The Telepathy Tapes

[FatPhil]

The fact that the receiver is part of the test team should rule out most cheating methods.

That said, what I would want to see is a control experiment with a non-telepath in the sender position, and the same receiver.

Nah, I want to be the reciever, and I want my share of the $500000!

EDIT: Also, I don't think a tester should be the receiver - because that invites claims of deliberate bias.

 

[JMartJr]

The fact that the receiver is part of the test team should rule out most cheating methods.

Can you expound? I'm not sure I follow.


Also, more generally and not in response to Mendel's post, it is worth keeping in mind that there is deliberate cheating, and there is also not knowing that you are getting the information through other channels, such as hearing what the sound of the numeral being drown is and inferring the number subconsciously. Not all ways to get a false positive result involve deliberate falsification.

 

[Ann K]

I think non-reporting is a receiver's most honest way of saying "I'm getting nothing". Forcing the person into making a guess changes the whole business from telepathy into mere statistics. If you want to test telepathy, the receiver would have to sense something, but if you're just testing statistics you would need a much greater number of tests.

 

[Giddierone]

I think non-reporting is a receiver's most honest way of saying "I'm getting nothing". Forcing the person into making a guess changes the whole business from telepathy into mere statistics. If you want to test telepathy, the receiver would have to sense something, but if you're just testing statistics you would need a much greater number of tests.

I agree. But, how does she explain the rounds where she did write a number then? Did she "get" something? If so how?

The whole thing just seems like they pulled it together on their lunch break. Why couldn't they have grabbed a random stranger off the street to be the reciever and/or not tell them what the test is about.

 

[Ann K]

The whole thing just seems like they pulled it together on their lunch break. Why couldn't they have grabbed a random stranger off the street to be the reciever and/or not tell them what the test is about.

This was designed by students, remember? I hope later class discussions made them think about what they should have done.

 

[Giddierone]

Oh, the test subject's name is Mr. Deviner - like Diviner....

 

[Mendel]

Can you expound? I'm not sure I follow.

Mentalism acts—stage telepathy—work by setting up a system in advance where a confederate signals the receiver the answer via a pre-arranged code. This obviously requires that the receiver knows about the code, so they're not going to be fooled into thinking it's telepathy. So then the test team knows it's fake.

If the receiver isn't a stooge, then they have to cheat some other way, e.g. through stochastic prediction or by controlling which number the sender reveals after the recipient has committed.

 

[Giddierone]

a confederate signals the receiver the answer via a pre-arranged code.

Like the Zancigs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Agnes_Zancig

They used a secret code to perform demonstrations of telepathy. Mrs Zancig, with her back turned, 10ft away, or even in another room, could divine letters, calculate numbers, or describe images from Mr Zancig, writing them on a slate tablet.

 

[Ann K]

Skeptical Inquirer's Stuart Vyse writes about "Upward Bound", supposedly written by autistic Woody Brown using the point-to-the-letter method.

Now, Woody has produced his first novel, which was published by a division of Penguin Random House, one of the legendary "big five" publishing companies.

This is a truly remarkable achievement, but not for the reasons most people think. Rather, it is remarkable that this mother-son pair has been able to mislead so many people and get this far. I realize that sounds harsh, but this view is based in evidence provided by the Today Show videographers. Often the video footage of nonspeaking individuals being subjected to RPM or other spelling methods does not give a clear view of the letter board held by the communication partner, and in other cases, the autistic individual genuinely appears to be tapping out recognizable words and sentences. In contrast, the Today Show staff gave us an unusually clear view of Woody's typing, and the results were devastating. The full six-minute Today Show segment on Upward Bound is shown in the YouTube video below, and the clearest examples of his typing begin approximately at the 3:00 minute mark.


Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tLz-5ZEOT80&time_continue=1&source_ve_path=NzY3NTg&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fskepticalinquirer.org%2F


Shockingly, for anyone who pays even the slightest attention, it is obvious there is a problem. Woody's taps on the letter board bear no relation to the words attributed to him. U.K. YouTuber Jill Bearup did a detailed analysis of an earlier video of Woody and his mother, and she pointed out that (a) the number of taps Woody makes for a word rarely match the number of letters in the word attributed to him by his mother, and (b) the actual letters tapped are gibberish. A screenshot from Bearup's video is shown in the banner of this article, with the words attributed to Woody at the bottom and Bearup's best determination of the letters typed at the top. Bearup also points out two common flaws of the spelling methods: Mary Brown does not hold the board steady, and, even more troubling, Woody is often not looking at the letter board.

 

[Ann K]

Note FYI: I get error messages for Jill Bearup's video on the above topic from Safari, but it works just fine on Chrome.

 

[Giddierone]

Ugh, this stuff is so tragic. He's obviously just "typing" an unintelligible string of characters. Do people just need to believe so strongly?

There's a good estimate the characters he types here:
Source: https://youtu.be/wwofBlN9PDs?si=BvSmSqzcTEriIksy&t=433

 

[Charlie Wiser]

Like the Zancigs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Agnes_Zancig

They used a secret code to perform demonstrations of telepathy. Mrs Zancig, with her back turned, 10ft away, or even in another room, could divine letters, calculate numbers, or describe images from Mr Zancig, writing them on a slate tablet.

My sister and I had a party trick like this - fooled our friends for years and never revealed the secret. #1 could telepathically divine the word #2 was sending (a word suggested by the friends while #1 was out of the room) with 100% accuracy.

 

[JMartJr]

My sister and I had a party trick like this - fooled our friends for years and never revealed the secret. #1 could telepathically divine the word #2 was sending (a word suggested by the friends while #1 was out of the room) with 100% accuracy.

Go on....

 

[FatPhil]

Ugh, this stuff is so tragic. He's obviously just "typing" an unintelligible string of characters. Do people just need to believe so strongly?

In such contrast to the example I remember very clearly from my youth, that of Joey Deacon, who had severe cerebral palsy.

In 1970, Deacon began to write his autobiography with three friends. Ernie Roberts, who also had cerebral palsy, had been in hospital since the age of ten and was able to understand Deacon's speech. Roberts listened to Deacon's dictation and repeated it to another patient, Michael Sangster, who wrote it down in longhand. After proof-reading by Chris Ring, a student who visited the team each week, it was typed by a fourth member of the team, Tom Blackburn, who was initially unable to read or write but taught himself to type in order to help. The forty-four page book took fourteen months to write.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Deacon#Tongue_Tied
The book was turned into a 70 minute docudrama, published by the BBC's in its /Horizon/ series, which is available on youtube -
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZqbSNRa8Fk


I was sure I remember some communication integrity checks (it was 45 years ago when I last watched it), and indeed several are dramatised therein:
- Firstly, Joey alone is shown a picture, and asked to tell Ernie what's wrong with it, which Ernie correctly does. So Joey's input's good, and his output can be made understandable by Ernie.
- Secondly, when writing the book, there seems to be an extra step not listed above which proves that the pipeline works at least at the character level - Joey spells out the proof-read text to Ernie, which Tom then types. If what's typed doesn't closely match what's already written down, then clearly the pipeline isn't working, and you'd have hardcopy evidence of the failure. That second step was an almost unnecessary step, because it almost halved the possible throughput, but it did at least have the benefit of adding Joey's approval to Tom's rendering of the sentences.

Joey's words deserved respect, so they were given their full information-theoretic value to reflect that respect; in contrast, my annoyance at the facilitators in this modern case is, quite frankly, visceral. I too will "swerve", lest I breach any policies.

 

[Charlie Wiser]

Go on....

I'm not convinced this would work on adults... at least not adults with any scientific curiosity.

Sister leaves the room. Our friends decide on a word for me to send to her: RAPTURE. I am not allowed to speak a single word when she returns - I have to transmit the word to her without talking. I have before me a chessboard and a letter opener/knife.

Sister returns. Everyone gathers round.

I say: "Ready?"

I move the point of the knife completely at random along the lines of the chessboard, stopping to tap once.

I say: "Please, everyone quieten your minds."

I move the knife some more while our friends attempt to decipher the code I'm sending via the chessboard.

I say: "Take your time."

I keep moving randomly and tap the knife 5 times.

I say: "Right, did you get it?"

I tap the knife twice.

Sister says: "Rapture."

Nobody complains that I spoke.

After a few rounds, they try tricker words with X and Z in them so we have a system for those letters - eg. clear throat for X, low whistle/exhale for Z. They try long words but often those can be extrapolated from the first few letters.

We say goodbye to our bewildered friends and eat the leftover chocolate fingers.

 

[Charlie Wiser]

Anything (or nothing) could be used instead of the chessboard, it's just an easy way to transmit vowels while causing a distraction.

 

[MapperGuy]

Ugh, this stuff is so tragic. He's obviously just "typing" an unintelligible string of characters. Do people just need to believe so strongly?

There's a good estimate the characters he types here:
Source: https://youtu.be/wwofBlN9PDs?si=BvSmSqzcTEriIksy&t=433

The tragedy is that there are so many ways to test his communication ability. Use a touch sensitive letter board while his mother is not in the room. Asking her to decipher what he pointed too from the video, as opposed to on the fly. Then ask her to do so again, for random portions of the video and see if she gets the same words from the same section of the video every time. Ask him to repeat a sentence while his hand movements are being recorded to observe if there is any repetition of his hand movements of the first time he typed it.
Just asking his mother to allow video taping from a position where his movements are clearly visible. Or where the letter board is fixed in a solid position.
Ask him a few simple questions while his mother is not in the room and then ask him for answers to those questions when mother is in the room, but not repeating the question where she can hear it. Would he be able to answer any of them?

So many things wrong with the whole demonstration.
Is she harming him? I would say not, she is helping him to a better life than he would have in an institution.

 

[Mendel]

Is she harming him? I would say not, she is helping him to a better life than he would have in an institution.

She's parading him like a parrot. He'd be better off in a place that allowed him to actually communicate.
Talk to autists who have experienced both.

 

[Ann K]

So many things wrong with the whole demonstration.
Is she harming him? I would say not, she is helping him to a better life than he would have in an institution.

Is she harming him? I honestly don't know. Is she perhaps harming him in the same way that people who take quack disease cures are harmed, by taking them INSTEAD of the real medication that might actually help? Perhaps it's a second-hand type of harm to others; if he is considered a lost cause (an admission that he himself cannot be helped), permitting this type of blatant deception to go unchallenged may lead other, less impaired sufferers down a useless path when other therapies could have helped them.

I think that his mother has honestly dedicated her life to a pretense that SHE believes, but there's a ripple effect. I believe that allowing trickery (whether intentional or not) to proliferate and push out sound science is never a good idea.

 

[MonkeeSage]

Ugh, this stuff is so tragic. He's obviously just "typing" an unintelligible string of characters. Do people just need to believe so strongly?

There's a good estimate the characters he types here:
Source: https://youtu.be/wwofBlN9PDs?si=BvSmSqzcTEriIksy&t=433

A new article in the NYT from a mother of a severely autistic child, historian of medicine and vice president of the National Council on Severe Autism, discusses how the pseudoscience of FC/S2C is harmful in the context of RFK jr and MAHA. Quite the whiplash from the book review discussed in the linked video, but good that hopefully the same readers of the book review will see this opinion piece.

Such facilitation, proponents claim, unlocks hidden literacy inside people previously considered severely cognitively impaired. In 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interviewed the father of a speller who wrote a book with his son. Discussing his takeaways from the book, Mr. Kennedy says the son "learned to do calculus in essentially a day." According to "The Telepathy Tapes," a popular podcast that first aired in 2024, there are spellers who can read their facilitators' minds.

Here's the thing about F.C., though: The science doesn't back it up.

[...]

Despite these consistent findings, support for spelling has persisted. In a January report, one spelling proponent estimated that the number of trained spelling practitioners was around 1,000, up from just a handful that she knew of a decade ago.

Spelling proponents are pushing for government backing: In the New York State Legislature, debate around the adoption of a communication bill of rights for people with severe intellectual disabilities has effectively come down to whether it would only apply to methods that are "validated."

Sylvia Fogel was recently appointed to head the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, which advises the federal government on its five-year, $2 billion budget for autism services and research. In a March interview, she said that among other things, her committee will "be focused on investigating or hoping to recommend more research around novel communication methods like typing and spelling for those with minimally verbal or nonverbal autism."

This all matters because resources poured into pseudoscientific methods like facilitated communication obviously can't also be directed toward the most intractable problems profoundly autistic people face, including self-injury, seizures, wandering and, yes, communication challenges.

Upward of 25 percent of autistic children are nonverbal or minimally verbal, and while many successfully learn to use Augmentative and Alternative Communication systems, not all do. Developing tools to enable all autistic people to authentically and independently communicate their needs and preferences is obviously a top research priority for the profound autism community.

But it's not all about money or opportunity costs. The most serious harm created by F.C. is that it deprives severely cognitively impaired individuals of the limited control they have over their own lives.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/opinion/autism-facilitated-communication-spelling.html