Sunday Sermon #4: Is Telepathy Real?

Some initial thoughts on the controversial viral podcast series, ‘The Telepathy Tapes’.

‘The Telepathy Tapes’ image.

Sunday Surmons are short essays on spirituality, delivered to your inbox every first Sunday of the month.

A few days ago I stood still on a busy pavement to better listen to Episode 3 of the viral podcast series, The Telepathy Tapes. Compelling storytelling does that—it captures you in amber, making you oblivious to the world around you. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s a podcast (and hopeful future documentary) that seeks to persuade an audience that non-verbal autistic people have otherworldly perceptions and highly advanced telepathy skills.

I abandoned my shopping trip as I got sucked into one of the experiments shared in this episode. Sam, a production assistant, is about to decide the word that he wants Houston, a non-verbal autistic young adult, to pull out of thin air. I listened as Sam described stepping into the garage to write his word down to imminently prove whether Houston got it wrong or right.

At this point, while staring into moving traffic and without a conscious attempt to think about what the word was, I saw a whiteboard in my mind. A green pen wrote “friend” on the whiteboard. A few seconds after I’d had that mental image, Sam said that the word he wrote down was “friend.” The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I smiled to myself. Who the fuck knows, right? It was uncanny. Back to the podcast: Sam returns to the room where Houston is, and Houston writes out F-R-I-E-N-D on his speller.

A few days later I engaged my sceptic brain to figure out how I—like Houston—could have guessed that word.

I re-listened to the podcast to see if the word “friend” had been said earlier…and then noticed that the full name of the episode is “Telepathic Communication between friends and groups.” Was that word in my mind because I had seen it, even without registering it, within the last half hour? Highly probable.

But that would still be odd luck. And I’ve had enough curious instances of this exact type to recognise the quality of the image that came into my mind; the way the whiteboard and green writing looked like vivid technicolour film footage, different to how it appears if I consciously try to imagine something. Plus, I didn’t try to think of a word, it came to me.

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In case you haven’t listened to it yet: The Telepathy Tapes is the most bingeable podcast series since Serial. It hit number one on the US Apple podcast charts, knocking Joe Rogan off the top spot. Rogan himself spoke about the show on his pod, calling it “really fascinating” and added in his reductionist salt-of-the-earth way that “if it’s real, shouldn’t scientists study it like it’s real?”

And it is fascinating. It’s hosted and made by a documentary filmmaker called Ky Dickens and psychiatrist Dianne Hennacy Powell. Though I haven’t yet finished all the episodes, what I have heard three-quarters through the series indicates that at the very least, these children and young adult subjects are highly sensitive to subtle cues from other people and their environment, beyond what one would expect of a neurotypical person. It makes an excellent side-case for non-verbal autistic people to get taught and treated as though they are intelligent and capable of excellence, rather than patronised with the assumption that they might think below their age range. (I’m speaking here as a total layman—i.e. the average listener—when it comes to topics of special educational needs or autism so I’ll focus on the ESP side of The Telepathy Tapes.)

For me, the highlight of the podcast—which is essentially a collection of tests and anecdotes about instances of telepathy between neurotypical people and non-verbal autistic people—is a spiritual gathering place called The Hill.

The Tapes say that non-verbal people can tap into this non-physical arena, where they can congregate remotely and speak to people like them all over the world about anything they want. It’s a beautiful idea. At one point, Houston’s mother, Katie, describes how he was in his room with pillows over his head. She initially thought he was in danger before learning from him that he has to do that to block out external stimuli and information so he can access The Hill. It’s like the big reveal in a Netflix sci-fi show.

Everything you hear from Dickens has the ability to raise questions within you about consciousness, sensory deprivation, neurodivergence and the future of research into latent human abilities.

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As a journalist, I feel comfortable saying that this podcast is not journalistically sound. It’s giving entertainment, it’s giving American podcasts, it’s giving Gaia TV.

Within the first minute of the podcast, and repeated in every episode, Dickens tells us, “For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and their classrooms. And nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on this podcast, we do.” It sets up an unnecessary The People versus The Establishment slant, an arguably anti-intellectualism premise that undermines the project. Research on topics vaguely linked to telepathy is happening slowly in the fields of parapsychology, psychology, physics and neuroscience. While I do not doubt that the subjects of the podcast have faced scepticism and felt silenced because what they say they experience is extremely Out There, I hate this dramatic post-truth framing.

While I find much of what’s presented massively engrossing, I’m equally suspicious of any content—particularly one circling ESP or spiritual topics—that positions itself as a harbinger of truth. The documentarian Penny Lane tweeted that the existence of The Telepathy Tapes backs up her theory that documentary filmmakers can be dangerous: “We have powerful tools of manipulation at our disposal, and we are not as a group smarter or more ethical than anyone else.”

Dickens and her team go to admirable measures to ensure the tests with non-verbal autistic kids are rigorous (some videos of the experiments are available to view online—at a price). However, a brief Google shows that there’s some controversy around the facilitated communication methods used in the tests for the podcast, namely Spelling to Communicate (S2C) and the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). There are serious and obvious reasons why issues of consent, manipulation and miscommunication have to be carefully considered when it comes to honouring non-verbal communicators. (See: the real life case depicted in the documentary Tell Them You Love Me.)

When much of the podcast consists of parents and Dickens verbally paraphrasing children’s non-verbal communication, it makes me question whether this was the correct format for this exploration. I’m not sure what the alternative would have been. Is this too sensitive a subject and too early an area of inquiry to morally present as material? Probably, yeah. To suggest that all non-verbal autistic children experience telepathy (which Dickens does) is frankly insane based on the limited research and interviews in a single podcast series.

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All of that said, as an explorer in these realms of possibilities, I’m emotionally sold. I already think that telepathy—to some extent or another—will be understood in my lifetime as a mundane phenomenon. I experience some minor form of it pretty regularly. It’s guessing that a specific person is about to call me. Sometimes it’s knowing exactly what someone will say before they’ve said it, despite not being able to receive any visual cues from them. I’ve also seen things that have made me know that are more connected and available to each other than we currently think we are.

Until science goes deeper into the field of telepathy during a dark age of misinformation, so much of this is anecdotal. That is why the rigorousness of the journalism involved with covering the science of consciousness really matters.

Whether you think I’m delusional to consider that my moment with the word “friend” might be some type of telepathy depends entirely on whether you have experienced something like it before. As the production assistant Sam says in Episode 3, “Watching it and having it happen to you are two different things.”

This podcast is highly controversial. Listen to it for yourself. Some think it’s genius. It has inevitably been deemed magical thinking by many scientists. Most importantly, perhaps, it has had a mixed response from the autistic community. I’m not convinced that the work itself authenticates anything. But the overwhelming popularity of The Telepathy Tapes—and so much similar content, from Life After Death with Tyler Henry to Joe Rogan’s coterie of spiritual-meets-pseudoscience guests—proves one thing: that we’re at a point in culture where the vast majority want to be believers.

Meditations:

Can you imagine what The Hill looks and feels like? Would you want to go there if you could?

Do you feel that telepathy might be a universal latent human skill?

Or are you closer to thinking that it could be a rare gift?

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If you missed it, check out my gift guide to yourself for 2025 <3