Podcasts
Occasionally, Podcast hosts take on the topic of Facilitated Communication (FC), with varying degrees of accuracy and scientific rigor. Some hosts understand the problems with traditional touch-based FC, but may not understand that there are over 20 different names for FC now, including the more popular ones: Spelling to Communicate, Supported Tying, Rapid Prompting Method, and Spellers Method. Others do a fairly good job overall in getting the message across to their audiences that FC is a pseudoscience. Still others take a credulous, “seeing is believing” approach to the topic.
Telepathy Tapes
This podcast is hosted by Ky Dickens and promotes the idea that nonspeaking or minimally speaking individuals with autism have telepathic abilities. Dickens downplays or ignores altogether the fact that these individuals are being subjected to FC/S2C/RPM or other variants. None of the telepathy tests conducted thus far in the series includes authorship testing. In fact, the participants are blinded from test stimuli, not the facilitators. The host and the experts included in this podcast, in our opinion, take a credulous, not scientific approach to investigating the topics of telepathy and FC.
Reviews of the podcast:
Boynton, Janyce. (2025). ‘The Telepathy Tapes”: autism is not a superpower. AIPT.
Jarry, Jonathan. (2024, December 13). The Telepathy Tapes Prove We All Want to Believe. McGill University Office for Science and Society.
Johnson, Stephen. (2025, January 9). What People are Getting Wrong This Week: ‘The Telepathy Tapes’. LifeHacker.
Leiva, Javier. (2025, January 28). The Telepathy Tapes B-Side part 1. Pretend.
Leiva, Javier. (2025, February 4). The Telepathy Tapes B-Side part 2. Pretend.
Leiva, Javier. (2025, February 11). The Telepathy Tapes B-Side Part 3. Pretend.
Marshall, Michael. (2025, January 31). The Telepathy Tapes is wrong - autistic children don’t have supernatural powers. The Skeptic.
Mathieu-Sher, Reva and Forbes, Heather. (2025, January 27). ASAT Responds to The Skeptical Inquirer: “The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience.” Association for Science in Autism Treatment.
Novella, Steven. (2025, February 5). The Telepathy Tapes - More FC Pseudoscience. Science-Based Medicine.
Remski, Matthew (2025, January 23). Unravelling the Telepathy Tapes, Conspirituality.
Vyse, Stuart. (2025, January 6). The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience. Skeptical Inquirer.
Vyse, Stuart. (2025, February 8). The Telepathy Tapes: Autism and Telepathy - A scientific perspective. Talking with Stuart Vyse. The San Francisco Experience.
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