Ever since last September when it first came out, the Telepathy Tapes Podcast has been recasting as a paranormal phenomenon something that, in a normal world, would invalidate facilitated communication (FC) and help liberate non-speaking autistics from it. That something is evidence of facilitator control over messages that are generated primarily (in most of the instances discussed on the Telepathy Tapes) by Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) and Spelling to Communicate (S2C). In the world of the Telepathy Tapes and its many enthusiasts, the paranormal phenomenon in question is telepathy. That is, the non-speaking autistics who point to letters on letterboards while their facilitators are within auditory, visual, or tactile cueing range (typically holding up the letterboards and moving them in the air) purportedly aren’t being controlled by their facilitators, but instead are reading their facilitators’ minds.
The Telepathy Tapes Podcast has been highly influential beyond the world of non-speaking autism. Not only has it ranked in recent months as one of the top podcasts; it has also inspired other podcasts to have episodes about it, including podcasts in which people with no particular stake in either FC/RPM/S2C or in autistic telepathy seem ready to accept its conclusions—along with a host of other paranormal claims. (The Telepathy Tapes has also garnered a number of critical podcasts as well—see here).
This means that a full defense of the invalidation of FC by scientific experiments must now include a defense of science itself. And this, in turn, means (1) examining why some people go for paranormal explanations over scientific ones and (2) offering reasons for people to be more skeptical about the former.
This post is an attempt to do both.
I draw my admittedly non-representative sample of paranormal belief-prone individuals from two recent telepathy-friendly episodes on popular podcasts: Joe Rogan’s Joe Rogan Experience and Mayam Bialik’s Bialik Breakdown. Rogan is a top-ranked podcaster with viewership rates in the hundreds of thousands to millions of views (his telepathy podcast, Joe Rogan Experience #2279 currently has over 800K views). Bialik has a PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA and is famous for her role on The Big Bang Theory (which featured a main character with apparent Asperger’s Syndrome and savant skills, but no telepathic abilities—at least not in any of the episodes I watched). Bialik’s telepathy episode, which is called “Real or A Hoax? The Secrets Behind the Telepathy Tapes but which doesn’t actually entertain the hoax possibility, currently has almost 200K views.
On both episodes, hosts and guests alike appear sympathetic, not just to telepathy, but to paranormal phenomena in general. Besides Rogan and Bialik, there’s
Rogan’s guest Ky Dickens, a filmmaker and the producer of the Telepathy Tapes;
Bialik’s co-host Jonathan Cohen, who is described on the Breakdown website as a “writer, poet, producer, father and futurist who imagines and designs new applications of technology,” and
Bialik’s guest Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and the author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else.
While Kripal has long dabbled in the paranormal and while Dickens’ paranormal sensitivities are evident from the very beginning of the Telepathy Tapes, Rogan, Bialik, and Cohen all display at least a partial preference for paranormal explanations over scientific ones.
Rogan, for example, isn’t smitten with skepticism, but wowed (as in literally saying “Wow”) when Dickens tells him about The Hill, a mystical realm where non-speaking autistic individuals purportedly communicate telepathically with one another while sleeping. He asks Dickens whether this has been validated, and when she assures him that it has, he doesn’t probe further.
Bialik, for her part, is wowed by the Telepathy Tapes’ account of parents around the country reporting that their non-speaking autistic children simultaneously fell asleep in the middle of the day and learned, via telepathy on The Hill, that one of their non-speaking peers had just died. The only other explanation for this, Bialik states, is that “all the parents were lying.” Bialik also accepts a mother’s account of how her non-speaking son would telepathically communicate to her his musical compositions while she slept, which she would transcribe upon awakening. For Bialik, what counts as proof here is the mother’s report about taking her son to a music studio. The son, Bialik tells us, didn’t ask “What the f*** am I doing here?”, but instead communicated (it’s unclear how, since he’s nonspeaking and apparently doesn’t even point to letters) that he wanted to tweak this and that part of his mother’s transcription, and indicated in various (unspecified) ways that “that he was the agent of the music and the lyrics.”
Of course, the elephant in the room for all of this—the non-paranormal explanation—is a combination of (1) facilitator control (the accounts of the happenings on the Hill are generated through Spelling to Communicate or S2C), (2) what these parents would like to believe about their non-speaking children (where it’s more palatable to view facilitator control as telepathic powers—see discussion here), (3) parent-to-parent(s) communication and contagious memes within the community of parents who believe their non-speaking kids are telepathic, and (4) a mother’s highly motivated interpretation of her son’s non-verbal behavior in a sound studio. The delusions are many and (where the parents are concerned) quite understandable; no one has to actually be lying about any of this.
Elephant dans la pièce (illustration ChatGPT4 - Dall-e3) v2.jpg
So what I want to examine here is what other paranormal beliefs are held by Rogan, Bialik, et al., why they might seem compelling, and whether they actually outcompete alternative explanations that are more reasonable and scientific. If we can nudge these sorts of people back toward science, the damning evidence against FC that’s being recast as telepathic powers might stand a better chance of liberating FC/RPM/S2C’s victims.
Assuming that Rogan, Bialik et al. are representative of the general paranormal-prone public, we see several reasons—espoused by all of these people—for paranormal beliefs. They are:
Seemingly amazing coincidences
Seemingly amazingly accurate predictions (“precognition”)
Mysteries surrounding human consciousness
Mysteries surrounding savant skills
Apparent telepathy in animals
Converging beliefs across world history and cultures—with the exception, of course, of the “western” scientific community.
Let’s start with coincidences. One of the first things discussed on the Rogan episode is phone telepathy: when you think of someone and immediately they text you. We’ve all had that happen, but somehow many of us recognize it for what it is—a coincidence in the context of an event-filled world full of people who are primed to notice coincidences more than non-coincidences. We recognize this even if we don’t fully grasp just how many non-coincidences occur and how much we filter them out in favor of the coincidences. It’s easy not to notice how much wandering our minds do in the course of the day, with fleeting and often forgettable thoughts about one friend or another. It’s easy to forget how often the person doesn’t text when we think of them and does text when we don’t. It’s easy to underestimate how often our minds forget the usual stuff, retain the more remarkable stuff, and misremember so much of the more remarkable stuff as having been more remarkable than it really was.
As with coincidences, so, too with precognition—instances of amazingly accurate predictions. It’s easy to forget how often our minds make predictions, how often our—and other people’s—predictions don’t pan out; how selectively we remember the more successful predictions and forget the failures, and how much we misremember our—and other people’s—successful predictions as more accurate than they really were. In addition, some predictions and coincidences may be influenced by subtle cues, priming, or subconscious learning of which we aren’t consciously aware: a news headline causes two friends to simultaneously free-associate to thoughts of each other; a subconsciously learned “hunch” about someone may cause us to predict, correctly, which email messages they will respond to.
Far more mysterious than these phenomena is consciousness. No one—scientists included—has anywhere near an adequate account of how conscious experience arises from physical brains. Nor is it clear that anyone will—and this includes paranormal belief-holders. For Ky Dickens and Jeffrey Kripal, conscious experience provides evidence of a non-physical world. Both cite a former NASA scientist by the name of Thomas Campbell who believes that consciousness is what creates the universe—or, put another way, that “our reality is virtual and that consciousness is the computer.” According to Campbell’s author page on Anazon
a set of quantum physics experiments designed to provide evidence for or against the hypothesis... are being performed at the California Polytechnical university. First Results are expected in late 2023 or early 2024.
So far, no news. And as far as I can make out, his claim is essentially un-falsifiable. If we’re living in any kind of computer simulation, any experimental results we think we’ve produced would be part of the simulation. So what could possibly distinguish simulation-based results from non-simulation-based results?
The question of life as a simulation, like the mystery of consciousness, strikes me as unanswerable by anyone—scientists, normal people, and paranormal people alike. But that doesn’t stop Rogan, Dickens & Co from assuming that Campbell’s hypothesis is true. Kripal argues that “physical reality deeper down is more like a surrealist painting, more produced by the imagination.” Dickens argues for a paradigm shift that places human consciousness, not physics, at the foundation of the universe.
What’s sort of compelling about all this is that there’s a grain of truthiness here. Each person’s reality and identity is based on their conscious experiences. Our conscious experiences derive from the specific circumstances of our lives, which derive from the worlds we inhabit, which are, in turn, a function of the universe we happen to live in. And that universe is, in a sense, a function of us, and therefore of our consciousness. That’s because the universe we inhabit—along with the planet we happen to live on, down to the type of star it orbits, its position in the solar system, its orbital path and speed, its tilt, its spin, the way it wobbles on its axis, its moon, its size, its chemical composition, its geological history, and its current geological age—is the only kind of universe (solar system, planetary environment, etc.), of all the millions (billions? trillions?) of possibilities, in which the we, as humans, could possibly have evolved and could currently exist. So, if we limit ourselves to an extremely egocentric, human-centric perspective, human consciousness is essentially connected to our particular universe as we know it to be.
But Kripal and Dickens are positing something more literal than this: namely, that human consciousness is literally the foundation of The Universe. Furthermore, they propose, this solves the riddle of consciousness. But they don’t explain how, and if they tried to, they’d fail. That’s because, even with all this paradigm shifting and literal embedding of consciousness within the broader universe, we’re still left with the mind-body problem. That is, we’re still left with the nagging question of how conscious experiences connect up with physical brains: how, in particular, conscious experiences connect up, as we know they do, with the brain’s very physical electromagnetic activities and synaptic connections.
But while placing consciousness at the foundation of the universe doesn’t solve the mind-body problem, it does help Bialik et al. “solve” telepathy, precognition, and near-death experiences—assuming, of course, these phenomena actually exist. Telepathic thoughts, presumably, propagate through the fabric of the universe from one mind to another. Since that fabric, per Dickens and Kripal, is timeless—including all past, present, and future conscious phenomena—precognition presumably happens whenever phenomena from the future reach those minds that are open to them. Near-death experiences—and other altered states, including dreaming, psychedelic states, and what Kripal calls “trauma”—are simply the results of certain minds, or states of mind, that have openings into which some of the cosmic consciousness’s more magical elements can creep. Kripal cites Kevin Cann, a verbally fluent autistic man who says that all autistic people have mystical experiences—which would presumably include Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory, were he a real person, and my moderately autistic son, who is. Kripal also cites Elizabeth Krohn’s first-hand accounts of her near-death experience, which, according to a previous Bialik Breakdown episode featuring Kohn, involved two weeks in heaven and newfound knowledge and abilities.” Surely Krohn isn’t fabricating anything, nor do Kripal or Bialik entertain the possibility of hallucinations, false memories, or some combination thereof.
Instead of discussing the unreliabilities of the human minds/brains, Rogan, Bialik et al. discuss the supposed reliabilities of human culture. Outside of what they call “western” science, they point out, most cultures throughout history agree that the mind is more than the physical brain, the soul survives death, and that dreams contain prophecies (Bialik cites the Bible). Most cultures also once believed that the earth is flat, that the sun literally rises and sets, and that the universe and all creatures great and small arose through forces other than the Big Bang and evolution—three mosty outdated beliefs that Dickens and Kripal, elsewhere in their interviews, disparage as ridiculous.
Besides believing in the Big Bang, evolution, and a round earth that spins with respect to the sun, Bialik et al. are into quantum physics. Kripal, for example, implicitly alludes to “quantum entanglement” when he gives his take on autistic telepathy. In what is one of the most dismissive statements about autistic people I’ve ever encountered, he states:
These individual autistic children are simply nodes. You know they’re picking up the signal from this broader consciousness or mind, and when one dies, they know right away that-that, and because they’re emotionally entangled with that node.
This makes the autistic community sound like the undifferentiated Borg from Star Trek. (Rivaling Kripal in his dismissiveness, Dickens tells Rogan that the most loving thing you can say to a non-speaking autistic person regarding their outward behavior is “I know that’s not you.”)
Shubham Dhage
Kripal goes on:
We all live in a Newtonian world. In other words, we think we’re material objects in some kind of neutral space. But our bodies are also quantum. We know that. That’s a fact. We know that matter is quantum deep down and it’s all connected and it’s all one and it does things that make absolutely no sense to this Newtonian up here frame of reference... And so we have physics to tell us that there are these two levels of reality, but we haven’t integrated that into our worldview.
One reason most of us haven’t integrated quantum mechanics into our worldview is that, for the most part, quantum phenomena have very little effect on the world as we experience it. A quick look at Wikipedia will reveal that the effects of quantum mechanics on the world as it affects human beings are limited to a handful of modern technologies: e.g., quantum computing, LEDs, MRIs, and electron microscopy. There are, thus far, no scientific reports of discernable quantum effects on our minds or bodies, or of how quantum physics contributes to the connectedness or oneness of the universe. For the latter, someone would have to empirically validate a sort of Unified Field Theory, and so far, no one—no physicist, no normal person, and no paranormal person—has done that.
But Kripal, like other paranormal belief holders (Deepak Chopra comes to mind), has recast quantum physics as being about something far beyond subatomic particles, black-body radiation, and the Planck Constant: something downright mystical. How else to explain all that quantum entanglement, all that spooky action at a distance, all that Uncertainty, and all those mysterious effects of observers on measurements? “The early quantum physicists,” Kripal claims, “they all turned to one place for the best place to understand what quantum physics is about, and one place was mystical literature. They all turned there.” That claim is easily fact-checked, and it isn’t true. As Wikipedia’s Quantum Mysticism article tells us, just two physicists, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, were interested in Eastern mysticism “but are not known to have directly associated one with the other” (quantum physics with Eastern mysticism). Only a few (lesser-known) physicists thought that the consciousness of the observer played a causal role in measurement outcomes. As Einstein said about quantum mysticism (or what Murray Gell-Mann called "quantum flapdoodle"): "No physicist believes that. Otherwise he wouldn't be a physicist."
Besides “quantum flapdoodle,” there’s flapdoodle about fields: ”energy fields”; “mind fields.” The mostly invisible power of electromagnetic fields, and the fact that the brain, as an electromagnetic object, must generate such fields, comes up in on the Telepathy Tapes, though not on Rogan’s and Bialik’s podcasts—at least not on the episodes I’m discussing here.
But let’s turn back to Dicken’s and Kripal’s claims about the supposed mysticism of autistic people and to yet another basis for paranormal beliefs—namely, savant skills. These aren’t exclusive to autism, but are more prevalent in autistic people; they include extraordinary skills in math, music, and language. This much everyone agrees on. As I discussed in my last post, however, Dickens, along with Diane Hennacy Powell, Dickens’ self-proclaimed expert on savant skills, goes further. They claim that savant skills are disproportionately present in non-speaking autistics and that they can only be explained by telepathy. The definition of savantism that Dickens gives Rogan is telling: “Being able to really excel at something that you haven’t been taught.” The actual definition of savantism Is slightly different: excelling at something, not that you haven’t been taught, but that is inconsistent with your overall level of functioning.
Nor are those savant skills that have actually been empirically confirmed (as opposed to those heard about through anecdotal reports) so mysterious as to cry out for paranormal explanations. Scientists have modeled how some of them develop; in general, they appear to correlate, not with being non-speaking but with “Heightened sensory sensitivity, obsessional behaviours, technical/spatial abilities, and systemizing.”
The only specific instances of savant skills that Dickens cites on Rogan’s show—with more wows from Rogan—involve language skills. She cites an autistic boy who could speak Russian and Japanese at the age of 5 or 6, and a non-speaking autistic girl who purportedly typed out messages in Portuguese and Spanish and also turned out to understand hieroglyphs. Both reports are second- or third-hand, and all the words attributed to the girl were generated by S2C and so most likely not her own. As for the boy, as I wrote in my last post, videos show hyperlexia vis-a-vis Chinese characters and Japanese hiragana (a recognition of the symbols and an ability to read them out loud) and a precocious ability to recite specific sentences in Chinese and a couple of other languages. There is no need to invoke a telepathic connection to a collective consciousness at the base of the universe; a precocious obsession with languages and writing systems, an ear for languages, and some systematic self-teaching will do the trick.
As far as apparent savant skills in non-speaking autism go, both Dickens and Kripal appear to find telepathy (as in a telepathic connection to the collective consciousness at the base of the universe) more likely than facilitator cueing (as in the adult facilitators being the ones whose skills we’re actually witnessing). For Dickens and Kripal, the mind-body disconnect that purportedly defines autism (according to FC proponents but not according to autism specialists) makes autistic people more tuned in to the purported cosmic consciousness. In addition, while the regular use of language causes the telepathic skills that all of us were purportedly born with to wither away, non-speakers with autism, who communicate less readily, retain these skills. Telepathy, ultimately, appears to be the only real savant skill—or at least the ur-savant skill. All other savant skills, per Dickens and Kripal, derive from telepathy—at least in the case of non-speaking autistics who depend on facilitators to demonstrate those skills.
But what about apparent animal telepathy? Dickens and Rogan discuss a bunch of examples, none of which depend on facilitated communication. They are:
The elephants that supposedly traveled for miles to the home of “elephant whisperer” Laurence Anthony after he died and again, for years thereafter, on the precise date of his death—a claim that Snopes classifies as “undetermined.”
Synchronized movements and cooperation within groups of animals: fish swimming in schools, birds flying in formation, wolves collaborating on hunts. Scientists have explained all of this synchrony (and successfully simulated some of it) in terms of individual group members following simple rules of thumb, either innate or learned through simple associative learning mechanisms, based on the position and movement of their nearby group-mates (and, in the case of wolves, the position of their prey), as sensed through visual, tactile, auditory, or olfactory cues. For fish, see here; for birds, see here; for wolves, see here.
The mystery of how prey animals know when they’re being watched. Here, too, the mechanism is subtle cues, in many cases way too subtle for humans: e.g., predator-specific vibrations and the changes in the concentration or age of particular scents. Animal precognition, namely of coming storms, goes unmentioned here, but this, too, can be explain by cues—e.g., by sensitivity to changes in atmospheric pressure.
Rupert Sheldrake’s research on dogs who know when their owners are coming home—because they anticipatorily go to the window. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that Sheldrake’s experimental design has been critiqued and that more plausible alternative explanations for his results have been offered.
Getty Images
Beyond all the apparent appeal of the paranormal as an explanation for seemingly amazing coincidences, seemingly amazingly accurate predictions, the mysteries surrounding human consciousness, the mysteries surrounding savant skills, and the apparent telepathy of animals, there are constant claims by paranormalists that they’re espousing the braver, more open minded, more interesting way of looking at the world. Kripal, for example, states that he finds things he can’t explain “delicious.” According to Rogan, Bialik, & Co., regular scientists, by contrast, are afraid of the paranormal (or “psiphobic”—my word; not theirs). They’re afraid of looking foolish, afraid of things they can’t explain, and afraid of people who experience things that don’t fit into their box. They’re also rigid and controlling. They need stability and limit themselves to what can be measured and observed, to what they can explain and control. They take everything else off the table. Except, presumably, for those mystical quantum physicists, they limit themselves to matter and linear time and are hopelessly stuck in a materialist paradigm. They dismiss the lived experience of other people. Like yesterday’s flat earthers, they’re holding back scientific progress. And destroying what’s beautiful to boot: by putting the flower under the microscope, they magnify the sun’s rays and burn it up.
One way in which these people might appear more open-minded than scientists is in seeming to embrace both science and skepticism in addition to the paranormal. But this embrace is quite limited. Kripal likes quantum physics, but not controlled experiments; Dickens doesn’t believe there’s scientific support for aliens, but she does believe in telepathy; Rogan interrupts the interview to google “Voynich manuscript debunked” and “HECS suit debunked,” but not to google “facilitated communication debunked” or “autism as mind-body disconnect debunked.” Rogan knows that there are quacks and charlatans out there, but thinks he can tell by gut instinct whether someone’s lying.
So who’s actually more open-minded? Scientists are. When people make claims that strike them as implausible, they ask for evidence—which might sound like being dismissive, but actually is more of a provisional openness. Scientists are inherently curious. They’re constantly looking for new things to observe, measure, and test. Observation, measurement, and controls, of course, are at the heart of empirical science—as everyone once learned in elementary school. Without these, there is no science, and anyone can claim anything they like: that the earth was created in seven days, that there are Zebras on the North Pole, or that vaccines cause autism. Scientists may take all sorts of things off the scientific table—from mystical poetry, to unfalsifiable claims like we’re living in a simulation, to claims that have already been solidly rebutted (like those about facilitated communication and non-speaking autism)—while still enjoying poetry and speculations about simulations during their off-hours.
As for who’s fearful, one thing that all espousers of paranormal beliefs appear to be afraid of is well-controlled empirical testing—despite the existence of a half million-dollar reward for anyone who can prove the existence of paranormal phenomena via such tests.
And as for destroying beauty and wonder by looking under the metaphorical microscope, the microscope in particular, and scientific findings in general, have revealed beautiful and wondrous phenomena: the microstructures of a flower petal, the ways that a few simple rules create phenomenal emergent properties like the elaborately coordinated movements of fish shoals, or the subtle ways in which one person’s involuntary, nonconscious muscle movements can non-consciously condition another person’s behavior in increasingly subtle and powerful ways over time.
So let’s conclude with a few things that those who lean towards the paranormal should open up their minds to:
How unreliable our first-hand experiences and memories are
How people can look like they’re telling the truth—because they believe what they’re saying—without actually telling the truth
How cues can simultaneously be too subtle for conscious minds to detect and yet powerful enough to influence animals into elaborate patterns of group behavior that aren’t deliberately planned out, or to influence human beings into the production of elaborately spelled messages that they may or may not understand
How the things that science can’t explain aren’t satisfactorily explained by paranormal phenomena
How paranormal phenomena don’t explain anything that science can’t explain better.
Addendum: A Telepathy Tapes Update
Through these podcasts and other developments, Ky Dickens is getting a ever growing attention for her various claims, and an ever-growing fund for her upcoming projects, which, as we learn at the end of the Rogan interview include:
releasing a documentary film based on the Telepathy Tapes within the year, with five non-speaking members on the production team
raising awareness of “spelling” (as in Spelling to Communicate) and getting it into all schools
opening up large centers that provide opportunities for “spelling” and for training more people to be “communication partners” so they can interact with and hire non-speakers.
Telepathy, Dickens acknowledges, is serving as a sort of “Trojan horse” to raise awareness and support for Spelling to Communicate.
But along with this dark revelation comes another one: The International Association for Spelling as Communication (I-ASC), Dickens complains, is sending letters telling people “Don’t talk about telepathy or you’ll have your accreditation taken away.”
The Telepathy Tapes has drastically raised awareness of “Spelling to Communicate,” but not all publicity is good publicity. Just possibly, a combination of infighting among quacks and true believers, on one hand, and the promulgation of credibility-straining claims about autistic non-speakers, on the other, could ultimately cause the whole abnormal-but-not-actually-paranormal phenomenon to collapse under its own weight.
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