In 2024, a documentary was made of the research done by Dr. Diane Powell, which became known as The Telepathy Tapes, which became very popular for awhile and also became quite controversial. Because of the area of focus chosen by the filmmaker in the documentary, there is quite a bit of confusion and misunderstanding about what Dr. Powell’s research actually is. It’s high time to sort it all out and as a parapsychology journalist, this is my jam.
Dr. Powell, a psychiatrist who has specialized in in working with autistic children, first began investigating savant abilities in autistic children, but heard stories of telepathy, which she began investigating.
The Beginning
It began with “Hayley”, a ten year old severely autistic girl who seemed to be a mathematical savant. She could solve many digit math problems while not knowing basic multiplication or division. However, one day during an informal test, the calculator displayed the answer in exponential numbers and Hayley gave the exponential answer. When asked about the switch, Hayley replied that she was getting the answer from the therapist’s head. Subsequent testing seemed to confirm this, and because of this the father, who had heard of Dr. Powell because of her previous research with autistic savants and telepathy, contacted her.
The parents sent Dr. Powell two videos of Hayley doing their attempts at experiements. Hayley was able to independently type her answers into a device called a talker, a device similar to an iPad with an electronic voice. When she tested Hayley with more formal parapsychology experiments, the results were nothing short of mind boggling. She describes two days of experiments with “Hayley”:
Day one, Therapist A: 100% accuracy on three out of twenty image descriptions containing up to nine letters each, 60-100% accuracy on all three of the five-letter nonsense words, 100% accuracy on two random numbers that were eight and nine digits long.
Day Two, Therapist A: 100% accuracy on six out of twelve sets of numbers with 15 to 19 digits each, 100% accuracy on seven out of 20 image descriptions, and 81-100% accuracy on nine out of nine sentences between 18 and 35 letters. Day Two, Therapist B: 100% accuracy with five out of twenty random numbers of up to six digits in length, and 100% accuracy with five out of twelve image descriptions containing up to six letters. (Mindfield, V.8, issue 1. pg. 30)
These results are statistically far from usual for a telepathy experiment, both in overall accuracy and the specificity. For ordinary telepathy experiments, achieving this level of experimental success is unheard of. Dr. Powell has discovered something novel.
Autism is a Syndrome
Before I go farther, it is important here to understand that autism is a syndrome, not a disease. It does not have a specific cause and it is diagnosed by psychiatrists through its symptoms. One of the relevant aspects of autism is a partial suppression of some of the functions occurring in the left frontal lobe and other areas, so for example, while some autistic children cannot talk, some of them may be able to understand language quite well and when they overcome their motor difficulties, those children can learn to type. Their lack of interaction and seeming emotionlessness, masks a very sensitive, often quite intelligent and emotionally rich child.
Telepathy Research
The Telepathy Tapes focus on the autistic community and their dealings with the constant telepathy among the children and Dickens does a few informal experiments to demonstrate it. For her, it’s about showing the prevalence of it, the impact of discovering this whole under served and misunderstood community and how the community responds to the cultural taboos and how they have to battle against outdated prejudices against using spelling boards. It’s a very important story that needs to be told.
From a science standpoint telepathy has been demonstrated over and over again through the years in well controlled and often replicated experiments known collectively as The Ganzfeld experiments; it’s been demonstrated in remote viewing experiments, as well as Rupert Sheldrake’s Staring experiments and Russell Gruber’s Mirror Worlds research, to name a few. Some of these were mentioned on the podcast.
This experimental evidence must be emphatically stated because too often, psi research (and the Telepathy Tapes) are treated as though each and every experiment happens in a vacuum where no other research exists, and everyone new who comes along has to prove everything all over again. But that’s not how science works and it’s extremely important in the case of Powell’s research and the autistic world described in the Telepathy Tapes to look at the vast body of research that has come before.
Neither Powell’s research nor the Telepathy tapes have to meet any unrealistic extraordinary evidence standard. It’s been demonstrated that telepathy isn’t all that unusual, so that fact that it turns up in autistic children is interesting, but there is no reason to get overly worked up about it. Telepathy is the most likely explanation for Powell’s experimental results and the many stories told in the podcast, so when confounding factors are present, such as the need to touch and comfort the children in experimental tests, which are sometimes unavoidable when working with non verbal autistic children, the whole experiment isn’t in jeopardy. Dr. Powell’s research is focusing on strong telepathy, which may give us a rare insight into the conditions necessary for telepathy to occur.
Facilitated Communicators Make Poor Research Subjects . . .
Skeptics claim that the experiments use facilitated communication, which looks like this:
In the video, the therapists are engaging the individuals in typing at a very direct level, to help them learn the motor control and physical process necessary to type on their own. At this stage, the therapist is so directly involved in the process that the individuals can’t be said to be producing their own work. This is in fact, a huge problem with this method. These Studies have shown that it’s the facilitators, not the autistic individuals doing the typing. Throw in a parent desperate to communicate with their child and it’s very easy to for this method to devolve into a total sham. So why do people continue to use it? Well, there is research supporting it. In addition to that:
Because . . . sometimes it works, which is why this method still hangs around. (Not to mention the fact that there isn’t anything better to replace it.) I asked Dr. Powell about this and this was her reply:
. . . the reality is not so black and white. I have seen individuals whom I believe are definitely communicating their thoughts and others where it is clear that the parents are engaged in hopeful thinking. There are children who progress to eventually type independently and were "in there" all along and others that never do.
Such is the nature of neurodiversity.
Each child needs to be fully assessed to see why they can't speak, given the appropriate treatment options/accommodations, and tracked. The problem is that they are all treated as though they have the same condition.
While the skeptics all blather on about how facilitated communication is totally discredited, basing their opinions on their ten minute Internet search, the real expert with real life experience sees this as a far more complex issue with shades of gray. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but I suppose it will.
Dr. Powell receives requests to test for telepathy in children using facilitated communication all the time, and unfortunately has to refuse them because until they can speak or type on their own, they are not good test subjects. They may indeed be telepathic, but unless they meet a standard which is in line with scientific testing, there is no point in testing them.
. . . Which is Why Dr. Powell Doesn’t Use Them
Here is an example of Dr. Powell’s research:
In this video is Ramses, an autistic savant, who performs a short demonstration of his abilities. Because he can talk and doesn’t require someone touching him, a lot of the problems with sensory leakage go away. It is this sort of test subject that Dr. Powell is interested in.
Here is another video showing her experiment with Hayley, a non verbal autistic girl.
As you can see, neither experiment uses facilitated communication. None of her experiments do. To put it bluntly, she’s not that stupid. So what happened? Why did the skeptics get their hackles up and make such a big deal about it? This is perhaps best answered by a direct quote from Dr. Powell from a book review that she did of “Becoming Psychic: Lessons from the Minds of Mediums, Healers, and Psychics” by Jeff Tarrant, for the Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition, 2024, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 276-281.
. . . Reports of telepathy appear to be a common experience among non-speakers who have recently learned how to communicate by “spelling” on letter boards. They all use a technique called rapid prompting method (RPM), otherwise known as “spelling to communicate” (S2C). RPM was developed by Soma Mukhopadhyay for her autistic son Tito. The method’s rationale comes from the fact that many nonspeaking children have intact receptive language but they have a sensorimotor issue that causes an expressive aphasia in which they struggle to use their oral musculature to speak.
Similarly, they have difficulties using their upper extremities to write or type. RPM works because it uses pointing on letter and number boards to spell out answers and doesn’t require the same level of fine motor control as typing. Over time, the motor abilities of some improve to the extent that they can graduate onto a keyboard. RPM is a controversial communication method labeled scientifically invalid by the American Speech-Language Association (ASHA) because it requires prompts on the part of the facilitator who holds the letter board. The aim of the prompts is to keep autistic individuals on task because they often have a tendency to fixate on a particular letter or number when spelling out their answers.
Due to the active role of the facilitator, the communications obtained by RPM are considered by most speech therapists to be the facilitator’s and not their child’s. This is not always a correct assumption, because occasionally the child goes on to type independently and eventually proves that they were indeed the communicators. Furthermore, RPM has had some major successes and enabled some non-speakers to go to college. Perhaps the most famous is Elizabeth Bonker. She gave a commencement speech at Rollins College in Florida as class valedictorian.
The issue of telepathy is a hot potato among the spelling community. Mukhopadhyay has actively discouraged it for understandable reasons. She has been working hard to convince the mainstream educational and medical communities to accept these children’s communications as their own. Understanding the issues for the non-speakers becomes even more critical when you realize that the numbers of autistic children have soared during the past forty years. The incidence was only one out of every 10,000 children in 1985, but is one in thirty now. Announcing that these children are telepathic could undermine the credibility of Mukhopadhyay’s method, so choosing the right course of action in reporting my research has been a fine balance.
Another issue with Elisa is the potential for subtle cueing. Being touched would be considered a red flag from the standpoint of skeptics. However, when many children are first learning RPM, they do best while being touched by a parent. At the time of testing, Elisa had been using the RPM boards for such a short period of time that she required far more assistance from her mother to communicate than desirable.
Anxiety also played a role in creating more need for tactile support. That is particularly the case in initial experiments being filmed on camera. To avoid the issues caused by RPM, I have primarily tested under controlled conditions autistic children who are able to speak and/or type independently (Powell, 2015a, Powell 2015b). However, the documentary filmmaker following my research wanted to start by filming experiments that were being set up for the first time and all of my untested children were using RPM.
Tarrant briefly mentions the concerns I raised over touching and how it could be construed as a source of subtle cueing, but he was also convinced that what he saw was indeed telepathy. I cannot fault Tarrant too much for considering Elisa telepathic. After our experiments the entire sound and camera crew walked away with the same impression. No one visually detected an obvious pattern that could be considered cueing. All told, there were at least ten witnesses, some of whom were filming from multiple camera angles. Nonetheless, the conditions were clearly not optimal for proving telepathy and we cannot definitively say that there was no cueing without more tests and a detailed analysis.
Dickens Found a Social Issue and Pursued It
The Documentary “The Telepathy Tapes” by Ky Dickens began with an examination of Powell’s research, but Ky Dickens found an under served, misunderstood minority and recognized the importance of their needs over a purely scientific discussion. It also made for a far more compelling documentary. A scientifically accurate show is ok. A show that pursues a social issue and uncovers a very unusual community at the expense of not emphasizing the science is much better. That’s just how things are. In this case the emotional and social value of the podcast was very high and it did extremely well, and unsurprisingly, it came at the expense of a deep scientific discussion. Honestly? I can find no fault in her approach. She’s reaching a general audience.
Had Dickens adhered to a more scientific approach, it’s entirely possible that her show would not have been as successful. To meet her own goals, Ky Dickens took the correct approach. She was not at all blind to the science; she has many resources listed on her website, it’s just that there were other more pressing priorities for her in creating a successful show.
The show focused on the testimony of people experiencing telepathy in action and did an excellent job of capturing them and showing people describing their personal paradigm shift. These things are far more compelling to most people than scientific protocols and proper methodology. It’s highly likely that the telepathy was real and the reactions were genuine responses to real phenomena, and that this is what led to the show’s success.
This was not the first, nor will it be the last show that focuses on personal stories over science. There is a well known and largely unsolvable tension between the needs of science and the needs of a successful show. In this case the show displays experiences that are personally convincing, which is easy to conflate with experiences that are objectively convincing. This is where the show veers away from science and can be interpreted as venturing into True Believer land. All of it can be dismissed as anecdotal by people who find telepathy to be unbelievable. Science, and only science can make the needle of skepticism budge.
The Skeptics and the Believers are both True Believers
The road to True Believer Land is traveled by believers and skeptics alike. It seems to me to be a kind of liminal state where people aren’t fully on board with an idea and deep down are afraid that they’re wrong, but are uneasily moving toward it and need to create external acceptance to help resolve their uncertainty. The bigger the personal paradigm shift, the stronger the anxiety and the greater the need to reinforce it. It’s more likely to occur with people who began as skeptics, but switched to becoming believers.
While I have run into many True Believers over the years, I don’t think that’s what’s happening on the Telepathy Tapes. These people being interviewed are dealing with telepathy constantly to the point that it just normalizes. That’s not what True Belief looks like. It’s more likely to happen with people who just listen to the podcast.
A more pressing matter is those who began as believers, but switched over to becoming atheist materialist skeptics. They go through a similar process. They are the ones that need focusing on here. This whole True Believer thing is not dissimilar to people who “find” religion and start evangelizing.
The Telepathy Tapes: A Skeptic Trigger Warning
The science of the show was somewhat superficial, it had a true believer vibe to it and it was popular. Precisely because of this, the True Believer skeptic machinery got into high gear and went on the attack, lest those gullible weak minded people get hoodwinked by the fantasy of psychic powers. Clearly the skeptics must rush in and save the day with their rational logic! And as usual, being who they are, they made a mess of things in their haste to push their atheist materialist belief system and remove all sense of wonder and mystery from the world.
It seems to have begun with Jonathan Jarry, M. SC., writing for the McGill Office for Science and Society, The Telepathy Tapes Prove We All Want to Believe, (Dec. 13, ‘24) who begins his article by launching into a skeptical morality tale of the horrors of believing in the paranormal. He then expresses disbelief that Dr. Powell was the subject of a witch hunt by the medical board, and with no understanding of the irony, launches his own witch hunt. Here’s the story:
A Skeptical Witch Hunt
Dr. Powell was called before the medical board for them to review a complaint that had been lodged against her. Dr. Powell claimed that it was her interest in psi research that led the board to launch a full investigation into a matter that turned out to be trivial. (She was cleared at the next meeting.) Jarry, -who seems to have no idea how bias works-, looked only at the complaints themselves, never considering that there might be subtext. (Or that it might be attitudes like his that led to the review.) In any case, Dr. Powell wrote in a rebuttal:
If needed, I have a copy of the letter sent by a psychiatrist to the board that specifically tells them to take my license away on an emergency basis because I wrote a book on ESP, even though that is not what they put in the public record.
Other parapsychologists would find this unsurprising. Getting professionally attacked based on their interest in psi research is just another Tuesday for them.
Brandolini’s Law in Action
Not content with merely attacking Dr. Powell and the show, Jarry decided to go after the whole of parapsychology, starting with what can only be described as a bald faced lie: “Research into parapsychology has been plagued by false positive results.” What follows can best be described as the skeptical True Believer narrative while providing his own spin on the skeptical talking point that parapsychology is a failed science. I won’t bore you with everything wrong with his statements. Suffice to say that like the rest of this crowd, he cherry picked things that supported his narrative and left out everything that didn’t. (You can find the thorough rebuttal from Dr. Powell here.)
Her long rebuttal, a poster child for Brandolini’s law, is a common sight in parapsychology, where researchers have had to do these tedious rebuttals on a continuous basis throughout the years.
Jarry even went so far as to suggest that the materialist atheist organization, Center for Inquiry, (They are listed on their tax records as an atheist organization.) investigate the children, because what could possibly go wrong with self described atheist skeptics with hardened beliefs investigating a phenomena with strong spiritual implications?
The last time a skeptic did this, James Randi, by the way, he bullied a girl and covered her face in duct tape to prevent any light from reaching her eyes because she was successful at first in an experiment involving seeing without her eyes. He traumatized her to the point that she lost her ability. (Follow the link on the wayback machine. There are pictures.)
Anyhoo, once Jarry got the ball rolling, it was picked up by the Center for Inquiry and their materialist atheist publication, the Skeptical Inquirer. The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience. (Jan. 6,’25) Read both that article and the one from Jarry and notice the incredibly condescending tone that both use. They are both excellent examples of what skeptic True Belief looks like. From there the skeptical narrative and talking points popped up in a few other articles and Reddit threads.
The Neutral Point of View
If you’re wondering what an actual, neutral point of view would look like, it was best summed up by Jeff Tarrant, PhD BCN, in his blog post hosted by Psychology Today where he wrote:
While preliminary in nature, the remarkable consistency and accuracy observed across multiple individuals strongly suggest that the results cannot be easily explained by chance or conventional mechanisms alone.
. . . While often dismissed as anecdotal or attributed to misdiagnosis, these cases persist and defy easy explanation. Both savant abilities and spontaneous healing serve as reminders that anomalous phenomena, even when poorly understood, can point to mechanisms not yet accounted for in our current models. Rather than dismiss such cases, science should approach them with open-minded inquiry and methodological rigor.
So in other words, the correct scientific response when addressing The Telepathy Tapes goes something like this: “That was interesting, but more study is needed.” It’s not necessary to add in the skeptical harrumphing, finger wagging and personal attacks. That is all just an example of their True Believer mentality.
As Usual, Experts are Far Less Biased
Parapsychologists spend in some cases decades scientifically examining psychic phenomena. (I first wrote about Dr. Powell’s work in 2014 and she had been working on this for years before I learned about it.) Their experience and expertise in the field has replaced any strong emotional investments in a particular position they may have once had and they are better at seeing psychic ability clearly and unemotionally than anyone else. Dr. Powell is no exception to this.
In the unusual situation in which she finds herself, she is the sane voice caught between a popular view of telepathy as amazing and another as it being completely nonexistent. There would be comedy to this if the stakes weren’t quite so high for autistic people. Taking an extreme position on telepathy, whether it’s viewing it as a super power or believing that it can’t exist at all, is harmful to the autistic community.
In all the time I’ve been writing about parapsychology I’ve never seen a parapsychologist so completely squeezed by a situation like this. Dr. Powell is caught between two opposing True Believer views of telepathy where the science is completely overwhelmed by polarized emotional positions. As I said earlier, it’s the hard science that moves the needle.
What Dr. Powell’s Research Can Tell Us
What’s lost here is the actual contribution her research can provide to science and our understanding of psychic ability and the brain. Having test subjects who exhibit such strong telepathy can potentially give us valuable insights into what the necessary conditions are for telepathy to occur. It may give us some insight into how to help some autistic children. (The underlying conditions for autism may vary, so no method is going to work for all autistic children.)
We know, for example, that suppressing activity in the left medial middle frontal lobe can increase psychic ability in normally functioning people. This area is often suppressed in autistic children and suppression of certain brain functions, it turns out, is part of what enhances psychic ability.
This has been suspected for a long time, mostly due to advances in research connected to understanding the physical interactions of psychedelics and the brain. One would think that such a drug would increase connections across the brain to create the vivid experiences associated with psychedelics, but in fact, those connections are disrupted. Psychedelics work by suppressing brain activity, not increasing it.
There is work to be done. And what this whole circus surrounding Dr. Powell’s research demonstrates is that crowds of true believers, either skeptical or believer, aren’t helping at all.
