S2E33: Trapped Inside a Brilliant Mind | Talk Tracks

For decades, Dr. Robert Melillo has studied autism, brain development, and human cognition. In this conversation he shares his theories on why some non-speaking individuals may understand far more than they can physically express. Drawing on neuroscience, developmental psychology, and years of clinical experience, Dr. Melillo explores the relationship between body awareness, motor control, communication, and intelligence. He discusses why speech may be inaccessible for some non-speakers despite intact language and comprehension, what individuals have told him about their experience of being disconnected from their bodies, and why he believes giftedness and disability can sometimes emerge from the same neurological roots. Whether you agree with Dr. Melillo's theories or not, this episode invites listeners to reconsider long-held assumptions about autism, intelligence, and what it means to truly understand another mind. Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call—subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.supercast.com. http://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

  Hey everyone and welcome back to The Talk Tracks. This episode of The Talk Tracks features Dr. Robert Melillo, a clinician, researcher, and brain specialist who has spent decades studying autism, developmental neuroscience, and non-speaking individuals. In this conversation, Dr. Melillo shares his theories about hemispheric imbalance, body awareness, motor control, giftedness, and why some non-speakers may struggle to access speech despite understanding far more than people realize. This episode raises fascinating questions about intelligence and bodyment, communication, and what it really means to be present inside a mind that the world may fundamentally misunderstand.

• 0:40Ky Dickens?

  Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens and welcome to The Talk

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:12Ky Dickens?

  Talk Tracks, brought to you weekly from TTT Media. In this series, we explore the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, consciousness, and yes, even unexplained phenomena like psi-abilities. We examine the mysteries that sit just beyond the edge of what science can currently explain alongside researchers, thinkers, families, and experiencers. If you haven't yet listened to the telepathy tapes, I encourage you to start there. It lays the foundation for everything that we'll be exploring because every era has ideas once dismissed as impossible until someone was willing to investigate them seriously. And on this show, we do just that.

• 1:53Ky Dickens?

  Thank you for being here, Dr. Melillo. I'd love to have you start by introducing yourself and giving us a bit of your background.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Dr. Robert Melillo, and I've been a clinician and a researcher, brain researcher primarily for about a part of 35 years. One of my main areas of research is really looking at autism and especially non-speaking autism. I have a specialty in neurology and rehabilitation, but I also have a degree in clinical rehabilitation neuropsychology. I also have a PhD in developmental cognitive neuroscience. And understanding human brain development is one of my main areas and the neuroscience around it. I've been teaching and a clinical professor for about 25, 30 years. I developed a company called Brain Balance Achievement Centers,

• 2:43Speaker 02

  where we had 150 centers around the country. These are learning centers that are geared towards kids with different types of learning or behavioral challenges. I've written over 100 scientific papers and I have eight bestselling books. Disconnected Kids is the biggest selling book, which is translated into 18 languages. And it's one of the bestselling books in that genre of all time.

• 3:06Ky Dickens?

  And what's that book about?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  It's about understanding for parents, what is actually happening in their child's brain? And that's really where it starts for me. You know, you give someone a diagnosis, what does that mean? What is actually happening in their brain? How does it get that way? And what can we do to maybe optimize that in one way or the other?

• 3:25Ky Dickens?

  So in the case of non-speaking individuals, which is, you know, kind of like the focus of season one of our podcast, what exactly is going on there from a mind-body perspective?

• 3:35Speaker 02

  So based on our research, and we've done a lot of research into this, what we're seeing is that autism in general, the whole spectrum, is really related to individuals that are...

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Genetically, their traits are gifted towards more left hemisphere dominant skills. We know that families of kids with autism, you see a much higher incidence of physicists, mathematicians, engineers. We also know that doctors, lawyers, and especially software engineers, anywhere in the world where there's a cluster of people in the IT industry, you see a dramatic increase in autism around there with Silicon Valley having by far the most. And one of my areas of research is trying to understand and create a universal model of autism that understands every point on the spectrum from a child or an adult that

• 4:31Speaker 02

  might have been referred to as Asperger's or as very highly functioning and super bright and articulate, but may struggle socially or with some emotional regulation, on the other end to someone who can't speak, can't regulate their body, has no control. All of them are related to more of a right hemisphere developmental delay with a left hemisphere overactivity, and to the degree of this imbalance is the degree of their functionality. And what we see is that the lack of language, this has been one of the things that I've spent my career trying to understand is why with an individual in the autism spectrum, what is literally preventing them from speaking?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  No one's ever really answered that, to be honest, and I've spent a lot of my time on that research. A lot of people assume there's a problem in the left brain with areas that we call like Broca's area for expressive language, or Wernicke's for receptive, but we know that those kids often have advanced skills in those areas, meaning many of the kids we work with, they may be hyperlexic, they can read early. I have one kid from England that could read at seven months. No one should be able to read at seven months, right? So typically in child development and human brain development, the right brain takes the lead in development for the first three years, and that's where we connect with our

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Body, we develop sensations like what we call interoception and proprioception. And we build a map of our body in our brain and then we develop a map of how to move our body. And the largest part of that map is really the face, the tongue, the mouth and the lips for verbal and nonverbal expression. We develop social emotional intelligence. We get emotional regulation. We're able to control our body and our movements. And then the left brain comes on after the first three years. And then that's where we start forming conscious memories. We start to be more logical, linear.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  We start to learn words and numbers and letters and we start to memorize facts. And it's very sequential and it's more motor driven and it's more aggressive and it's more goal directed. And so that sequence of how that happens is very important. The degree of difference between the right and left brain is what makes the human brain most unique. And in individuals that are unusually strong and gifted on one side, especially the left, that left brain can come online too early and it can kind of shut down the right brain. And that's where we see that regress of autism. And when they lose connection to their body, they lose any sort of sense of self or map.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  And that is what prevents them from speaking, even though all the words are there and they know everything. And that to me is what we're looking at. And the more unbalanced it is, the more severely impaired they are, but the more gifted they may be.

• 7:38Ky Dickens?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. And a lot of specialists that we've interviewed have said that non-speaking individuals can't talk because it's a fine motor skill. Is that true for the most part?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Yes and no, meaning that a lot of people have the idea that it's apraxia, which means that they can't move and they're having trouble with motor planning. Motor planning is actually a left brain skill. That is the same area where we see stimming and tics and hyperactivity come from. So we know that those areas are average, actually. Overactive in autistic individuals. But again, there are these things called humunculi. There are these maps, these 3D distorted maps that we build in our brain as we're developing and moving through the world. And I can give you an example. One kid who was actually on the first season of the telepathy tapes,

• 8:31Speaker 02

  when asked why he couldn't speak, he said, I don't see my body in the brain, in my brain. And so then I can't move my body. Other kids will tell us that they literally don't feel their tongue. They don't feel their mouth. They don't know where their body is in space. So the primary problem really is a sensory problem with interoception and proprioception.

• 8:53Ky Dickens?

  When he says interception, he's referring to someone's internal state, which helps with self-regulation or things like body temperature and hunger. Proprioception refers to our body's interaction with the outside world, our position, balance, and the ability to sense our bodies in space. Often, this is thrown off for non-speakers.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  We form two maps. First, we form a sensory map. And the right brain forms a whole map of the whole body. So we become a whole person and we become embodied and we become self-aware in the right brain. And then, once we develop this sensory map, then we develop a motor map of how to move that part of our body. And the largest part of the map is again, the face, the mouth, the tongue and the lips. And then the next largest is the arm and the... So 60% or more of the map that we have in our brain is looking at our mouth and our face and our tongue for verbal and non-verbal communication, speaking, showing facial expression and reading facial expression.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And then it's pointing or typing or writing. And these kids are so disconnected and they don't form these maps that they don't feel that. They don't know where their arm is. That's why we may have to touch them for them to be able to spell, which is where a lot of the controversy comes from.

• 10:11Ky Dickens?

  And then where do you stand on typing to communicate? You know, what have you seen in that department that makes you feel like it's either valid? Valid or not valid?

• 10:19Speaker 02

  So with spelling, one of the things that in our research, looking at why they need to be touched, a lot of the controversy is people are saying, well, you're only touching them because you're guiding them. And I understand how it looks, and that's the way I thought about it when I first saw it. But then someone explained to me that we're not really guiding them. If anything, we're pushing against them because they can't feel it. And I thought, oh, that makes sense to me because you're touching them. One of the things I looked into were people that had strokes in the right brain, in the right parietal area, where we develop these maps. And they get what's called hemineglect syndrome, where they don't know that this is their side of the body, or they may not see this whole side of the world.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  They may draw a drawing of a clock and they only draw the right side of the clock, and they don't realize that. And some may even have what's called alien hand syndrome, where they're like, this, whose arm is this? And they're like, somebody else's arm, it's not mine. Or you ask them, whose arm this is, and they say, I don't know. But if you touch them, they all of a sudden may know, oh, that's my arm. And that's what I think is going on, because when you touch them, they don't have these maps, these humunculi in the brain, and especially the arm is like one-third of the whole map. And when you touch them, all of a sudden their brain sees it, and now they know, oh, there's my arm, and now they can move it, because now they can see it.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  And they can always move it, that's why it's not a primary dyspraxia. It's primarily that they couldn't see it. And once they see it and they can move it, now they can actually show you what they know. And that's where the spelling part comes into play.

• 12:00Ky Dickens?

  Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful, actually. It's like you need the connection of someone else to be able to fully function. And we all do, right? I mean, we really all do, but not to this degree physically, I think, for the most part.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's why, you know, a lot of spelling techniques, they refuse to touch them. And the child would go years without really being able to spell. And if you just touch them, they would be able to spell. Even sometimes if you just touch them on the shoulder.

• 12:26Ky Dickens?

  When they are eventually able to spell, would you say it is because of the repetition of touch? Like, if you signaled enough times to an praxic brain that this is part of their body, you know, do they begin to acclimate to that concept and thus control their body more?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that may be part of it. I think, you know, the brain is plastic. But the thing is, like what we do, and again, I learned this from kids that were spelling, that spelling is more of a right-hand, left-brain thing, right? Because you're spelling and the left brain is what spells. They're using their right hand most of the time, which is the left brain. They're speaking to them from the right side, which into their right ear and usually using their right visual field. All of it goes to the left brain. The left brain is overactive. And when it's overactive, that's what causes stimming and tics and hyperactivity and OCD and maybe anger outbursts.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  So I had one kid that told me that I love spelling, but when I do it, it overstimulates my left brain. So he said, is there a way we can balance this? So we started using the left hand, sitting on the left side, speaking in their left ear from the left visual field. And now they don't get overstimulated and they actually can access their emotions and it's activating the right brain at the same time. So what we need to do is build up that area of the brain where they feel their body and connect to their body, this area called the insula and then the parietal lobe and the anterior cingulate, which makes them self-aware. So our goal is always to get the person to speak. And this is what they say. They spell all the time.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Please help me speak. And I had one kid, actually, who was very, who was clearly telepathic and worked with somebody who was on this show, was very well-known. And I know it was a real thing. And he was saying, please help me speak. And I said, if we help you speak, what happens if you lose your ability to read telepathically? And he said, I would give that up if I could speak. And I said, OK. You know, but our goal, and we do get many of them to actually speak and even many at a normal level.

• 14:43Ky Dickens?

  Really? Non-speakers?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:45Ky Dickens?

  That's amazing.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:53Ky Dickens?

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• 16:08Speaker 02

  We've been doing this for years, and the people that work with me are expert, been doing it for 20 years, and they do it with their own children, who are now grown adults. And I know that they're doing it the right way. And especially when we get kids that may need assistance in the beginning and then can type or spell on their own, they always tell us that, you know, this was me all along. I mean, a lot of the controversy is if you're touching them at all, that you're influencing them, or that you're moving the board to influence them. But they confirm that that's not the case. I just had a mom last week from Mexico, who, boy, was about six years old with autism.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  They didn't believe he knew anything. Not only did he start spelling and answering questions, but he was doing it in English, and they thought he only New Spanish. And we see many of these kids, they they know five languages. But if you can't express it verbally, and if you can't point, and you can't control your body because it's always constantly stimming, how are you going to show what you know? And part of the reason why this happens is because they're so brilliant with their left brain, and it comes online too early. And many people even know they understand everything, but they can't speak. Now, if they understand everything, why can't they speak? It's not a left brain issue. It's not just purely a motor issue.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  It's primarily a sensory perception that then influences the motor. You can't move your body if you don't know where it is.

• 17:44Ky Dickens?

  You're saying the biggest challenge or issue with, you know, the praxic non-speaking population is just that they can't really even feel where this part of their body, like the mouth part of their body is to make it move or function.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Yes, and this is what they tell us, by the way. I've I asked the non-speaking kids, which, you know, it's interesting when we have kids that have been spelling for a long time and they come to us. One of the first questions I ask them is, why can't you speak? Nobody ever asks them that. But if you ask them that, they'll tell you. And they always say that it's, I don't feel my body. I didn't know I had a body. I don't know where it is, or I don't feel my tongue in my mouth. And that's what they say virtually every time. I can't move it, but mainly because I can't feel it.

• 18:31Ky Dickens?

  I just think it's such an important point because it's very easy to stigmatize someone who's just not speaking and moving their body uncontrollably. And historically, people will just say, oh, they don't have any intelligence. And what you're saying is actually the complete opposite, which is also what many non-speakers say, right? Is that they understand everything and non-speaking does not mean non-intelligent.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Not at all. And that's one of the my missions in life is to go out and prove that. And we've done the research on this as well. And I understand the neuroscience under this. I had an eight-year-old from New Zealand who had never spoken a word. And I was working with his mom virtually, and she was teaching him how to spell. Soon as he started spelling, he started saying, I want to be a physicist. And he started throwing out these words, these big words that she didn't understand what they were, but she realized they were physics terms. And she asked him to define it, and he would then define it in really detailed terms to where she couldn't even understand it.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  So she went to a friend who was a physics professor and she said, can you read this word and tell me what this definition is if it's right? And he looked at it and he said, yeah, this is very accurate. This is a very good description of this word. And he said, why are you asking me? And she said, because this is my eight-year-old, non-speaking autistic kid. And he said, that's impossible. No child would know this word. Nobody would know that. Only a physicist would. And she said, well, I didn't write it. You know, he wrote it and he defined it. I didn't even know what the definition meant. So, you know, these are the things, these kids are remarkable. I think in that same vein, that level of having these super advanced left brain skills,

• 20:15Speaker 02

  I think at a certain level may also lead to the ability of telepathy.

• 20:20Ky Dickens?

  Okay. And I was going to ask you that because I'm sure you've seen at this point, many people knowing things that they shouldn't know or that they have no way of knowing. And I wanted to get your opinion on that. You know, how do you think that's possible? And where do you think it's coming from?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so believe me, I came as a skeptic. I was a skeptic in spelling part when I first saw it. I was a skeptic as far as anything with telepathy. Obviously, I'm a scientist, I'm a neuroscientist, and I like to think of things in concrete, scientific things that I can prove. Then with spelling, eventually I realized, okay, this is absolutely real. And then I was able to understand the neuroscience under it. And we do brain imaging, you know, we do a lot of research with QEGs. And we see that in the left side of the brain, these kids have hyper connectivity of their short-range connections. And they may even be more powerful, like almost superhuman level of processing in the brain.

• 21:18Ky Dickens?

  And what do you mean by short range?

• 21:19Speaker 02

  So when we're maturing and when we're growing, we start out with short-range connections in our brain that build the foundation of networks. And then as we mature, we then lose some of those and replace them with longer range connections, especially between the right and left hemisphere or forward and backward. I use the analogy, it's like if I was going to drive around any neighborhood here on Long Island, I would go through my town and I would use the little roads that go, you know, from one to the other, to school, to the bank, to church, and that's efficient, right? But if I was gonna go and wanna go to another end of Long Island or into New York City, I would jump on a highway and I would take a longer range connection that would be much more faster and efficient.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  If I took short backroads all the way to one side of Long Island or New York, it would take me 10 times as long. Our research and others have shown that in autism, there's an overabundance of short-range connections, which are very powerful and very fast. And there's a deficit of long-range connections because their brain is staying in a more immature state. That is really what we see in our research. There's no damage or injury or genetic mutation that is at the root of any of these issues. What we see is that there's this developmental delay and imbalance that is superimposed on these gifts and that contributes more to vulnerability.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  And then that's superimposed on certain genetic traits that go along with that, that give them this potential for advanced skill.

• 22:55Ky Dickens?

  So using short range would mean that you can almost, you know, hyper-fixate on something and get sort of more into it than if you use long range?

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Yes, the left brain is all about hyper-fixating, highly detailed attention. And I think that, you know, those same networks, if they're really hyper-connected and they get into a frequency range that most people don't get into, it may allow them to literally extend and speak to other people in a telepathic way.

• 23:25Ky Dickens?

  So do you think it's their consciousness or it's their brain firing outside of their body?

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Well, there's two different things I can think of. One is, I don't know if you're familiar, there's research looking at the genetics of people that are telepathic versus those that are not. And again, there's different things with telepathy. You have some that it's really more, you know, speaking to others or hearing others' words, others, it's more clairvoyance. And I think that they may be slightly different left brain versus right brain abilities, as opposed to someone who may be super right brain dominant and super creative and might be overly sensitive and that might be a medium or clairvoyant, where somebody who's left brain dominant, it might be really more, you know, like words and reading words and communicating that way.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Part of our research is looking at consciousness and, you know, what is consciousness? And obviously, no one's really even defined that as of today. There's a lot of fighting going on, but there is a faction, these really great scientists, a guy named Tononi out of basically, I think Rutgers, and along with even a guy named Roger Penrose, he literally was Stephen Hawking's partner when they discovered black holes. Brilliant physicist, one of the best out there. And he went into then consciousness research. And some of them believe that it's consciousness emerges as a byproduct of connectivity in

• 24:55Speaker 02

  the brain, meaning that the more connected as we mature and as these connections, these long range and short range connections get to a certain point, we become conscious. So we can see that at around 18 months to two years, when a child recognizes themselves in a mirror. That's when they become self-aware, which to me is the ultimate level of consciousness, which happens primarily in the right brain. And that's the emergence of self-consciousness and self-awareness that happens. And if we have a seizure or if people go into anesthesia, that goes away. But yet, we're not really changing the connectivity in the brain. So what's actually happening?

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Is it an emergent property out of the level of the complexity that something on a quantum level is engaged? Other people believe that literally there is a universal consciousness and at a certain level of connectivity, we can tap into that. And if you, if that is the case, which again, there are legitimate researchers that believe that is what kind of happens. And if there is that, then that means that it's a consciousness we're all tapping into, which then means that we should be able to communicate telepathically.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Now, if you look at research, like legitimate research that's done on looking at telepathic people, there is a chromosome seven. There's different versions of that chromosome. One is known as the wild type, meaning a more natural state of that chromosome, and the other is a modified version. And it was shown that people that are telepathic have the wild type of that seven chromosome. So it would seem that it's a more natural state of that chromosome. And maybe this is a more natural state for us. And what we see is that as we've evolved, we've found ways to inhibit that ability

• 27:09Speaker 02

  and replace it with the ability to speak and communicate because for whatever reason, that may be more efficient or whatever. And, you know, again, are we communicating because we're achieving a certain frequency of power that's extending out of our brain and literally allowing us to communicate? Or are we tapping into a common universal consciousness where now we're able to tap into others? We have this one 12-year-old girl from Canada that mom, again, came to us, didn't really think this child knew anything, started spelling and just is saying incredible things. They realized that she knew five languages.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  And she says, almost like what Nikola Tesla said. Nikola Tesla said, there's a universal-like library where information is stored and that he was tapping into that. And this little girl says that as well. Like, the mom was asking, how do you know this stuff? And she basically said, all the information is there. It's available. I just need to go to this library and I can get it at any time.

• 28:10Ky Dickens?

  This universal library that this 12-year-old girl from Canada seems to be describing is often referred to as the Akashic Records. And that's something that has been discussed a few times in this podcast before. And the Akashic Records have been referenced historically and are believed to be a non-physical library that contains all information, right? Past, present, future, about the universe and every soul that ever has or will ever exist. Another way to think of it is like an information field, right? That all information in the universe doesn't go away. It's stored somewhere. So that's really fascinating. And I want to go back to something you referenced. You mentioned earlier that you don't think autism necessarily has to do with genetic causes, which actually feels a little surprising to me because there's a lot of statistics how

• 28:52Ky Dickens?

  if you have one autistic child, you're much more likely to have a second one.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:56Ky Dickens?

  What do you postulate is the reason that this happens to some people?

• 29:01Speaker 02

  So, again, there's two different main subsets of autism. One we call syndromic and the other non-syndromic. Syndromic means there are some individuals that do have a clear genetic mutation. And that might be something like Down syndrome, Fragile X, tubus sclerosis, or some other known mutation. Or it might be what we call a de novo mutation, which means it's not coming from the parents. It kind of spontaneously arises. But that's rare. That's only about 5% of those on the autism spectrum. And to me, that's not really autism. It has very many different features. It's a genetic disorder where they're also labeled with autism.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  But the vast majority of those on the autism spectrum, there is no clear genetic mutation associated with it. And there are traits. There was just an article that came out in Scientific American based on a research paper that was just produced identifying 30

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Nine traits that are associated with autism spectrum. And differences in those traits and the expression of those traits may relate to differences on the spectrum. But what do those traits do? Just like we have traits, genetic traits that might give me, you know, eye color, hair color, height. There are also traits that give us abilities, right? You know, like in a, in a family, you might have a family that they're all musicians or they're all really great in math. Or they're all great athletes. So when someone is uniquely talented or gifted or intelligent, what does that mean? Neuroscience wise, it means that there are areas and parts of the brain and networks

• 30:41Speaker 02

  that are usually more on one side or the other that are uniquely connected. Those connections are a little stronger in those people. And there was a guy named Brodmann in the early nineteen hundreds that created maps of the, of the, of brains of all animals. But in humans, he created a map of about forty five to forty eight different areas of our brain on the right and left side. And then correlated that over years with functions. And, and that's one of the things we use in neuroanatomy to talk about areas of the brain. So many of these traits seem like they have to do with building different parts of the brain. And then when you put different parts together, that's what makes up networks. And networks communicate.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  And we know that imbalances in networks or disconnections in networks to one degree or another is really at the basis of almost every mental health issue. Where you're looking at schizophrenia or bipolar or anxiety or ADHD. And to different degrees, they're all built on different traits. Like for instance, bipolar runs in families that are very creative. People that are great artists, we know, you know, like Hemingway was bipolar and many of his grandchildren. Whereas, you know, left brain skills are things like people that are incredible scientists like John Nash from Beautiful Mind, who was this brilliant mathematician. His son is also schizophrenic. He was schizophrenic and that's what schizophrenia is.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  It's an excessive, it's very similar to autism in many ways. And it's interesting that they hear voices, right? And are they actually hearing? Other people's thoughts and many people that are brilliant genius level scientists have been known to be schizophrenic, just like autism is the same is very similar. You know, there's an article a few years ago called the puzzle of the unbalanced mind, meaning that if there's not genetic mutations, but when we look at traits and what gets passed on evolutionarily, traits get passed on because they create what we call evolutionary fitness. What does that mean? It means it makes you more likely to survive individually and as a species, which means

• 32:55Speaker 02

  you need to be able to procreate. Genes that promote your ability to procreate are genes that are more likely to get passed on, right? And we know there's something called sexual selection where females generally choose certain males based on certain traits that are beneficial. And so traits that lead to having less children should get weeded out over time, right? But yet in autism, they very rarely have their own children. Schizophrenia, they rarely have their own children. And bipolar, they kill themselves five times more likely and they don't have as many children. So these genetic traits based on that should be going away.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  But instead, we see an explosion. Why? Because at a different version of the trait, it gives an extreme ability and advantage. So autism and schizophrenia, the traits that underlie it build really strong networks in the left side of the brain. And we're moving more and more and more towards a left brain society. Education, psychology, you know, medicine, everything with technology is moving in that left brain world. So we're promoting that more and more. At a certain level, it gives a great advantage. But if you go too much, or if the other side isn't keeping pace, then you slip over what's

• 34:22Speaker 02

  called a cliff edge and now it becomes a sharp disadvantage. But most of the time, it's an advantage. So the traits that are associated with autism, we see that, again, we see them in physicists and engineers. It's really like an engineering brain. And, you know, that is great. As you go up to socioeconomic scale, the better school you went to, the higher IQ you have, the more money you make, the better neighborhood you live in, the more likely you are to have a child with autism. It's not something that comes out of neglect or a bad thing. I tell parents all the time, you didn't do anything wrong. You gave your child a gift, but this gift is out of control right now. And that's the problem.

• 35:06Ky Dickens?

  So I want to quickly jump in and add here that while Dr. Malio's theories about hemispheric imbalance and autism are not necessarily universally accepted and remain debated with our neuroscience, he operates from a framework we do not see enough of from many neuroscientists. And that is listening to what the individual with autism is telling him and considering that autism and giftedness sometimes exist closer together than we assume. It's almost like you're saying we have evolved too much in some ways, like mentally. So two brilliant people coming together to have a child could result in that.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  They're more likely to have a kid with autism, especially if they're left brain dominant. If they're right brain dominant and they're really gifted, you know, creatively, they're more likely to have a kid with dyslexia or a bipolar disorder because those are opposite. Kids with autism, they're not reading other people's emotions. They don't feel their own emotions. They may have what we call alexithymia where they really can't understand what emotion they're feeling and they're emotionally, you know, dampened more. Whereas people that are right brain in the creative world are hyper emotional, hypersensitive, and they fear of being judged by others or they have social anxiety.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  And many of, and we interview some of the top singers, songwriters, actors and people in the creative world, and they're virtually all dyslexic, and they all suffered with this anxiety or self-esteem, overjudging themselves, all of that. My daughter and I do a podcast called The Right Brain, W R I T E, and she's an incredible singer-songwriter in Nashville. You know, she struggled with dyslexia and she struggled with emotional things like anxiety, like being overly emotional. There's something called metacognition from, from the frontal lobe. It's one of the highest abilities our brain has, and it's the ability to judge

• 37:02Speaker 02

  ourselves accurately, right? It goes along with self-awareness. And what we see is that people that are really overly right-brain dominant tend to judge themselves negatively, much more harshly. Even people that are incredibly talented, they judge themselves harshly and they assume other people are judging them negatively. And that kills them because these are people that are also driven to perform. So they have this dilemma where they have this gift that's in them to write a song, or perform a song, or act, or get on stage, or dance, and they're also har- highly afraid of being judged by others and being rejected.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Ultimately, the right brain has what we call rejection sensitivity. People in the autism world, or people with the left brain dominant, they tend to judge themselves overly positive. So like a narcissist, that's what narcissism is. Someone highly intelligent that lacks a certain level of self-awareness can be very charming, but yet they judge themselves as great. You know, they're, they never do anything wrong. This is the way the brain works. This is emotions. Like, for instance, the left brain generates primarily the emotions of happiness and joy, anger, but also pride. The right brain generates sadness, fear, sense of danger, shame, embarrassment.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Embracement and guilt. And so if you have too little joy because you have too much sadness, combine that with shame and guilt, that's the definition of a major depressive disorder. And many of the people in that world, you know, they suffer from depression. And that's kind of where the bipolar part comes from as well. And so it's really a matter of the looking at the balance of these networks. And the more gifted, you know, one of the things that's fascinated me since I was a kid, I like to read books about people that accomplish things and athletes and scientists and astronauts. And there was always this thing where many of their life ended tragically. And there was this saying that there's a thin line between genius and insanity.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  And I was like, why would that be? If you were a genius, wouldn't you just be happy? Right? That you were a genius? If you were a great artist, wouldn't you be like, wow, every day I'm a great artist? But yet, you know, that's not what happens. So part of what I've tried to do, I think, is understand that. And these imbalances in these networks, what we call functional disconnection syndromes, is the area of my lab and our research, and I think we've published as much as almost anybody in the world on that, especially as it relates to things like autism or dyslexia or ADHD. I think understanding the dynamic of these networks and the dynamic aspect of the brain, the more gifted you are in an area,

• 40:00Speaker 02

  the more vulnerable you are to a deficit in the other side. And if that deficit outweighs the gift, then it becomes a diagnosable disability.

• 40:10Ky Dickens?

  Well, thank you so much, Dr. Malio. This has been really eye opening and you're doing fantastic work. And thank you for not assuming that speech or the ability to speak means intelligence and for not assuming presence needs eye contact. And most of all, for listening to the non-speakers and believing what they say.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:29Ky Dickens?

  That's it for this episode of The Talk Tracks, but new episodes will be released every Wednesday, so stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that knit together our reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. To dive in deeper, subscribe to our Backstage Pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content like telepathy tests, Ask Me Anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free, connect with other members on our Telepathy Tribe Discord, and hear and see exclusive content from the Telepathy Tapes Vault. Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com for more info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Producers Katherine Ellis and Selena Kennedy,

• 41:14Ky Dickens?

  technical directing, audio mix and finishing by Jeremy Cole, opening and closing music by Elizabeth P. W., and original logo and cover art by Ben Kandora Design. I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.