Out In Left Field

In my last post, I proposed one reason for the popularity of the Telepathy Tapes: how predisposed people are to believe in paranormal phenomena. Here I examine another reason: how predisposed people are to believe that autistic non-speakers can be unlocked via held-up letterboards—that is, via variants of facilitated communication known alternatively as Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) and Spelling to Communicate (S2C).

First, the Telepathy Folks

As far as Telepathy Tapes listeners go, part of this inclination comes from the fact that the podcast provides no explicit indications that the individuals on the Telepathy Tapes are being cued by their facilitators. The podcast is audio only, and so in scenes where nonspeaking autistic individuals type out messages on letterboards, all we have are the verbal descriptions provided Ky Dickens, who is not only the show’s host, but a fervent believer in FC. And Dickens’ verbal descriptions omit that the letterboards are held up and inevitably shift around while the autistic person’s extended index finger roams around in front of the letter arrays. The show does provide a few videos behind a paywall, but the facilitator cueing in these, as with many other videos RPM and S2C, is proving to be too subtle for most naïve viewers.

But that doesn’t fully explain what so many people with no vested interest in FC are apparently ready to believe—judging, at least from what we’ve heard from the many Telepathy Tapes enthusiasts. Presented with verbal descriptions of scenarios in which an autistic person points to a number that only the facilitator saw, or to a sequence of letters that labels a picture that only the facilitator saw, a surprisingly large number of Telepathy Tapes listeners have concluded that this is both:

A.      a reliable description of what happened, and

B.      evidence, not that the facilitator might be influencing the number/letter selection through via normal, if subtle, physical mechanisms, but that the facilitator is instead sending a telepathic message that is picked up and acted upon by the autistic non-speaker.

Beyond telepathy believers

As we’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog, you don’t have to believe in telepathy to ignore or dismiss facilitator cueing. But dismissing facilitator cueing entails at least one extraordinary belief: namely, that non-speaking autistic individuals, who typically show little signs of attending to other people, or of comprehending more than a few basic words and phrases, and who typically aren’t included in general education classrooms, have somehow acquired sophisticated vocabularies and literacy skills, worldly knowledge, and academic skills across the entire K12 curriculum. For telepathy believers, the explanation is straightforward: this acquisition happens through telepathy. For everyone else, there are instead a host of FC-friendly education myths that have long dominated the world of K12 education and in turn, through the salience of K12 education in many people’s lives, also dominate our popular beliefs.

Myth #1: Kids can learn academic skills by osmosis.

Within and beyond the education world, there’s a widespread belief that, just as many non-academic skills can be learned through immersion and incidental learning in the natural environment, the same holds for academic skills. That is, just as typically developing children learn to walk, talk, and build block towers without any explicit instruction, the same, purportedly, goes for reading, writing, and arithmetic. Indeed, there’s an entire pedagogy based on this notion: “child-centered discovery learning.”

For reading, this means immersing children in a “print-rich environment.” For math and science, it means manipulatives (blocks, rods, chips) and child-centered exploration. Teachers are “guides on the side” rather than “sages on the stage,” providing minimal instruction or error correction. (See for example Hirsch, 1996; Ravitch, 2000). While few schools take such notions to extremes, and while learning to read through osmosis has been widely discredited, the general notion that discovery learning is more effective than direct instruction continues to resonate broadly and deeply throughout K12 education and on into the general public.

And it extends, naturally, to the world of FC. Indeed, Douglas Biklen, the person credited with bringing FC to the U.S. from Australia  more or less echoed the proponents of literacy through print-rich environments when he said, by way of explanation for the literacy skills in FC, that:

I think it's rather obvious that the way in which these children learned to read was the way that most of us learned to read-- that is, by being immersed in a language-rich environment. You go into good pre-school classrooms and you'll see words everywhere, labeling objects, labeling pictures. You look at Sesame Street. We're introducing words. We're giving people whole words. We're also introducing them to the alphabet. (Palfreman, 1993).

As in K12 education, this line of thinking extends beyond literacy to other skills and knowledge. FC proponents have claimed that FCed children have learned about current events by listening to NPR (Iversen, 2006); Spanish by listening to their siblings practice at home (Handley, 2021); and physics by overhearing a physics class through a cafeteria wall (personal communication).

In K12, the illusion that students can master material without explicit instruction is sustained by powerful prompts and cues from teachers, often in the form of leading questions. I discussed this phenomenon in an earlier post; we can see it play out in detail, for example, in Emily Hanford’s Sold A Story. This podcast is an exposé of an approach to reading known as “Balanced Literacy” and/or “Three Cueing” that eschews phonics instruction and encourages kids to guess words from context. In Episode 1, a teacher reads a story about two children, Zelda and Ivy, who have run away from home because they didn’t want to eat the cucumber sandwiches their father had made for them. The teacher turns to a page where a word is covered up by a sticky note and prompts the students to use context to guess what it is. The word occurs at a point where the Zelda and Ivy are wondering how their parents will react when they realize they’re gone. Here is the excerpt:

Teacher: Do you think that covered word could be the word “miss”?...

Teacher: Could it be the word miss? Because now that they’re gone maybe their parents will miss them?

The teacher asks the kids to think about whether “miss” could be the word using the strategies they’ve been taught.

Teacher: Let’s do our triple check and see. Does it make sense? Does it sound right? How about the last part of our triple check? Does it look right? Let’s uncover the word and see if it looks right?

The teacher lifts up the sticky note and indeed, the word is “miss.”

Teacher: It looks right too. Good job. Very good job.

(Sold a Story, Episode 1 transcript).

The teacher doesn’t seem to recognize what a big clue this is—that is, how many other possibilities there might be: “find,” “scold,” “resent,” etc.—and therefore to what degree she’s essentially told the students the answer and, quite likely, overestimated their word-identification skills.

Precisely this sort of oral prompting pervades—and sustains the illusion of— the more recent variants of FC—Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), Spelling to Communicate (S2C), and Spellers Method, where facilitators frequently direct letter selection with phrases like “up-up-up,” “right next door,” and “get it!”

Myth #2: All students are equally capable: they just need the right environment for learning and the right outlet for demonstrating understanding.

The world of K12 education has become increasingly resistant to the reality that different children have different levels of academic readiness and academic achievement. Instead, large proportions of education professionals, along with large proportions of the general public, embrace pseudoscientific theories (“multiple intelligences”; “learning styles”) that recast differences in skills as differences in styles. These beliefs have continued to spread despite the growing evidence against them (Willingham et al., 2015; Newton & Salvi, 2020). Individuals once viewed as low achievers are now often labeled as “bodily-kinesthetic learners.” This type of learner, purportedly, doesn’t do well in traditional classrooms but will prove quite competent with instruction and activities that incorporate lots of movement (skits, dances, building things, marching around the classroom). Individuals who struggle to read or do math might also be labeled as “visual learners”—purportedly performing perfectly well so long as teachers replace letters and numbers with pictures.

Consistent with these assumptions, assessments are now less about testing specific skills and more about giving students multiple options for “demonstrating understanding.” Specific suggestions include allowing kids to make presentations, posters, or “concept maps” instead of pen-and-paper tests, and providing supports like text-to-speech and speech-to-text (see for example, here). A “visual” student might, for example, retell a story in pictures rather than in words.

The presumption that all students are equally capable, given the appropriate adjustments, echoes a mantra of FC proponents that dates back to Douglas Biklen: Always presume competence. But the similarities don’t end there. In FC, as in education, the apparent (but purportedly not actual) challenges of the population in question are explained by invoking the person’s body. The education world, regarding students who struggle in traditional classrooms, invokes a bodily-kinesthetic learning style; the FC world, regarding minimal speakers with autism, invokes a mind-body disconnect. Finally, just like it’s the teacher’s job to figure out the best way for individual students to demonstrate the understanding that they’re presumed to have somehow acquired, it’s the facilitator’s job, via the letterboard or keyboard, to figure out the motor or regulatory support needed for individual clients to demonstrate the literacy skills and academic knowledge that they, too, are presumed to have somehow acquired.

One final commonality here between the FC world and the edu-world is the notion that the hard work that people used to think was necessary—whether the direct, systematic instruction and “drill and kill” of traditional classrooms or the intensive, one-on-one “discrete trials” of ABA—can be bypassed by methods that simply (1) presume that children are capable of learning on their own and (2) provide appropriate supports and outlets for children to put that learning to use.

Myth #3: Traditional, controlled tests are unreliable and don’t measure what really matters.

In the education world, there has long been a resistance to high-stakes standardized tests that measure student achievement. Particularly vociferous are those most invested in the teaching business: teachers unions and education schools (Phelps, 2023). These individuals make several arguments against using such tests—arguments that resonate across the general public. Among other things, they claim that:

• Testing is stressful, and some students perform poorly only because of anxiety. (There is some evidence for lowered performance in those with test anxiety, and some evidence for effective remedies).

• Marginalized groups may underperform on standardized test because the tests are biased against them or because of “stereotype threat.” (There is some empirical support for the latter, and some effective remedies).

• Standardized tests can only measure rote skills and “teaching to the test,” not conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking (see also here). (Untrue: here standardized tests effectively measure conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking. This is why, for example, the SAT has been a better predictor of college success than grades are).

• There are better ways to measure student achievement—e.g., projects, presentations, portfolios of student work. (These measures are much more subjective and unreliable).

While standardized statewide tests are still routinely administered across the country, the interest groups most resistant to high-stakes testing have effectively eliminated the most informative of such tests: those tests that most fully, comprehensively, and objectively assess students’ skills across a variety of key academic sub-skills and provide the most information about which educational pedagogies are working and which students have been most ill-served by which pedagogies. The canonical example of such tests is the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS). The ITBS was once used by schools across the country (I took it multiple times as a kid in Illinois); it has become decreasingly popular since then and was recently replaced by new “Common Core-aligned” tests. Used until recently by many in the homeschooling community, the ITBS reported sub-scores in various aspects of reading and math and placed no ceiling on skills being measured, such that a 4th grader could score at a 6th-grade level in a particular reading sub-skill.

Most of the new Common Core-inspired state tests, in contrast, only report general scores for reading and math, not sub-scores. They also only measure students up to what the state considers to be grade-level standards: standards which many testing experts consider, for most grades, to be set too low. Also reducing the tests’ informational value is the fact that some of the math questions require literacy skills (explaining your answer) and that students can receive partial credit for incorrect answers for which they provided verbal explanations. (Both of these factors artificially lower the scores, relative to other students, of English learners and students with language delays—including students with autism). The tests are further compromised by low security: teachers rather than outside proctors administer the tests, and some large-scale cheating episodes have come to light (see Phelps, 2023).

Also decreasingly informative are the SATs, which many colleges have made optional, and which have been redesigned to measure fewer skills with less precision. Many of the math problems allow calculators, and few require complex algebraic operations. The analogies and vocabulary sections are gone, as are questions that ask students to synthesize long passages. Passages now consist of 1-2 short paragraphs, often accompanied by charts and graphs, followed by a single question that often is more about the chart than the paragraph(s). The passages (and graphics) are no longer drawn from the works of professional writers but instead are written by test-makers; as a result they’re often hard to make sense of, not because the writing is sophisticated, but because they’re poorly written (or designed). Test-takers no longer lose points for guessing, so guessing rates have gone up, adding even more noise to the signal.

Meanwhile, one of the most popular early reading assessments in use in K12 schools, Fountas and Pinnnell Benchmark Assessment, is so poor at detecting skilled vs. struggling readers as to be equivalent to a coin toss.

As for those who want to promote a particular pedagogical approach as “evidence-based,” in lieu of standardized testing that might indicate objective effects on learning outcomes, we have anecdotal reports from classrooms: subjective accounts of high levels of student and teacher engagement, interviews with teachers, annotations of student work, and/or researchers’ field notes. “Lived experience” substitutes for objective testing; anecdotes for evidence.

And if the education world needs one more reason to dismiss objective tests, Telepathy Tapes host Ky Dickens obliges. On her “resources” page she claims, falsely, that ”nothing in education can truly be empirically validated because every student is inherently unique.”

Which takes us back to FC. FC proponents, just like their counterparts in the education world, have successfully suppressed informative testing. While the Don’t test mantra dates back to Douglas Biklen and the 1990s, there were, in that decade, a number of FC practitioners who nonetheless willingly participated in objective tests. But those tests consistently established that the facilitators were the ones controlling the FCed messages. What came next was a host of arguments against authorship tests that parallel the education world’s arguments against academic tests:

• Test anxiety purportedly impedes the FCed person’s ability to type messages, particularly in the hostile environment that purportedly results from skeptical examiners.

• Test performance is further undermined by stereotype threat: that is, by negative stereotypes about the abilities of minimally speaking individuals with autism (Jaswal et al., 2020) (Unlike in educational testing, there is no evidence that either anxiety or stereotype threat affects authorship testing).

• Authorship tests are insulting and violate the dictum to Always presume competence. (Apparently standardized education tests aren’t as insulting or unethical. Many FCed individuals take such tests—with the help of their facilitators).

• There are alternative ways to assess authorship that are purportedly more reliable, like comparing the writing styles of the FCed individual and their facilitator(s), or looking at whether their pointing rhythms suggest an awareness of English spelling patterns, or mounting an eye-tracking computer on their heads and recording whether they look to letters before they point to them (Jaswal et al., 2020; Jaswal et al., 2024; Nicoli et al., 2023). (See here, here, and here for critiques).

• Or better yet: there’s lived experience. FC-generated accounts attributed to FCed individuals recount their experiences with FC and explain how it’s really them producing the FCed messages. Videos or live observations of FCed individuals typing purportedly establish beyond a reasonable doubt that they aren’t being cued by the assistant who is always within auditory or visual cueing range.

• As for other types of standardized tests—cognitive tests, academic tests— none of these should be conducted on any minimally speaking autistic individual except through FC. That’s because all such tests require some sort of physical response (pointing to pictures; arranging shapes; filling in bubbles), and so the purported mind-body disconnect makes these tests hopelessly unreliable.

The hostility in both the worlds of FC and the worlds of education towards objective, well-controlled, informative testing underscores what’s so powerful about such tests: they are the brass tacks that everything comes down to. They are, in all areas of life, what separates the science from the pseudoscience and exposes the clinical quacks and methodological cracks for who and what they are—whether in K12 education, in minimally-speaking autism, or on podcasts about telepathy.

While standardized statewide tests are still routinely administered across the country, the interest groups most resistant to high-stakes testing have effectively eliminated the most informative of such tests: those tests that most fully, comprehensively, and objectively assess students’ skills across a variety of key academic sub-skills and provide the most information about which educational pedagogies are working and which students have been most ill-served by which pedagogies. The canonical example of such tests is the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS). The ITBS was once used by schools across the country (I took it multiple times as a kid in Illinois); it has become decreasingly popular since then and was recently replaced by new “Common Core-aligned” tests. Used until recently by many in the homeschooling community, the ITBS reported sub-scores in various aspects of reading and math and placed no ceiling on skills being measured, such that a 4th grader could score at a 6th-grade level in a particular reading sub-skill.

Most of the new Common Core-inspired state tests, in contrast, only report general scores for reading and math, not sub-scores. They also only measure students up to what the state considers to be grade-level standards: standards which many testing experts consider, for most grades, to be set too low. Also reducing the tests’ informational value is the fact that some of the math questions require literacy skills (explaining your answer) and that students can receive partial credit for incorrect answers for which they provided verbal explanations. (Both of these factors artificially lower the scores, relative to other students, of English learners and students with language delays—including students with autism). The tests are further compromised by low security: teachers rather than outside proctors administer the tests, and some large-scale cheating episodes have come to light (see Phelps, 2023).

Also decreasingly informative are the SATs, which many colleges have made optional, and which have been redesigned to measure fewer skills with less precision. Many of the math problems allow calculators, and few require complex algebraic operations. The analogies and vocabulary sections are gone, as are questions that ask students to synthesize long passages. Passages now consist of 1-2 short paragraphs, often accompanied by charts and graphs, followed by a single question that often is more about the chart than the paragraph(s). The passages (and graphics) are no longer drawn from the works of professional writers but instead are written by test-makers; as a result they’re often hard to make sense of, not because the writing is sophisticated, but because they’re poorly written (or designed). Test-takers no longer lose points for guessing, so guessing rates have gone up, adding even more noise to the signal.

As for those who want to promote a particular pedagogical approach as “evidence-based,” in lieu of standardized testing that might indicate objective effects on learning outcomes, we have anecdotal reports from classrooms: subjective accounts of high levels of student and teacher engagement, interviews with teachers, annotations of student work, and/or researchers’ field notes. “Lived experience” substitutes for objective testing; anecdotes for evidence.

And if the education world needs one more reason to dismiss objective tests, Telepathy Tapes host Ky Dickens obliges. On her “resources” page she claims, falsely, that ”nothing in education can truly be empirically validated because every student is inherently unique.”

Which takes us back to FC. FC proponents, just like their counterparts in the education world, have successfully suppressed informative testing. While the Don’t test mantra dates back to Douglas Biklen and the 1990s, there were, in that decade, a number of FC practitioners who nonetheless willingly participated in objective tests. But those tests consistently established that the facilitators were the ones controlling the FCed messages. What came next was a host of arguments against authorship tests that parallel the education world’s arguments against academic tests:

• Test anxiety purportedly impedes the FCed person’s ability to type messages, particularly in the hostile environment that purportedly results from skeptical examiners.

• Test performance is further undermined by stereotype threat: that is, by negative stereotypes about the abilities of minimally speaking individuals with autism (Jaswal et al., 2020) (Unlike in educational testing, there is no evidence that either anxiety or stereotype threat affects authorship testing).

• Authorship tests are insulting and violate the dictum to Always presume competence. (Apparently standardized education tests aren’t as insulting or unethical. Many FCed individuals take such tests—with the help of their facilitators).

• There are alternative ways to assess authorship that are purportedly more reliable, like comparing the writing styles of the FCed individual and their facilitator(s), or looking at whether their pointing rhythms suggest an awareness of English spelling patterns, or mounting an eye-tracking computer on their heads and recording whether they look to letters before they point to them (Jaswal et al., 2020; Jaswal et al., 2024; Nicoli et al., 2023). (See here, here, and here for critiques).

• Or better yet: there’s lived experience. FC-generated accounts attributed to FCed individuals recount their experiences with FC and explain how it’s really them producing the FCed messages. Videos or live observations of FCed individuals typing purportedly establish beyond a reasonable doubt that they aren’t being cued by the assistant who is always within auditory or visual cueing range.

• As for other types of standardized tests—cognitive tests, academic tests— none of these should be conducted on any minimally speaking autistic individual except through FC. That’s because all such tests require some sort of physical response (pointing to pictures; arranging shapes; filling in bubbles), and so the purported mind-body disconnect makes these tests hopelessly unreliable.

The hostility in both the worlds of FC and the worlds of education towards objective, well-controlled, informative testing underscores what’s so powerful about such tests: they are the brass tacks that everything comes down to. They are, in all areas of life, what separates the science from the pseudoscience and exposes the clinical quacks and methodological cracks for who and what they are—whether in K12 education, in minimally-speaking autism, or on podcasts about telepathy.

REFERENCES

Handley, J. B., & Handley, J. (2021). Underestimated: An autism miracle. Skyhorse.

Hanford, E. (2022). Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went so Wrong. [Podcast]. APM reports.

Hirsch, E.D. (1996). The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. New York: Doubleday.

Iversen, P. (2006). Strange son. Riverhead.

Jaswal, V. K., Wayne, A., & Golino, H. (2020). Eye-tracking reveals agency in assisted autistic communication. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 7882. doi:10.103841598-020-64553-9 PMID:32398782

Jaswal, V. K., Lampi, A. J., & Stockwell, K. M. (2024). Literacy in nonspeaking autistic people. Autism, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613241230709

Newton, P., & Salvi, A. (2020). How Common Is Belief in the Learning Styles Neuromyth, and Does It Matter? A Pragmatic Systematic Review, Frontiers in Education. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.602451

Palfreman, J. (Director). (1993). Prisoners of Silence [Documentary]. PBS.

Phelps, R. (2023). The Malfunction of US Education Policy. Lanham, MD: Rowen and Littlefield.

Ravitch, D. (2000). Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The Scientific Status of Learning Styles Theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628315589505

https://www.amazon.com/Malfunction-Education-Policy-Misinformation-Disinformation/dp/1475869940

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing

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.

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.”)

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.

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.