The Telepathy Tapes, PART I

in defense of anecdotes

What are the stories you tell yourself? How do you view the world? Is it a place of cause and effect, of hard measurement and even harder facts? Or is it a place of hope and wonder, of mystery and marvels? Can it be both?

And do you even recognize that everything you believe about the world started as a story?

How you answer those questions will probably be an accurate predictor of how you receive The Telepathy Tapes.

Let me just say up-front: I’ve become less and less enamored of what many describe as “hard facts,” though I’m trained — like most of us who went through formalized “higher” education — to believe hard facts not only exist, they’re the only things worth attending to.

Many people, including me, have had personal experiences that defy factual explanation; experiences that float outside the realm of the “scientifically provable,” or even outside casual conversation. There are lots of things I don’t bring up when I’m chatting with the woman who cuts my hair.

Here’s the one that changed me forever:

I’m 23, and my mother has just died a few hours ago. I’m lying in bed, unable to sleep. When I close my eyes, her last moments in the hospital keep replaying in vivid detail: the rattling of her last breaths spaced farther and farther apart by eerie silence; her open eyes that stared into infinity, signaling the end; and the moment I most want to forget forever — my gentle attempt to close those eyes, a touch… that seemingly triggered from her a choked, strangled, gasping sound.

I had pulled my hand away in fright, heart racing. Had I done something wrong? Was she still with us?

Later, in the darkness of my childhood bedroom, the hours march by as I relive that horror. Oh god, I’m so sorry, Mom, I silently intone, over and over. There are no tears, just the heaviest of guilt and dread weighing on disbelief that she is gone.

I look at the luminous hands of my electric alarm clock: 2:00am.

I sigh, deeply.

At the far reaches of my awareness, there is a buzzing sound. It is low and quiet at first. I glance at my clock again — nothing. Where is that sound coming from? I reach with my ears: it seems to be emanating from a high-up corner of my room. An insect, maybe? But how could that be? It’s December in Cleveland.

The sound grows louder, and I can hear it shift. It’s inching from one corner to the next, following the line that joins wall to ceiling around my room, a dirt bike engine slowly making a square circuit. This is no insect.

Curious but for some reason unafraid, I track the invisible buzz that is cornering my room, pulling all of my attention as it accelerates and heightens in intensity. Faster and faster it goes, louder and louder it sounds, until it reaches a peak — I have no idea how much time this has taken — and suddenly changes direction, shooting directly into my chest.

Like a roman candle, my heart explodes into warm sparks that ignite my veins and trigger spontaneous tears.

I feel safe. I feel forgiven. I feel my mother’s message now lovingly humming throughout my entire being: all is well.

More than three decades later, I can say unequivocally: there is nothing like personal experience to permanently open your mind to the mystical, the unseen, the possible. From that day forward, I began a steady shedding process I wasn’t even aware of — one that has only accelerated, like that buzzing, in the past few years.

I care less and less about what academics and experts think, and care more and more about the personal experiences of others. I’m certain there are plenty of researchers out there who could find all sorts of plausible, material explanations for my buzzing sound event — that is, if they didn’t just laugh it off as something purely made-up — just as there are plenty of researchers who think The Telepathy Tapes are utter bunk. That’s fine.

I’m not here to prove the validity — or lack thereof — of the series. I’m here to offer you my observations and impressions, as I often do about so many things, in the spirit of free thinking and of… well, Spirit.

---

The Telepathy Tapes is a seven-hour podcast series that briefly knocked Joe Rogan off his number one perch, possibly because he mentioned on his 2024 Christmas special that he was a fan.

I would never have discovered it if a close friend — someone who views the world with wonder in the same way I do — hadn’t recommended it.

Here’s how I would describe it:

The series explores the possibility that certain non-speaking autistic children have gifts that defy conventional understanding, ranging from telepathy to precognition and mediumship.

The creator of the series, Ky Dickens, introduces us to non-speakers from all over the country, their parents, and caregivers, as she travels with Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a neuroscientist who has made it her life’s work to understand this phenomenon and prove its legitimacy.

Whether or not The Telepathy Tapes itself is “proof” of legitimacy — and neither Dickens nor Powell claim that it is — the series is fascinating, as it challenges our conceptions of human communication and even of consciousness itself.

And here’s how an article from McGill University’s Office for Science and Society (subheading: “Separating Sense from Nonsense”) describes it:

“A journalist taps into a community of parents of nonverbal autistic children and discovers that we all live in a simulation and the real world is Heaven, and these neurodivergent kids are actually gifted and they can visit Heaven at night, download infinite knowledge, and use telepathy to communicate. No one is ever dead, and everything you have ever seen on The X-Files is real: energy healing, psychokinesis, and clairvoyance. These nonverbal geniuses, if we allow ourselves to believe in them, will usher in a revolution in both medicine and spirituality.

Does this sound believable?

You probably answered “no.” That’s because…[it]… is too much to process. But if I drip-feed this magical thinking over the course of seven hours and build it up anecdote by anecdote, you might just start believing in it.” [bold emphasis mine]

Predictably, the vast majority of headlines on the series follows suit:

• “The Telepathy Tapes Podcast: Misguided Hope or Calculated Pseudoscience?” — The Autism Cafe

• “The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience” — The Skeptical Enquirer

• “The Dangerous Charm of The Telepathy Tapes” — Podcast Review

These words: Dangerous! Anecdotes! Pseudoscience! They’re spat out like epithets, curses to keep us all away. From what, though? From the ignominy of getting suckered into belief? Why would so much energy be directed in such dire warnings against believing?

Because: power resides in the unseen, and belief beats the pathway to its door. Need I remind anyone that in quantum physics, a particle’s actions are affected by pure observation?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For those who aren’t familiar with The Telepathy Tapes, you can find mainstream reviews at any of the three sources I listed above.

Ky Dickens is an accomplished filmmaker, creating compelling stories in the realms of activism, healthcare, and what used to be called “human interest.” She approaches this topic with skepticism from the get-go, which provides a useful starting line: she begins at the “deep incredulity” side of the continuum, which allows for a more significant shift as she narrates the podcast’s seven hours, progressing through episodes with cautious belief before finally crossing the finish line, amazed and enthralled, at full-on conviction.

As she shifts, I do, too.

This part of McGill University’s comment, quoted above, is accurate: “…if I drip-feed this magical thinking over the course of seven hours and build it up anecdote by anecdote, you might just start believing in it.” Heaven forfend! Don’t let anecdotes convince you! Don’t believe in anything until and unless ALMIGHTY SCIENCE has proved it to be true!

Ceding lived-experience knowledge in favor of “expert” opinion is one of the great afflictions of our times, causing unfathomable misery. One quick example: waiting for research to prove that cell phone usage is destroying generations of young people. I wrote an essay in 2023 about it, in my response to the Surgeon General’s tepid, craven advisory about kid’s use of social media.

More recently, I commented on Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel article about flawed studies on the effects of cellphones in school settings:

“I’m so tired of our enslavement to researchers. Parents know when their children have been affected, and they don’t need anyone else to prove it. Sigh.”

I am tired of the enslavement. It certainly shows up in the critical response to The Telepathy Tapes. Ky Dickens clearly states that the demonstrations of telepathy she set up are not “scientific proof;” they are methods she has devised to see for herself the validity of parent’s claims. Yet listeners and reviewers rake her and the entire podcast over hot coals for not being scientific enough.

Science is not the purpose of The Telepathy Tapes. From the podcast’s website: it “shines a light on the untold capabilities of those who have been underestimated for far too long.”

Dickens is adept at storytelling, and the anecdotes she provides of these children and their parents are wildly compelling. How could they not be? Mothers describe the exact moment when they realized that — contrary to what they’d been told by autism professionals — their child wasn’t “gone;” he or she was very much “there,” trapped inside a non-functioning suit of flesh with no means to communicate anything of substance.

Just that part alone is a horror story and a heroic tale, woven together in wonder — not unlike life itself. But add to that the telepathy part (non-speakers demonstrating some kind of ability to “see” through the eyes of a trusted facilitator, which looks a helluva lot like telepathy), the savant part (non-speakers knowing languages no one has ever taught them), and the metaphysical part (an out-of-body meetup place the non-speakers go to called The Hill), and you’ve got the makings of a colossal paradigm shift.

And as we all know, paradigms do not go gently into that good night.

Rather than allowing the story to open up a new way of viewing the world, skeptics are hellbent on picking it all apart. Many of them focus on “facilitated communication,” the controversial method by which these non-speakers have finally found ways to converse.

In this method, a non-speaking child points at letters, one at a time, on a small alphabetic board held by the facilitator — a teacher, parent, or other trusted individual — to spell his or her thoughts.

A facilitator holding up a letterboard for the speller.

Controversy lies in what critics say is “subconscious intention.” They claim that the speller is “ventriloquized,” picking up subtle cues orchestrated by the facilitator either by physical contact or board maneuvering. The thoughts expressed letter by letter are those of the facilitator, not the speller, they say.

Dr. Powell debunks those claims in an open letter here, if you’re interested, as well as defends her academic and professional record from targeted attacks to smear her reputation.

What interests me is what I mentioned earlier: the tremendous amount of energy directed toward keeping us all away from “dangerous pseudoscience” and its “proponents” like Powell. It feels very familiar to me, with its echoes of “if you try to heal your cancer using alternative methods you’ll die,” or “the risk of not vaccinating is much greater than any risk of potential harm that could come from a vaccine.”

It’s the same energy that has been marshaled against any member of the scientific fold who steps out of line, from 16th-century Galileo Galilei, to 19th-century Ignaz Semmelweis (the Hungarian doctor who pioneered hand-washing), to 21st-century Dr. Vladimir Zelenko who objected to mRNA vaccines and who saved over 7000 lives with his early covid treatment protocol.

As Voltaire said, “It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.”

I can’t tell you if the anecdotes that Dickens and Powell are bringing to our awareness are 100% right. But here’s what an “established man,” Chris French, emeritus professor of psychology at Goldsmiths University, says on a Guardian podcast about any anecdotal evidence:

[One twin feeling pain at the moment the other faraway twin gets into an accident] “might be very very impressive to the people who experience it, it might have a profound impact on them, but it doesn’t actually prove anything scientifically.”

Pat-pat on the head, you silly little twin who thinks you experienced something real. Anecdotes mean nothing. They are isolated incidents, unverified by independent researchers and not replicable in labs. They are child’s play, fool’s gold.

I could excuse his arrogance if he didn’t follow that statement up with this <ahem> “explanation” of the inner workings of the brain and resulting impossibility of telepathy:

“We know that the brain is basically, works in terms of electrochemistry, you know, we know that there are electrical impulses in the brain, between neurons, and we know that we can actually record EG from the surface of the scalp and so on and so forth.

But the kind of physics of the situation means that you would not be able to pick up on that information from any kind of distance.”

Really? That’s his explanation? I particularly like “and so on and so forth.” Um, sure. Throw out a few terms — electrochemistry, neurons, EG — pivot to a shadowy, unnamed physics principle to wrap it up, and quod erat demonstrandum.

It’s laughable.

Scientists don’t know jack about how the mind actually works. They don’t know where memories “are stored,” why we sleep, or how we see. They don’t know how the placebo effect works, or why certain people don’t get sick and others do. They don’t know where gravity really comes from, or how life began on Earth, or what consciousness is.

Yet the patronizing continues:

“I’m sure there’ll be people out there now who’ll be saying, oh, quantum physics! Quantum entanglement! It’s just hand-wringing. It’s trying to explain one mysterious phenomenon in terms of another mysterious phenomenon. But it doesn’t give you a well-articulated theory that leads to predictions to actually put to the test.”

Hmm… kind of like explaining cosmic radiation as caused by a Big Bang, no? As Terence McKenna observed, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’”

And then our man French finishes with a dig at those who believe in telepathy:

“To be honest, there hasn’t really been any plausible mechanism that’s been put forward.”

A mechanism. Of course. Because the brain is a machine, just like the rest of the body, the Earth, and the Universe… and they all grind along together like the gears of an Edsel.

Those confident folks in the dark are the ones telling us not to believe in the light.

They know that an anecdote, like the one I shared with you about the night my mother passed, has no value — other than the “profound impact” it has on the person who experiences it. Once you tell someone else about that impact, it falls into the category of useless. It proves nothing.

Is that not patently absurd?

Many years ago my friend Judy shared with me her story of healing herself of breast cancer without any allopathic intervention whatsoever, and I’ve shared it with others who’ve gone on to do the same, inspired by her success. It may “prove nothing,” but it’s my idea of profound impact, French.

Could it be that the cold, rational scientific community downplays anecdotes because it’s afraid of their inherent power? Stories heat us up emotionally, and induce us to take action — like rejecting the advice of experts. We can’t have that.

Who knows — Ky Dickens may have downplayed the value of anecdotes at some point in her life. She sure as hell doesn’t anymore. That’s how the model changes: one story at a time. And that’s why open access to information, shared one-to-one rather than through gatekeepers with a vested interest in the status quo, is so “dangerous.” It’s changing the whole damn world. Can you feel it?

What Dickens is bringing forth in The Telepathy Tapes has godsmacking implications for our understanding of consciousness, and in Part II of this series, I’ll dive into them with gusto.

Before then, however, I leave you with one more sterling quote from McGill University’s take-down of the entire podcast:

“If we approach any surprising event with the belief that some things simply cannot be explained by science, we will never make progress in understanding our world.” [emphasis mine]

Sheesh. Won’t that be fun to start with next week?

---

Thank you for your presence here. If my work brings value to your life, share it with a friend.

Or, buy me a tea!

https://ko-fi.com/marypoindextermclaughlin

I love comments, too — it all keeps me going. :-)

To make sure you don’t miss Part II, subscribe to The Art of Freedom:

As always, keep your light shining bright.
xox
M