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Katie Asher, buzzing with exhaustion, collapsed on her couch. She was 40, smart, a bootstrapper with a southern drawl and long auburn curls. She also had an abusive ex-husband, three jobs, and five children, including a then-17-year-old named Houston, who had autism and couldn’t speak. Caring for Houston was torture. He smeared feces. He bit his hands so hard that she could hear him grinding the bone. He grunted and tantrumed all night long — no one in the family could sleep. He ran everywhere, fast: around the house, away from Katie. At age 3, he ran into the street and was hit by a pickup truck. Katie installed locks on the inside of all the doors; he was hers to protect. But after puberty, Houston was suddenly, terrifyingly huge: six feet and 200 pounds. Was he even in there? Katie asked herself this all the time. She had no idea.
Prostrate, delirious, Katie drifted in her living room. Then Houston sat still at her feet, which he had never done before, tugged on the blanket covering her body, and said the first sentence he’d ever spoken: “Mama, I love you.”
Those four words recharged Katie. She still had the three jobs and the five kids, but the words landed on her like a meteorite, a miracle. Their impact energized Katie to take Houston for a whole new round of treatments to try to get him to speak: integration therapy, music therapy, biofeedback therapy, the Tomatis Method, Forbrain. She talked one of the best speech-and-occupational-therapy clinics in Atlanta into taking Houston as a client. It fired him after six months. The clinic wanted to save resources for patients its practitioners believed could make progress.
Then a friend suggested Katie and Houston try a form of communication known in the autism world as spelling. Spelling involved not just Houston but Houston and Katie as a team. Katie’s role was communication partner; as such, she held in the air an 8.5-by-11-inch board or stencil covered with the letters of the alphabet and numerals 0 to 9. Houston’s role was a speller; he’d use a pencil to point to letters on the board to make words he wanted to say.
All summer long, in 2018, Katie and Houston spent four, five, six hours every day at their dining table trying to master the technique. Each spelling lesson consisted of a reading on a topic, like constellations, followed by questions that had just been answered by the reading. After each lesson, Katie lifted a black plastic stencil letter board in front of Houston’s chest. Houston lifted a pencil. Together they practiced as Houston learned to point the tip of his pencil in the proper place. A constellation is made up of a group of what? S-T-A-R-S. What is the name of the brightest constellation? O-R-I-O-N. They became “one instrument,” Katie said. “Like the cello and the bow.”
By then, Houston was 21, a little calmer than at 17, but his younger brother Joshua, a high-school wrestler, still regularly had to coax Houston into a cold shower when he melted down. Houston’s next birthday was significant: At age 22, he would stop receiving free public school, albeit in a special-needs classroom in which he’d been doing the same life-skills exercises — counting coins, picking out groceries — for years.
Three months before Houston’s birthday, as Katie held a letter board, Houston spelled I-M S-P-E-C-I-A-L.
Katie said, “Oh, of course you are.”
Houston spelled I C-A-N H-E-A-R T-H-O-U-G-H-T-S.
Katie was petrified. If Houston could hear her thoughts, he knew she lay in bed thinking, I can’t keep doing this. He knew she resented people with less severely autistic children: They wanted to celebrate neurodiversity. There was nothing to celebrate here. Katie thought her life was destroyed. And not just her life — she thought her four other children’s lives were destroyed. Houston’s autism made them all social pariahs. He often smelled like shit and couldn’t clean himself. She’d be caring for him until she died.
Soon after, Houston spelled I A-M T-H-E H-E-R-A-L-D O-F C-H-R-I-S-T.
In late January, I wrote to Katie. She and Houston had been main characters on a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. The show, about the telepathic abilities of nonspeaking autistic people, had rocketed up the podcasting charts and blasted open nationwide debate. What was happening in these families? What could they teach us about the nature of consciousness, interpersonal connection, and the spirit? Within 20 minutes of my reaching out to Katie, we had a plan for me to visit. Within an hour, she had sent a long email with the subject line “First Misconception — Language Acquisition.” In it, she explained, in a strobing storm of scientific terms, that “comprehension is in the Wernicke’s area of the brain, responsive thought is in the Broca’s area.” She attached Noam Chomsky’s rebuttal to B. F. Skinner’s 1957 book, Verbal Behavior.
A few weeks later, Katie and Houston opened the door of their home on a wooded hill outside Atlanta. Houston is now 28. That morning, he wore a T-shirt that read NONSPEAKING, VERY VERBAL; purple earplugs in both ears (his hearing is extremely sensitive); glasses to keep from seeing triple; and a rosary-bead bracelet on his wrist that matched the one on Katie’s. Over toast and berries, Katie and I discussed the world as she sees it: the number of electrons in the shell of an aluminum atom and how that’s related to vaccines causing autism; how the brains of people with autism don’t go through the typical pruning and myelination processes and how this results in a lack of sensory-motor integration and thus little or no speech.
Houston has apraxia, meaning he has difficulty with “motor planning.” The body he inhabits lacks the fine motor skills to get his lips, tongue, and soft palate to form the words he wants to say. Given this, Katie says, Houston’s ability to communicate mind-to-mind makes perfect sense. “If you’re not connected to your physical body, which one are you gonna use — your spiritual body or physical body?” she asked.
After concluding that Houston was telepathic, Katie asked friends in the nonspeaker community if their children were telepathic, too. Some said “yes.” Many said they didn’t know, checked, and said “yes.”
For Katie, Houston’s telepathy was a huge asset. He’d hand her her purse if she forgot it while she was running out the door. Or he’d spell something insightful, like THOSE ARE THE ROTTEN THOUGHTS. And he’d be right — she had been consumed by doubt in her faith. Yet the big news of Houston’s telepathy, to Katie, is not Houston’s mind reading. The big news is that thoughts are real; thoughts abide by natural laws. “The first law of energy is the law of conservation: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred,” Katie explained. “So that means our thoughts are transferring. What are they transferring to?”
I asked Houston, aloud, how it felt to go through the world in his body. Katie picked up the letter board. As Houston pointed with his pencil to letters, Katie called them out, then tried to shape the letters into words.
“H-A-V-I-N-G, having to hear what is — B. Having to hear is being P-R-E-S-E-N-T, present, W-I-T-H, with, F-E-E-L, with being present, with feelings, P-A, pain, C-R-U-E-L, cruelty.”
Katie paused and said to Houston, “Find your letter. You’re wandering all over the board there.”
They resumed. “L-O-V-E, love, L-O-S, loss, F-A-I, lost faith, W-E-A-R … Oh, okay. Weariness. L-O-N-E-L-I-N-E, loneliness.”
I asked Houston how he felt about the word telepathy.
“B-O-B-O-N, so. B-O-N … Oh, bold, bold.”
I asked, “What do you mean?”
“F-O-R-C, forces, P-E-O-P, forces people, to A-S, ask, I-F, if we A-R-E-R-M-O-R, are more than B-O-D-I-S, bodies.”
Before I left, Katie wanted to show me Houston’s telepathy skills. She handed me a slip of paper, and I wrote SURFBOARD.
“Grab the word,” she said as she held the letter board aloft in front of him. “What was the word she just wrote down?”
Houston spelled S-U-R-F-B-O-A-R-D.
The Telepathy Tapes was not plan A. Plan A was a video docuseries called Signal. Ky Dickens — a 45-year-old filmmaker with two neurotypical kids — believed that Signal was the most important work she’d do in her life. Quite possibly the most important story in the universe. She’d stumbled into the world of telepathy in 2021 after two close friends died and she felt pulled into a rip current of chaos and grief. She started reading about consciousness. On The Cosmos in You podcast, Dickens heard Dr. Diane Powell, a psychiatrist who trained at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, discussing her work on ESP, autistic nonspeakers, and savant skills. Even before Dickens spoke with Powell, she felt “complete certainty” that nonspeakers and telepathy would be the subject of her next film.
Dickens spent much of 2021, 2022, and 2023 — and tens of thousands of her own money — traveling with Powell and filming. Dickens also collected 30 “Nonspeaker Question and Answer” questionnaires. What the nonspeakers wrote was extraordinary:
ALL OF US WHO CANNOT SPEAK OR COMMUNICATE IN ANY WAY HAVE TELEPATHY
SPEAKING AUTISTICS ARE REALLY NOT GOOD AT IT.
At that point, Dickens had a good, not transcendent, career. She’d previously directed five feature-length documentaries, including one about people who survived plane crashes when everyone else aboard had died. Had the survivors been chosen? Did they now need to do something extraordinary with their lives? Signal asked the opposite question: Were those who seemed least chosen actually the most exalted?
Dickens created a 50-slide pitch deck. Then she pitched. And pitched. And pitched. She told me one film executive who saw the Signal deck cried; another said, “Often we’re offered a golf ball and told it’s the world,” but Dickens was pitching the world and delivering the universe. Yet in early 2024, the documentary-film market was imploding. Streamers didn’t want airy-fairy moon shots about the universe; they wanted celebrity and true crime. Dickens did have a true-crime element to add to Signal: Nonspeaking autistic young adults die untimely deaths at the hands of their loved ones at an alarming rate. “The kids age out of school, and the parents no longer have an option, besides staying home with their adult children,” Dickens later told me. But that was not the story Dickens wanted to sell.
After the last executive took a pass, Dickens fell into the arms of her wife and sobbed. She’d failed — failed the nonspeakers and their families; failed at showing the world telepathy existed; failed herself. She felt she’d been put on earth for this project — to amplify these voices that conveyed that we were all connected in a deeper than physical way. Her childhood had involved so much loss. She needed this. When Dickens was 17, she held a friend as his body cooled after he died in a car crash. Every year, at prom time, flowers appeared on her porch, sent by the mother of a boy she had gone on a first date with when she was 12. He died at age 14. Dickens’s mother was religious. Her father was not. She tried to suture her world together with kindness, intelligence, and brute force. Her elder brother was autistic; she coached him on social cues. Her younger brother was suicidal; she wrote a book for him on reasons to stay alive. She wrote papers for earth-science class arguing that science and religion need not be opposed; you could reconcile biblical and evolutionary time.
So after spending two weeks in “a hopeless funk,” Dickens sewed her world back together. She needn’t scrap Signal: She’d make a podcast.
She dumped hundreds of hours of sound files into Descript software and spent May through September of 2024 writing, cutting, and recording by herself — no editor, no producer. She relistened to her drafts while lying next to her children as they fell asleep. She walked lap after lap around her block, asking herself, What is this podcast really about? She honed her answer into a 13-second opener to read at the top of every episode: “For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening. Nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on this podcast, we do.”
When Dickens thought it was perfect, she played it for her wife, who was alarmed. “The way you say ‘we do’ is so frickin’ Darth Vader,” she said. “You have got to tone it down.”
On September 9, 2024, Dickens uploaded episode one of The Telepathy Tapes. In it, she introduces herself as an Everywoman — just your regular, appropriately skeptical science-nerd mom. Then she introduces Powell — the doctor willing to “challenge the current paradigm” in order to study autism and telepathy. (“So much as someone can be, she’s a legitimate academic,” Dickens says.) Dickens and Powell then go on a journey to test if telepathy is real. They meet a nonspeaking 13-year-old girl with autism named Mia. Less than a year prior, Mia learned to communicate through spelling with her mother as her communication partner. Spelling led Mia’s mother to believe her daughter could read her mind. In an Airbnb with all the reflective surfaces covered, Dickens and Powell blindfolded Mia and showed her mother random numbers and words. Mia then removed the blindfold and spelled the numbers and words her mother had seen. She was correct 100 percent of the time.
Through mid-October, Dickens released an episode a week, highlighting a cast of nonspeakers and their “spiritual gifts”: Houston and Katie; a son who composes music and delivers it to his mother’s brain while she’s lucid dreaming; teachers who communicate telepathically with their autistic students; two teenage nonspeakers in love who talk mind-to-mind; nonspeakers who see and talk with dead relatives and predict the future. The podcast’s subjects make some sweeping claims: All nonspeakers are telepathic. All can hang out and forge friendships at a nonmaterial place they call “the Hill.” At the end of episode four, Dickens tells listeners, “My doubt lies in the world that I thought I knew.” From here, Dickens introduces two scientists — Rupert Sheldrake, author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe — to explain that we don’t know much about consciousness or telepathy owing to intellectual gatekeeping. For over a century, mainstream science has been trying to protect the idea of materialism, defined by Dickens as “this notion [that] says all things in our world are the result of interactions between physical matter.” Rigid commitment to materialism has hidden the truth: We are more than our physical selves. Furthermore, the essential building block of the universe is not matter. It’s consciousness.
Downloads were good but nothing crazy: 120,000 across all episodes and platforms before December 1, 2024.
Then, in the lead-up to Christmas, the show exploded. The Telepathy Tapes stepped directly onto a crack in the autism world: a fissure between families who feel alienated by “the medical, psychiatric, psychological, biomedical Establishment,” as one parent of a nonspeaker put it, and families with continued faith in those institutions. By the end of 2024, The Telepathy Tapes had more than 2 million downloads. By mid-April, it had 15 million downloads.
Fans experienced the show as a revelation and a salve. Listeners unsatisfied by the cold, soulless box of materialist science and the smallness of what it had to tell us about our minds — listeners hungry for fresh ideas about the spirit and human potential — started flooding Dickens’s inbox:
“It’s like you lifted the veil covering a world that was right in front of me this whole time.”
“This is a revolution”
“Thank you for shifting the paradigm!”
“It’s happening!”
Life feels good inside Dickens’s world. There, we’re invited to step out of a reality defined by gravity and friction and enter a brighter, lighter universe. And Dickens is a thoughtful host. When she sets up for telepathy tests, she purchases blindfolds, takes down all the mirrors, and erects partitions, and she narrates with a kind of wonder and awe absent in so much of life. For instance, in episode two, a nonspeaker named Akhil correctly guesses dozens of random numbers and words that his mother has read. Then, Dickens shows his mother a nonsense picture. Dickens describes it as like “the remnants of a food fight, like mustard and relish and ketchup on the ground.” The mother has no idea what she’s looking at.
“What is that? What do you see?” she asks her son. He spells PAINT. Dickens is blown away. Our proxy on the podcast — a nonreligious cameraman who Dickens tells us is a serious skeptic — lands head in hands in Akhil’s basement. He asks Dickens if he now has to believe that “something bigger than us is happening, like some spiritual thing.”
Yet while Dickens is diligent in some departments, she’s hand-wavy about facts that don’t fit. This is particularly true about spelling, the communication method that provides the proof of almost all the podcast’s telepathy claims. Most nonspeaking children never learn this method. They often learn to communicate on their own using technology, like an iPad with pictures or symbols. But after families exhaust efforts aimed at independence, they frequently come, as a last resort, to two-person communication — a nonspeaker and a partner, a cello and a bow. The names of these two-person methods are a thicket of jargon: facilitated communication (FC), the oldest of the forms; rapid prompting method (RPM) and spelling to communicate (S2C), newer ones. In episode two, Dickens says, “Many in this world just simply say ‘spelling’ to keep things easy.” I’m going to use her convention here.
Spelling can be a lifesaver, keeping afloat the hope that a child can progress and use words to share who they are in a deeper way. Yet Dickens minimizes the evidence against it. Over the span of decades, a great many studies have been done about these two-person methods. The conclusion of this research is clear: They do not reliably produce the language of the nonspeaker. All too often, they produce the language of the communication partner. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association posts several warnings on its website. One states, “There is no scientific evidence of the validity of FC.” A second takes a formal position against RPM, S2C, and similar techniques under “a range of other names.” (In response to fact-checking for this article, Dickens countered, “None of the subjects in the podcast are using FC,” by which she means they’re using the newer methods. “To say that S2C is only valid if someone can control their body is ableist and a human-rights violation.”)
Howard Shane, who for decades ran the Center for Communication Enhancement at Boston Children’s Hospital, has worked with autistic nonspeakers for 47 years. He estimates that he’s seen 15,000 patients. When I visited this past winter, he showed me his storage room of communication gadgets, including huge keyboards that make it easier for individuals with poor motor control to type on their own. After Stephen Hawking lost the ability to talk in 1985, Shane helped create the device that enabled him to speak. In the 1990s, Shane devised a far simpler technology: a double-blind test to show if FC works.
For this he rigged up a manila folder with two pictures inside along with a flap he could quickly and stealthily move to reveal only one picture at a time. Shane used this folder to show the nonspeaker one picture (say, a dog) and the communication partner the other (say, a cat). He then asked the pair to name what the nonspeaker had seen. The correct answer, of course, should be “dog,” but the pair consistently spells CAT. Shane’s manila-folder test helps explain some oddities that surface on The Telepathy Tapes but go unexamined. For instance, Houston, like other spellers, can’t spell if the letter board is lying flat on the table; he needs someone to hold the board in the air. Houston, like other spellers, can also spell only with specific communication partners. Within his family, he can spell with Katie and his eldest sister, but not with his wrestler brother who lives at home. That brother explained this to me by saying he can’t “anticipate” Houston’s words.
This is not to say that communication partners on The Telepathy Tapes have ill intent. They don’t. They just want language for their children, and most probably aren’t aware that they are influencing the communication at all. This subconscious behavior is known as the “ideomotor effect” (also not mentioned in the podcast). Our brains can guide our bodies to move without our conscious minds being involved. With spelling, the ideomotor effect takes the form of cuing — a communication partner using subtle motion, body language, or verbal tics to guide the nonspeaker in what letter to choose. That autistic nonspeakers would be very good at reading these cues makes perfect sense to Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist who studies human potential and teaches psychology at Columbia University. Autistic brains are far more concerned than neurotypical brains with finding “reoccurring statistical probabilities,” i.e., patterns, he said. “When you have severe language impairments, it focuses your brain on nonverbal patterns in such an amazing way that most people can’t comprehend.”
The patterns, hidden to most of us, are legible to a trained eye. “Look — as soon as she sees his hand coming down, she moves the board to match the right number,” the expert mentalist Peter Turner noted as he watched videos Dickens provided of her telepathy tests, starting with Katie and Houston. Watching a video of Mia, he noted her mother’s hand on Mia’s chin and how the mother’s thumb and fingers guided Mia’s movements. In a third dyad, Turner laid out a further lexicon of cues: small gestures (“See what she’s doing with her hands — she’s letting him know that he’s on the right path”); unnecessary words that can serve as codes (“Watch that woman again — you’ll hear words like focus, like ‘Okay, okay, what is it?’ ”). Often he saw parents signaling to their children when they were wrong — and thus, in the absence of those signals, when they were right. Taken together, all this formed what Turner described as a “private language”: an idiosyncratic vocabulary that, he theorized, took on meaning organically over time. The pair likely gained fluency without even realizing how. Thus the sense of telepathy.
On the podcast, Dickens thanks Dean Radin for raising “the legitimacy of telepathy worldwide” through his “commitment to the scientific method and rigorous statistical analysis.” But in watching the videos of Dickens’s tests, Radin observed no credible evidence of telepathy. What he saw was love, yearning, and belief. “In some cases, probably all cases, the mom or the trainer is very heavily committed to seeing that the child is doing something extraordinary.”
Motherhood is an ongoing act of creation. You birth a child, then you continue shaping them. In an ideal world, you mold them into the best version of themselves, but inevitably you try to sculpt them into what you need them to be.
Manisha Lad, like Katie, is warm, smart, and undeterrable. Akhil, her only child, developed normally at first. At 5 months, Akhil started mimicking Manisha’s facial gestures; at 9 months, he began responding to his name. But after an MMR vaccine, at age 1, Manisha noticed “complete regression.” (Ample research shows vaccines do not cause autism.) Akhil started banging his head against the wall. Six months later, he was diagnosed with autism. A doctor handed Manisha a brochure and said, “Contact early intervention. He might speak late. He might not speak. He might not live an independent life.”
Manisha quit her IT job and devoted herself to Akhil. She attended dozens of autism conferences. She read hundreds of autism papers. She enrolled Akhil in occupational therapy, physical therapy, and ABA therapy. She put Akhil on a gluten-free, casein-free diet. She gave him B-12 shots. Still, after ten years, Akhil did not speak. Did Manisha feel she understood him? “No,” she told me one morning this winter when we spoke in the basement of her house in Edison, New Jersey. “No. No, no.”
When Akhil was 10, Manisha took him to see the best autism neurologist in Boston. He pronounced that Akhil’s “receptive language is very high” (meaning he had the capacity to take in information) “but expressive is zero” (he could not share that understanding with the outside world). Manisha wanted more. She moved Akhil to a new school. This school had “supported typing,” another name for facilitated communication. Instead of letter boards, communication partners held nonspeakers’ wrists as they pressed letters on keyboards or iPad screens. Manisha knew ASHA considered facilitated communication worthless. She was in no position to care.
In Akhil’s first week at the new school, he typed four lines with a teacher: I LIKE TO GO ON A LONG CAR RIDE IN A VAN.
Manisha hadn’t realized he knew the alphabet.
At home, Manisha held Akhil’s wrist to learn to type with him. She also tried to forge a stronger emotional bond with him by mimicking his behaviors. If Akhil hit himself, Manisha hit herself. If Akhil cried, she cried. Manisha knew the pain of the past dozen years had turned her into “a closed person.” So she decided to work on opening herself up through the teachings of Sadhguru. If she were a closed person, how could she connect with Akhil? She attended Sadhguru’s yoga and meditation retreats. She practiced calming her thoughts through breathing.
One day, when Akhil was 12, everything changed. The morning was banal: Manisha attended a parent-support group at Akhil’s school, then ran errands at Walmart and Target. At home that afternoon with Manisha, Akhil spelled YOU WENT OUT TODAY. YOU CAME TO MY SCHOOL, YOU WERE TALKING WITH OTHER PARENTS, THEN YOU WENT TO WALMART, THEN YOU WENT TO TARGET.
Manisha had told him none of this. That night, she said to her husband, “My life is an open book.” Manisha had concluded that Akhil could read her mind.
At her home in Edison, Manisha and I spoke for several hours about her journey with Akhil but also about perimenopause, marriage, not giving a shit anymore — all the things women my age discuss. But she made it clear that skepticism is for people with alternatives; it’s an artifact of good luck. Others, including some in her extended family, “can think I’ve gone cuckoo,” she told me. Yet she and Akhil were connected. Nothing could touch that. The normal rules didn’t help her, so the normal rules didn’t apply. The lucky, myself included, lived in a different universe. “You are not at a loss,” she told me. “My child is at a loss. I am at a loss. My family is at a loss.”
Akhil is now 23. He is minimally verbal, meaning he can type and speak some words independently, which he couldn’t do until age 13. That morning, upstairs with his father, he was eating dosa in his patterned jewel-toned pajama pants, bouncing with kinetic abandon from the table onto a chair, then down the hall and back. Like Houston, Akhil has apraxia. Cutting off the later syllables in words is common with apraxia of speech.
I introduced myself and asked Akhil how he was doing.
Akhil said, “Happy! I ah good!”
The whole encounter was slightly awkward. As Dickens explains on The Telepathy Tapes, a core tenet of two-person communication methods is “don’t test” — the emotional pressure created by testing causes tests to fail. Another key principle is “presume competence” — assume autistic nonspeakers have the same capabilities as their neurotypical peers. Still, Manisha, like Katie, wanted to show me her exceptional connection to her son, which Manisha prefers to describe not as telepathy but as “shared consciousness.” The relationship between their two minds feels porous to her. Many years ago, when Manisha was grieving her mother, Akhil told her that her mother’s spirit was asking him to play. To this day, Manisha notices that if she’s stressed, Akhil melts down.
In her living room, Manisha handed me half a dozen slips of paper and told me to write a word or a sentence on each. While I sat on the couch, writing, Akhil grew agitated. He ran down the hall, then returned, slapped a hand against his chest, and yelled, “We wi sho u ma mi ve good!” We will show you my mind is very good!
Manisha tried to calm him. “Just one or two, that’s it, okay? Don’t worry. Just one or two, that’s it.” She then plugged in a bowling-ball-shaped light, a gift from a Telepathy Tapes listener. The light was supposed to change colors according to the ambient energy in the room.
Akhil wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, then settled on the rug with his iPad. Manisha glanced at a slip on which I had written MY HUSBAND IS GOING SURFING TODAY. Then she sat down next to her son.
“Okay, big sentence,” she said. “Okay, we’ll try.”
Akhil shouted, “I wi tel wha i ma mo mind!” I will tell what’s in my mom’s mind!
“You tell her what is it. What is it?” Manisha said.
While Akhil typed on his iPad, Manisha sat at the edge of his peripheral vision, not touching his wrist but rocking her torso like a joystick. She also balled her fists with one finger sticking out of each, and pointed up, down, to the side.
“M m hu ba i,” Akhil called out as he typed.
“My husband is …,” Manisha said, consolidating and translating.
“Go go ca fo fa fo so fi.”
From this Manisha pronounced, “My husband is going surfing!” She sounded relieved.
“Give me one word,” Manisha said to me. “He’s feeling that unbelief. If you are questioning, you need to change your questioning.”
I apologized for the skepticism inherent in my role as a journalist. Then I handed Manisha a slip that read STRAWBERRY.
This time, instead of typing, Akhil just sat for ten seconds, blanket around his shoulders, iPad on the rug before him.
“Akhil, Akhil,” Manisha said.
Ten more seconds passed. Akhil typed no letters. Manisha said, “Strawberry. Very good.”
Akhil leapt up, ran down the hall and back again, upset. “I wa to sho hu ma min ver good. Yo yo mi mi mi i wi sho …”
Manisha completed his thought: “The mind is okay.”
She asked me to choose a shorter word. I wrote PEPPER.
When Akhil returned, he typed, A-A-A-E-P D-A B-A.
I felt terrible for coming. On the flight to New Jersey, I’d reread Dickens’s favorite book, Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist who survived two and a half years in Nazi concentration camps. In it, Frankl argues that while we cannot control what happens in our lives, we can control how we respond — and how we respond is where meaning and sanity lie. The worst horror is survivable; you can lead a good life if you continue to care for those you love, find purposeful work, and believe in some form of the divine. The stance is not naïve, but it is defiant. Frankl talked to his wife in his mind every day he was in Auschwitz. The conversations brought him great solace. Only after he was released did he learn she was long dead.
“New person … he can catch that emotion. He feels that uncertainty,” Manisha said, her voice tightening. “If you have one percent doubt, if you have that, he can catch it.”
My presence put a tear in the survivable world Manisha had constructed. Voice recorders and reporters’ notebooks had no place here. I apologized and called a Lyft, as she clearly wanted me to go.
“This has opened up my child to me. This is working,” Manisha had said to me earlier that morning, laying out the necessary terms of her universe, one in which she is profoundly and inalienably bonded to her son. “If you are telling me this is not working, what else do you have that works? Give me that. I tried everything. I have tried everything.”
In 1992, Janyce Boynton, a special-education teacher in Maine, started spelling with Betsy Wheaton, a nonspeaking 16-year-old girl with autism. Boynton had recently learned facilitated communication, a new technique she believed would help Betsy “break free” and show the world she was “ ‘in there’ with a story to tell.” At first, while holding the letter board, Boynton felt concerned about “instances where I moved the child’s arm” and uneasy about touching Betsy in general, as teachers touching students was largely verboten. But the touching built intimacy, a sense of special connection. “My student deserved to have her voice known, and I believed I was the one to make that happen,” Boynton later wrote in a journal article. Spelling worked best if Boynton dissociated a little and accessed “that flow state, the stream-of-consciousness kind of state,” she told me. Later, she would pull herself out of that trance and look at what Betsy had spelled “with a critical mind.”
Soon, however, Betsy started lashing out during spelling sessions — scratching Boynton, hitting her “hard in the face,” digging her nails into Boynton’s arm. Boynton did not take it personally. She loved Betsy. Their work was going well. Something else must be wrong. Was Betsy getting hurt at home? This was Boynton’s greatest fear. Within a few months, Betsy spelled the worst: Her father had been abusing her.
Boynton’s sense of duty toward Betsy ballooned. She alerted the school; the school alerted the authorities. Boynton facilitated Betsy’s questioning by a state investigator.
HE MAKES ME HOLD HIS PENISSS.
“Who touched you?” MY FATHER.
“When?” AFTER SCHOOL.
“Where?” IN MY HOUSE.
SOMETHING GOES OFF
“What something goes off?” HIS FUCK
“What does that look like?” IT LOOKS LIKE S-F-A-A SLIMY AND … D-D-A-A WHITE I’M AFRIAD I AM AFRIAD RAID
The state sent Betsy and her brother, Jamie, whom Betsy also accused of sexual abuse, to foster care. The guardian ad litem assigned to the case had questions about spelling, so he brought in Howard Shane. When Shane performed his manila-folder test, Betsy spelled what Boynton had seen, not what she’d seen herself. Shane asked Betsy to step into the hallway and gave her a key to hold. He asked Betsy to return to the room and spell with Boynton the name of the object she just held. Boynton did not know the answer, and the pair spelled nothing at all.
Waves of horror began crashing over Boynton; she would surface and get pulled under again by the reality of all she’d set in motion. What she’d told herself was intimacy with Betsy was just fantasy, a “vicious, largely subconscious, circle. Think the words. Type the words. See the words. Believe the words. Think the words. Type the words. See the words. Believe the words.” The revelation shook Boynton’s faith in herself. She remains shaken to this day. She had “held Betsy’s hand” and crafted “graphic depictions of rape and sexual assault that had no bearing in reality,” she wrote. Absorbing what she was capable of felt “like a death, really,” she told me.
A child without language is so hard to accept. So hard to accept that a parent and caregiver’s desire to find that child language can send them far out of the world as they’ve known it, far out of themselves, out of logic. I left Manisha’s house in touch with my good luck and how it shaped my life. But I also left knowing I am her. I’d race out of the whole quenched galaxy of beliefs and illusions I consider to be myself in order to protect and care for my children, even to maintain the thinnest filament of connection to them, if that was all the connection to be had. Manisha’s story, Katie’s story, Boynton’s story — these are stories of longing. They are stories of the lengths we will go for those we love.
Four years ago, in 2021, Kevin Plantan spent ten months incarcerated after his nonverbal daughter, through FC, accused him of rape. Like all the other parents in this story, Plantan and his ex-wife tried everything after their daughter, at age 2, “suddenly regressed and lost things, like an Alzheimer’s patient,” Plantan said. Up through sixth grade, their daughter didn’t speak at all. In seventh grade, her special-needs classroom, which refused to let students use FC, closed for the pandemic and she was mainstreamed into an online middle-school class with a communication partner. Immediately, she started earning straight A’s. She wrote Plantan messages like, “I’m smart. Can’t you see I’m smart?” and “I love you.”
The court dropped all charges after Plantan’s ex-wife refused to let lawyers test the efficacy of FC.
Plantan is bitter but not confused. His ex-wife “wanted to believe in the miracle so bad that she was willing to believe I’m guilty of these horrible crimes,” he said. The ferality of her craving matches his own. “I would have given my life,” he said, to get his daughter language. “That feeling of doom that she couldn’t really type was way worse than being arrested.”
Dickens’s documentary project is back on track. Many executives who rejected Signal in 2024 have since reached out, wanting to talk about the film. But as Dickens told me when I visited her in February at her home in Burbank, she’s not interested. She wants to move forward with total creative control, no studio she’s beholden to, no “notes that are going to be icky.” So she’s funding the project with $9.99 memberships on telepathytapes.com and donations from more than 1,600 listeners. In addition, she’s making a Telepathy Tapes season two.
Dickens comes across in person, as she does on the podcast, as measured and self-contained. “We’re trying to be good stewards of the science,” she said, “good stewards of the families.” Her ambitions have exploded. Along with the podcasts and the docuseries, she’s planning to open community centers for nonspeakers and create “a long-reaching nonprofit.” She wants to “convene a roundtable of scientists, ideally,” she said, “at Yale or the University of Virginia.”
The Telepathy Tapes shot through the culture at a very particular time. “People are just feeling so disconnected from themselves, disconnected from each other, disconnected from everything,” Dickens said that afternoon when Jess Zaino, her producing partner, dropped by. Zaino sees the public’s reaction to the podcast as a sign that, as a society, “we’re shedding our skin.” Faith in experts is waning. Zaino described Dickens’s role in our newly unfastened culture as “the messenger, the storyteller, the Joan of Arc–type person.”
Dickens, too, feels she’s shifted from documentarian to advocate. “The happiest, most contented and in my lane I feel,” she told me, is when she’s working toward making life easier for these families — helping them “get their kids’ words to count, to get spelling in schools.” Given her identification with her subjects and the fact that, in the back half of season one of The Telepathy Tapes, she introduces listeners to neurotypical teachers who have two-way telepathy with their students, I asked Dickens if she was interested in trying to become telepathic herself. She said “no.” Did she worry about her subjects reading her mind? She said “no” again. “I feel like a golden retriever up here,” she told me, pointing to her forehead.
Many in the nonspeaker community feel deep gratitude toward Dickens. The care and conviction with which she told their story caused the world to finally see them. Others, however, feel patronized. The Telepathy Tapes steers head-on into the trope of the super-crip: the disabled person whose extraordinary, perhaps magical, abilities make them worthwhile.
“It might disappoint fans of The Telepathy Tapes to learn that our nonspeaking child does not have magic powers,” said Josh Reno, an anthropology professor at SUNY Binghamton who has an 18-year-old nonspeaking autistic son. “He’s just a nice kid who finds ways to communicate with us without the use of words, and that is enough.” Reno gets the emotional logic of parents with children like his coming to believe in telepathy: “If I were to tell people Charlie was psychic or that he saw angels or ghosts, even if it’s not true, there is a truth to it.” Charlie’s relationship to the world is so unique, so incomprehensible. Yet Reno worries about the hardening of that private, poetic belief as public fact. “Maybe my son is psychic, I don’t know,” Reno said, “but he definitely is in jeopardy if unelected tech bros slash Medicaid to ribbons.”
Amy Lutz, a lecturer in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania who also has a nonspeaking autistic son, is angry about the podcast too. In her book Chasing the Intact Mind, she critiques the genre of miracle memoirs written by nonspeakers or their parents. One common thread in these books: Parents don’t regard nonspeakers’ autonomous actions — like Betsy’s hitting and scratching — as reliable expressions of the nonspeaker’s thoughts. Instead, the child’s true intent must come through the mouth or hand or brain of the parent.
Listeners may be surprised to learn Diane Powell, the paranormal researcher, is upset with Dickens, as well — with her willingness to cast aside inconvenient information, with her slide into spirituality. Powell has spent the past three decades of her career fighting skeptics who belittle her for claiming telepathy in the autistic population can be understood as what she calls “a savant skill.” By this she means the qualities of mind that enable Daniel Tammet to recite from memory 22,514 digits of pi could also produce, in other autistic people, an aptitude that looks like ESP. Yet what troubles Powell most, now, are not the doubters. It’s the newly enthusiastic embrace of telepathy from what she calls “the woo world.”
Among Powell’s complaints about Dickens: On the podcast, she misrepresented the testing they did together. For example, when Powell and Dickens visited Atlanta in 2022, they tested Houston’s ability to communicate mind-to-mind with another nonspeaker. Those tests failed: Neither of the non-speakers could identify what the other was thinking. Dickens and Powell brought on that trip a psychologist named Jeff Tarrant, who collected “QEEG brain scan” data by attaching electrodes to a nonspeaker’s head both in a “baseline” state and while the podcast’s subjects claimed telepathy was happening. On the podcast, Dickens describes this in miasmic science-y language: “We conducted QEEG tests with the hyperscanner, which provided some fascinating data.” But when I called Tarrant, he told me the brain-wave data he collected produced no meaningful findings at all.
Powell and Dickens haven’t seen each other in over two years. Powell feels used. Dickens, she said, invoked “my name, my reputation, my credibility, my credentials” to further her anti-scientific project.
Dickens’s embrace of cosmic forces certainly proved prophetic in at least one way: She was blessed to have to make the podcast first. Her material is far more credible with audio alone.
Nobody knows exactly what consciousness is. Or even if we can understand it within established science. On The Telepathy Tapes, Dickens tells listeners with great conviction that materialism cannot explain it; that to understand consciousness, we need to relinquish the long-held notion that the whole world is made out of matter and is thus subject to the laws of physics. Instead, we need to turn to idealism — the philosophy that matter isn’t foundational to the universe; the material world is an illusion. The real substrate of the universe is mental and not bound by physics and its rules.
This is a thrilling idea. What if David Chalmers, the preeminent scholar of a close relative of idealism known as panpsychism, is right, and we don’t understand how consciousness works because it fundamentally just is? What if consciousness is a foundational property of the universe, like mass or charge, and thus behaves according to a new set of principles we have not yet deduced? The principles of dualism could allow for bits (particles? Waves?) of consciousness to interact with each other at a distance — a.k.a. telepathy. But the materialists have smart theories, too, along with a nearly irrefutable argument: One shouldn’t invent a new fundamental component of the universe unless one absolutely has to. And there are compelling theories of consciousness that fit in the materialist framework. Among the strongest is based on the idea that the brain is a prediction machine. According to this theory, when we are conscious, the neurons inside our skulls are using the information they receive from our senses to project what will happen next. That is, our neurons are fabricating our experience of reality — what we call consciousness — out of memory and sensory data. In this context, consciousness is not that mysterious. It’s a feeling our brains create to help us navigate the world. And navigating the world well is essential to our material selves’ primary job: to stay alive.
There are some blips in the data, evidence of kinds of information transfer we don’t understand. Starting in the 1970s, mainstream science began producing some very modest proof of this transfer through the so-called Ganzfeld studies. These studies have been replicated many times. In them, Person A is put into a state of mild sensory deprivation: headphones, eye covers. Person B, in a separate room, is shown a picture and tries to send the image to Person A. Person A then has to guess, out of four options, which picture Person B saw. Person A guesses right 32 percent instead of 25 percent of the time.
Nailing down a global theory of consciousness — figuring out whether it’s a particle or prediction or some not-yet-imagined informational field — isn’t a high priority for most of us in our daily lives. Certainly not for parents with high-needs children.
Scot and Karen Sherwood moved from Tennessee to Florida to Washington to Georgia in search of a school that could help their daughter, Lily.
During a visit to a new school, outside Atlanta, she met a boy she liked, J.P. Lily and J.P. both communicated with their teachers through spelling. They communicated with each other mind-to-mind. They held hands and hung out with their friends on the metaphysical Hill. J.P. called Lily the love of his life. Then when Lily was 18 and J.P. was 17, J.P. drowned in his family’s hot tub.
At J.P.’s shiva, in September 2023, the Sherwoods first learned about The Telepathy Tapes. J.P. had been in it. Scot was reluctant to participate. He’s a radiologist, a man who spends every workday scouring data for disease and giving people information with which to make crucial decisions. But after J.P. died, Lily grew unhinged with grief — and adamant that she take J.P.’s place on the podcast. She still talked to J.P. mind-to-mind every day. I SEE HIM AS ENERGY, she spelled with Scot. HE TELLS ME HE LOVES AND FOR ME TO TELL OUR STORY.
Scot, already on the outermost reaches of who he once considered himself to be, took a step further, shed his reluctance to record, and made more room in his brain to accommodate his daughter and her needs. At first he thought, Okay, MRI scanners are pretty amazing. Maybe telepathy happens through electromagnetic energy. But then Dickens put out an episode of The Telepathy Tapes suggesting that people can receive telepathic messages in electromagnetically shielded chambers. So that was out. Scot kept trying. Quantum physics, quantum entanglement. Einstein’s spooky interaction at a distance? “Maybe there’s a component of the scalar wave that is part of the lattice of this?” he asked. He felt that kind of destabilizing love so many parents do — a cravenness, an unconstrained ache to protect his daughter and ease her pain. Scot had already crisscrossed the country. He’d already spent a fortune. He’d already become a man who would do anything, everything, for his child. What is telepathy, one might argue, but a boundless desire to connect? Why not go on a viral podcast, even one that threatens to weaken our grip on science and reality?
*This story has been updated to clarify the timeline of Houston’s spelling and to include more information on the research on autism and vaccines.