundreds of digits of Pi. Indeed, these skills are arguably far more magical coming from actual autistic brains than they would be if they were simply absorbed telepathically from some vague, amorphous source somewhere out there. Which takes us back to FC and all its associated illusions and lies—and how it, like telepathy, removes us all from the humanity and magic that exists in all children, regardless of their communication skills, regardless of how profound their autism.

REFERENCES

Bagnall, R., Russell, A., Brosnan, M., & Maras, K. (2022). Deceptive behaviour in autism: A scoping review. Autism, 26(2), 293-307. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613211057974

Heavey, L., Hermelin, B., Crane, L., & Pring, L. (2012), The structure of savant calendrical knowledge. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 54: 507-513. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8749.2012.04250.x

Park H. O. (2023). Autism Spectrum Disorder and Savant Syndrome: A Systematic Literature Review. Soa--ch'ongsonyon chongsin uihak = Journal of child & adolescent psychiatry, 34(2), 76–92. https://doi.org/10.5765/jkacap.230003

 

Whose Voice? A review of Makayla’s Voice

Largely eclipsed by the Telepathy Tapes Podcast is another documentary on non-speaking autism released at the end of 2024: a Netflix documentary short, Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World, first referenced here at facilitatedcommunication.org as an item on one of last year’s news roundups.

In the space of 23 minutes, Makayla’s Voice recounts the story of a 14-year-old girl whose communication skills were purportedly unlocked by a Spelling to Communicate (S2C) practitioner by the name of Roxy Sewell.

Makayla, as it’s quickly revealed, “is essentially nonverbal” and has a rare chromosomal abnormality known as 22q13 deletion syndrome, aka Phelan–McDermid syndrome (PMS). Approximately 100% of cases of 22q13 deletion syndrome involve intellectual disability and global developmental disability; at least 25% manifest as autism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22q13_deletion_syndrome

It appears quite likely that Makayla is among the 25+% of those with 22q13 deletion syndrome who also manifest as autistic. In the documentary, she shows behaviors consistent with profound autism: fleeting eye contact, self-stimulatory behaviors, and minimal spoken language ability. The documentary’s voiceover agrees. It voices “the thoughts expressed in this film,” purportedly “written entirely by her [Makayla] using a letterboard,” and introduces Makayla with these three words: “I have autism.” Nonetheless, Makayla’s most distinctive diagnosis is something other than autism, and this is one key factor that makes this documentary somewhat different from other pro-FC documentaries. The other distinguishing factor, as I’ll discuss later, is the voiceover.

It’s Makayla’s father, appearing immediately after the introductory voiceover concludes, who reveals Makayla’s “official diagnosis” to be 22q13 deletion syndrome. But from this point onwards all references to 22q13 deletion syndrome cease, and Makayla is presented simply as someone with autism. This terminological sleight of hand, which shows us yet another way in which the autism spectrum has been scrambled, allows the documentary to distance itself from intellectual disability: while close to 100% of those with 22q13 deletion syndrome are intellectually disabled, “autism” is more ambiguous. Indeed, there’s evidence that at least some minimally speaking autistic individuals, measured on certain nonverbal measures of intelligence, have close-to-normal IQ scores. 

As soon as it presents itself as about “autism” rather than about 22q13 deletion syndrome, Makayla’s Voice starts to look a lot like most other pro-FC documentaries. That is, it:

• waffles back and forth between autism as a curse and autism as a gift

• presents autism as a mind-body disconnect

• claims that society wrongly dismisses non-speakers

• presents facilitated messages that reflect what people want to hear

• presents facilitated messages that promote facilitated communication

• includes videos and other material that unintentionally reveal the hijacking of identity and agency

Let’s consider these one by one.

1. Autism as a curse

Voiceover messages attributed to Makayla include:

All hardships erase joy. I have an example. Autism. I wish I could be more like my siblings.

We also experience so much alone, thanks to autism. (This particular message also falls into the misleading “we autistics” category I blogged about earlier).

I hope I can end silence and autism.

2. Autism as a gift

Voiceover messages attributed to Makayla include these messages about wisdom and intelligence:

I'm really smart. I process information really fast.

The deepest messages come from those who, like Van Gogh and me, communicate differently.

And from her facilitator, Roxy, who uses the word “gifts” for Makayla’s differences:

She’s tapping into a layer of herself that most of us speakers don’t have access to because we are constantly listening in order to respond to someone else, whereas Makayla's listening, and she's taking in her world, and internalizing it, and reflecting on it at this deep, deep soul level, that I feel perhaps her father has access to as an artist.

Then there is this message, attributed to Makayla, about a special connection to nature:

The most beautiful sound I have ever heard is the empty way air flows between the trees. The sound goes unnoticed by most. But to me, it sings. It creates melodies that resemble my own silence. I belong in nature… The wind is my muse, it inspires me to beam in my own way… We are the sound of hidden beauty. Winds of autism. I soar in trees.

And, besides hearing the singing of the wind, there is this message about a special musical sensibility:

It is my gift to the world to sing my silence out loud.

Finally, there are these messages about synesthesia, a common meme in the world of FC:

All my senses are heightened and I can feel emotions through them as if they are music.

I see how the autistic mind mirrors the soul in a cosmic way. It sees colors in sound. Music in the wind. My soul sees what others cannot. Truth, honesty and love are colors surrounding the heart. I literally see that. It's music.

3. Autism as a mind-body disconnect

Rather than messages that reflect the social challenges and intense, narrow focuses of autism—core autism characteristics that track with eight decades of diagnostic criteria, screening tools, and psychological research—we have, in the voiceover messages attributed to Makayla:

I am trapped inside my body.

I run when my body separates from my mind.

It really confuses me how my body creates so much trouble for me.

Consistent with this, Roxy, the S2C facilitator, provides the usual explanation for how S2C is supposed to work:

When a student is first learning how to use the letter boards, they might need a lot of assistance, a lot of prompts. There's a motor piece where it's Makayla using her body to literally get every single letter on the letter board. And so that motor piece is something that's pretty exhausting.

And she describes the initial S2C lessons—which for some reason often seem to be about astronomy—as not being about academic content, which the facilitated person is presumed to have already somehow sponged up. Rather, the lessons purportedly address the motor skills of pointing to the correct letters:

In the beginning, with Makayla, we would do lessons, and I would ask her, “Today we're learning about galaxies. Let's spell galaxies.” And it wasn't that I was quizzing her on how to spell galaxies. I was helping her become confident in her body and pointing to the letters accurately.

4. Claims that society wrongly dismisses non-speakers

Some of the messages attributed to Makayla include the usual straw men about society’s supposed attitudes:

For speaking people, language is only worthy it they’re spoken by someone with speech.

 In my silence I’ve learned that many assume that silence equals dumb.

5. Facilitated messages that reflect what people want to hear

Voiceover messages attributed to Makayla include messages of love and reassurance to her parents:

I love you mom. (The conclusion of a long message to her mother).

 Happy late Father’s day… I love you so much it is unreal. I am so lucky to be your daughter. I get so happy to be near you… I giggle and cheer because I don’t want to allow you to ever doubt your worth. Daddio, you gave me so much, limelight, music, and love. You found my voice before anyone else did. A lot of my strength comes from the way I see you work. You are the best. I love you dad. (A message to her father, apparently shortly after being unlocked by S2C.)

We also hear messages about how intelligent she is. He father reports her as telling him:

I'm really smart. I process information really fast. I'm different but I'm here.

And the message to her mother includes:

I'm super, super smart. I learn by listening. My mind is a sponge that drinks knowledge like it's juice.

Besides these, there are the messages about Makayla’s unusual gifts—the connection to nature and the synesthesia. And from Roxy, the S2C practitioner, we hear about how creative Makayla is. Roxy illustrates this through a poem that she, Roxy, facilitated out of Makayla: a poem that, according to Roxy (the likely unwitting author), is "the most beautiful piece of writing I've ever heard.” Making comparisons between Makayla and an unloved snake, it includes words like “unworthy,” “misjudgment,” “nocturnal,” and “discreetly”—words well beyond the active vocabularies of many typical 14-year-olds. A later message facilitated out by Roxy states that Makayla wants to be an author.

6. Facilitated messages that promote facilitated communication

Like so many other FC-generated messages, Makayla’s S2C-generated messages promote FC (S2C in particular) both for herself and for others:

My letterboard is how I demand to be heard.

I know I’m lucky that you and Dad found Roxy so I could do this. All I had dreamt about in all my dreams really is doing this.

I hope to… change hearts. I want to show these boards to the world. Be an advocate for autistic people without a voice. I think my father can help since he knows so many people.

7. Videos and other material that unintentionally reveal the hijacking of identity and agency

In all the scenes of S2C-generated typing in which we hear the ambient noise, as opposed to the musical soundtrack, that noise includes constant verbal cueing from Roxy, the S2C facilitator, as Makayla’s finger wanders around the letterboard:

• “Reach,” “You got it,” “Mm hmm,” “I got you,” “One more,” “There you go,” “Right on it,” and even—when Makayla’s about to hit the wrong letter—“Don’t put it down until you get to your letter,” and, when Makayla’s index finger gets there, “There.”  

• In the course of facilitating the word “Mexico,” Roxy cues "Right on it" twice after Makayla’s index finger hits several letters between the “X” and the “I”; she then cues “Right on it” a second time when Makayla points to another extra letter between the “C” and the “O”. Roxy then pulls the board away even though Makayla is still pointing.

• In the course of facilitating the word “Russian,” when Makayla types “R-S-S-I” (without the “U”), Roxy cues “Reach,” Makayla hits another letter, and then Roxxy then calls out the word “Russian.” (Roxy then exclaims, laughing, “That's not what I thought she was going to say!”)

• When Makayla’s father starts to ask "Why are you so resistant to getting in the pool at the beginning?" Makayla clearly wants to start pointing at the board before he finishes the question, and indeed does just that—before it’s clear what her father is even asking her. The letters she ends up hitting, as called out by Roxy, are “T-S-M-Y-L,” which is interpreted by Roxy as “It’s my style”.

• For more on Roxy’s influence over Makayla’s letter selections, see Janyce’s video analysis here.

Throughout the entire message-generation process, Roxy is the one who controls the letterboard, even when Makayla attempts to grab it:

Roxy holds the board before Makayla starts typing:

Roxy holds the board after Makayla finishes typing:

Roxy holds the board when she has decided that Makayla’s finished, even when Makayla still has her index finger out, ready to keep pointing:

And at one point, when facilitating the word “silent,” Roxy pulls the board away after calling out the “S” and the “I”:

(Whereupon she “resets” the letterboard on front of Makayla’s index finger.)

There’s also a short clip of Roxy holding Makayla’s hand while Makayla holds a pen, causing Makayla to transcribe letters she’s first touched on the letterboard.

Throughout the documentary, we see Makayla’s near complete dependence on Roxy when producing messages. Only once do we see her holding a communication device (very briefly) on her own, and only once do we see someone other than Roxy holding the letterboard for her (very briefly, her father). In neither instance does the voiceover, or anyone else, tell us what messages, if any, Makayla is producing. Every other time she’s with her father or other family members, it’s a facilitator (either Roxy or another, unnamed facilitator) who holds up the board.

But it’s not just the S2C facilitators who exert control over Makayla’s purported communications and, indeed, her very identity. There‘s also the documentary itself: its voiceover and visuals. Not only does the voiceover read out Makayla’s purported FCed messages as if they’re authentically hers; it does so in an unusually authentic voice. That voice is purportedly selected by Makayla herself from at least three candidates. This conceit plays out the very beginning of the documentary, when two other voices read out the first message attributed to Makayla (”The most beautiful sound I have ever heard is the empty way air flows between the trees.”), and each one is dismissed (by another voice, probably Roxy’s, which says, “No. Ok, let’s try the next one”). Then a third voice chimes in, passes muster, and provides the voiceover for the rest of the documentary. That voice is provided by a voiceover artist aptly named Portia Cue.

Portia Cue’s voiceover is extraordinarily convincing. Most FCed messages are voiced by the same speech synthesizers used by text-to-speech apps, automatic checkout counters, and/or navigation apps, which makes them tougher to project onto the personalities of FCed humans. Portia Cue’s voice, by contrast, is highly expressive and authentic. Her delivery sounds spontaneous; her inflections resemble those of an adolescent girl. This makes it easy for us listeners to think of this voice, however subconsciously, as actually belonging to Makayla. The implicit theme of “Makayla’s Voice”—that of Makayla having found her voice—only adds to this illusion.

That said, towards the end, the documentary briefly undoes this notion with another message. Though voiced by Portia Cue, it states “But I want to use my real voice now.” The next scene, accordingly, shows Roxy prompting Makayla to actually speak. “What can you tell Dad?” she asks Makayla. With Roxy’s affirmation after each prompt, Makayla voices approximations of “I,” “love,” and “you.” What these word approximations mean to Makayla remains unclear. Equally unclear is what they mean about whether Makayla—unlike pretty much all other FCed individuals—is now going to move beyond the letterboard into speech. Equally unclear is whether a speech-language therapist has ever attempted to help Makayla develop her speech skills, and (given that she has some rudimental speech skills) why this appears to have been abandoned in favor of S2C.

Practically speaking, of course, Makayla cannot rely on Portia Cue’s voice. That’s because Portia Cue, unlike a text-to-speech app, cannot follow Makayla around for all her waking hours for the rest of her life. Portia Cue’s voiceover, presumably, begins and ends with the documentary. Out in the real world, in the absence of effective speech-language therapy, and using a letterboard rather than a digital device, the only voice that Makayla appears to have, at least for now, is that of Roxy (or the other, unnamed facilitator) reading aloud the messages produced by the facilitated letter selections. This, indeed, is precisely what happens in the final scene of the movie. But, presumably, this isn’t what we’re supposed to think that Makayla means by “my real voice.”

Returning to the illusion provided by the voiceover, this illusion is enhanced by a musical soundtrack that accompanies most of Portia Cue’s words. In combination with the allusions that some of those words make to Makayla’s musical sensitivities, it’s easy to hear the music as a sort of transcript of what’s going on in Makayla’s head, and also as what one of the voiceover messages, “This is my song,” refers to. So, too, with some of the documentary’s visuals, especially the images of celestial phenomena that accompany the voiceover messages about synesthesia and special connections to nature.

Beyond the facilitators’ control over Makayla’s messages, and the influences of the voiceover, musical soundtrack, and celestial visuals over viewers’ impressions of who Makayla is, we witness other sort of control. This is the physical control of Makayla that surfaces in the final scene. Makayla is sitting at a table with her family members, Roxy hovering above her with the letterboard in her hands (it’s the same scene as that shown in the above images of Roxy controlling the letterboard). When Makayla stands up to leave the room—presumably tired of sitting and pointing at the board—her family members tell her “Good job!” and “I’m so proud of you,” and Roxy tells her: “So you can do anything you want.”

But then, as she tries to leave the room, the 14-year-old Makaya is physically pulled back and prompted by both parents to say “bye” to the camera.

Makayla complies, twice. In what may possibly be the most authentic message of the entire documentary, she quietly approximates the word; prompted to say it again louder, she approximates it again.

“Ba.”

(“Bye.”)

Now, perhaps, Makayla can do anything she wants, or at least be herself—at least for bit, until the letterboard catches up with her to extract, yet again, what the documentary wants us believe is “Makayla’s Voice.”