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.
Telepathy Tapes - hosted by Ky Dickens 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:
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.
Vyse, Stuart. (2025, January 6). The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience. Skeptical Inquirer.