Telepathy: Is It For Real?

A popular podcast called The Telepathy Tapes claims that telepathy is real — and tons of people are convinced. So we open our minds to the possibility of mind-reading and ask: Could this be real?? And if not — what might be going on here? We dive into the science (yes — there is science!) with Dr. Katharine Beals, Prof. Jim Todd, and Prof. Chris French. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsTelepathy In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Extraordinary Claims of Telepathy (08:28) What Could Be Going On Here? (32:27) 50 Years of Science on Telepathy?! This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from Wendy Zukerman, along with Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Meryl Horn, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, So Wylie, Bumi Hidaka, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Zoltan Kekecs, Prof. Stefan Schmidt, and Janyce Boynton. Special thanks to Enrique Perez. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus.

• 0:05Wendy Zukerman?

  This is the show that pits facts against feeling like you can read someone's thoughts.

• 0:15Wendy Zukerman?

  Today, we are talking about telepathy. And here with me is Science Versus senior producer, Rose Rimler. Hi, Rose.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Hi, Wendy. So by telepathy, we mean the concept of beaming thoughts directly into someone else's brain, or being able to read other people's thoughts.

• 0:32Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm-hmm, yes.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  That's an idea that's been around for centuries, but it's having a bit of a moment right now, probably because of this very popular podcast called The Telepathy Tapes.

• 0:42Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, I am hearing a lot about this podcast. Yes, yes, yes, and telepathy with it.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Yes, it was the top podcast on Spotify earlier this year. It actually knocked Joe Rogan off the number one spot briefly. And it's all about how telepathy is real.

• 0:58Wendy Zukerman?

  You know, a very clever friend of mine texted me about this show and she thinks telepathy is real now. Exactly, it's very convincing.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you look at the comments, you'll see people saying, "This is revolutionary. This has moved me to tears. I'm a believer. My life has changed because of this podcast." And so, you know, I was very curious and so I listened to it. I listened to the whole thing. Wendy, I know that you haven't listened to it.

• 1:23Wendy Zukerman?

  No, that's right. We decided I wouldn't listen, so hopefully I can stand in for those of you who also haven't listened.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Okay, so let me tell you the premise. This show is about a very specific group of people. This is people with autism who are very limited in how they communicate and who require a lot of support.

• 1:42Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, right.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  And the show says that people in this group are able to communicate telepathically, with their family and with teachers and other people. And in fact, here is the show's tagline. They play this at the beginning of every episode.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms. And nobody has believed them, nobody has listened to them. But on this podcast, we do.

• 2:10Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, that's a podcast talk.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  It really is. So Kai Dickens, that's the host, that's who we just heard from. She is typically a documentary filmmaker, but she heard about this phenomenon and she wanted to study it, document it. And so she ends up visiting a lot of people who have had this experience with autistic people in their lives. Here she is again on the podcast.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  And what touched me the most is these parents were grappling with something that they believed to be absolutely impossible. But here they were. They were watching something unfold that had no rational explanation.

• 2:44Wendy Zukerman?

  And so, Rose, as you were listening to this podcast, what were you thinking?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Well, the stories were interesting and honestly, really intriguing. Obviously, there's been skeptics here saying that something else is going on to explain this.

• 3:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  So I wanted to find out what exactly was happening. And I got especially curious when I heard a scientist interviewed on the show say this.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Over the last 50 years, and there's been a huge amount of research on telepathy, published in peer-reviewed journals, which has proved to be repeatable and seems to me irrefutable in that it's showing that telepathy really happens. The problem is that the critics simply aren't interested in the evidence because their belief system is that this is impossible.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  And I was like, wait, what? 50 years of research in peer-reviewed journals, repeatable, irrefutable. I was like, I gotta look into that. Like, that's what I want to pull up, that 50 years of research in peer-reviewed journals.

• 3:52Wendy Zukerman?

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  And that's what I've been doing. So the last, you know, month or so, and it's, you know, it turns out scientists have been studying this for some time, and I learned a lot of really interesting stuff. Wendy, like, this has just been so fascinating to work on. It's been surprising. It's been infuriating. Sometimes it's fun. So there's like a lot to unpack here, and I'm just like excited to tell you about it.

• 4:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Great. It's all coming up after the break.

• 4:27Wendy Zukerman?

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• 6:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Rose is here to talk about telepathy, inspired by this hugely popular podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, which has really brought this topic back into the zeitgeist. So Rose, where do we begin?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  OK, so first, we're going to talk about some of the specific claims made in the show, The Telepathy Tapes. Then we're going to zoom out and talk about the body of research that scientists have done on telepathy.

• 7:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Great, let's do it.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  So the show is about people with autism who are nonverbal or who speak very little. And what you hear over and over again on this podcast is that their family can never speak to them or really communicate with them until they learn this method of communicating where the nonverbal person points at letters on a board or picks at keys on a keyboard. And essentially, they learn to painstakingly spell out words and communicate that way.

• 7:37Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And then, all of a sudden, this is where the telepathy comes in, they start spelling out things that they shouldn't know. So they'll like tell their parent, "Oh, I know that you went to Target today." But the parent's like, "I never told them that I was at Target today." Or they might say, "I know that you brought me cookies for a snack, but you left them in the car." And that person's like, "I never told you I was going to bring you cookies. I didn't tell you I left them in the car." How do they know these things? And they start thinking, "This person can read my mind."

• 8:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Huh.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  So if that was all the podcast offered, these like little anecdotes, or there could be a million little explanations, or coincidence, or luck, you know?

• 8:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  That wouldn't be that interesting.

• 8:21Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  But where it gets really interesting is that the host of the show doesn't just take people at their word for this. She goes and she specifically does tests to test that they are, in fact, telepathic.

• 8:34Wendy Zukerman?

  What kind of test?

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Well, so for example, in the first episode, she goes to visit a young woman from Mexico who is supposedly telepathic with her mom. And so like I described, this is a nonverbal autistic person who communicates by pointing at a board with letters and numbers on it.

• 8:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, right.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  And so this is the kind of test that Kai sets up. So she'll show something only to the mom, make sure the daughter can't see it. And then she asks-

• 8:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Like a cat, a picture of a cat.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, or like in this example, a picture of a pirate.

• 9:03Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  And, you know, the daughter can't see it. Sometimes she's blindfolded or they'll put a partition between the mom and the daughter. So the daughter can't see the picture. But then the mom says, OK, what am I looking at? Read my mind. What am I looking at? And we hear, and I'll play a little bit for you. The daughter, even though she can't see the picture, she starts pointing at letters. And she slowly spells out, remember, this is a picture of a pirate or pirata in Spanish. P. I. R. A. T. A.

• 9:40Speaker 05

  Pirata.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  She clearly types P I R A T A, which spells pirate in Spanish. I love this moment because the crowd just goes wild. At this point, everyone in the room had had their mind blown.

• 9:56Speaker 07

  I mean, I wouldn't do it as a skeptic. I'm generally a skeptic in my life.

• 10:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Who's this talking?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  This is the cameraman.

• 10:04Speaker 07

  Seeing this, I can't, it's hard for me to not believe this stuff, I think. I'm looking at everything. I'm watching her, I'm watching the mom, I'm watching, I'm watching everything. And for me and my perspective, it's real.

• 10:24Wendy Zukerman?

  Aha, that is impressive.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, hearing that cameraman's reaction is pretty compelling because you're like, wow, he was actually in the room and looking carefully, right? And he said it seemed real.

• 10:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  But the thing is, when autism experts hear about this, they immediately see a problem.

• 10:42Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  And it goes back to the, how people are communicating and the history of people trying to communicate with those who can't speak. I talked about this with Catherine Beals. She's an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. And I talked to her specifically about this case. So, so does this impress you?

• 11:02Speaker 08

  No, it's just, I find it extraordinary that anybody thinks it's a compelling instance of telepathy.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Well, she's kind of the perfect person to talk to about this.

• 11:10Speaker 08

  I started out as a linguist. That was my PhD. And then I had a child with autism. The particular situation I'm in is actually kind of the perfect storm.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  The perfect storm to see what's actually going on here. And Catherine says, we got to go back a few decades. Actually, the story starts in Australia, Wendy. You'll be happy to know.

• 11:32Wendy Zukerman?

  I feel right at home.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Someone there had invented a special way for people who can't speak to communicate. And in the 90s, this technique spread from Australia to the US. And it really took off here. It's a bit different from the way people are communicating in the telepathy tapes.

• 11:49Wendy Zukerman?

  With the letterboard.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  The letterboard. This is called facilitated communication. Here's how it works. The non-speaking person sits in front of, you know, some kind of keyboard.

• 11:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Next to them is a facilitator who gently holds their arm or their wrist and helps them select the letters on the keyboard that they want to select.

• 12:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm-hmm. So it's a bit faster than them having to do it all by themselves. Is that the idea?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Not exactly. For some of these folks, they actually need someone to help guide their hands to the letters to use the keyboard, or they don't do it at all.

• 12:21Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, OK.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  And so, once this method started being used more and more, these incredible things started happening.

• 12:28Speaker 08

  The claims were pretty extraordinary because these individuals who appeared to be completely nonverbal and maybe not attending to people speaking and language in general were suddenly able to produce grammatically well-formed sentences, perfectly spelled in many cases, and quite sophisticated in many cases. In some cases, poetry, sophisticated vocabulary. So it appeared to unlock what was, people were thinking was, an intact or fully-developed intellect in terms of having learned somehow to read, having mastered language, and so on.

• 13:11Wendy Zukerman?

  This idea that they can't speak beautifully, but locked inside their brain is this huge mastery over the English language that, until now, they were not able to express.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Sort of this idea.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this, as you can imagine, that's a huge breakthrough, right? And it got a lot of attention. It was all over the news. It was on TV. There was a primetime live episode. It eventually won an Emmy. Diane Sawyer reported on this as like this breakthrough. And you can hear how powerful this seemed.

• 13:51Speaker 09

  And now, a story about hope. For decades, autism has been a dark mystery, a disorder that seems to turn children in on themselves, against the world. Tonight, however, you are going to see something that has changed that. Call it a miracle, call it an awakening.

• 14:08Wendy Zukerman?

  I mean, so hopeful if you're a parent to be looking at your trials and thinking, wow, if there's so much in there, if only I could find a way to communicate.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, your child has never spoken to you, has never said, "I love you." And now there's this thing that says, there's a lot going on in their head and they can tell you about it.

• 14:26Wendy Zukerman?

  I do have to say, as hopeful as this is, I am getting a Ouija board vibe here.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a concern that people were actually, people from the beginning, some people did have that concern because you're holding someone's arm and potentially moving it for them, even if you don't think you are. So it could be that the facilitator is controlling what this person is typing.

• 14:51Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, not, not, not meaning to necessarily, just wanting to move through it faster. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. D O, you probably mean dog.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Exactly, that kind of thing. And there are always a little bit, there's always some skeptics out there. But for a while, because this is just so cool to people, they just kept chugging along. But then the cracks started to show in these very dramatic ways because in some cases, people were spelling out very disturbing messages. Some of their stories were told in a frontline documentary. It was called Prisoners of Silence. It came out in 1993. And here they are talking about a teenage girl with autism named Betsy.

• 15:32Speaker 10

  One day, using a letter board, Betsy and her facilitator wrote that everybody in her family, her father, mother, grandparents, and brother, were sexually abusing her.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Social services were called, Betsy was taken out of her home, put in foster care. An investigation was started. But the people working this case were like, mm, can we really trust these allegations? They came from this unusual technique. Someone else is holding Betsy's hand and helping her point out letters, type. So what they wanted to know was, who is writing the messages? Is it the autistic person or is it the facilitator? So they set up tests for Betsy. And Catherine described the kind of tests that they did.

• 16:15Speaker 08

  You might have a divider between the facilitator and the person they're facilitating. And the person they're facilitating sees a picture of a hat. And the facilitator sees a picture of a shoe.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  This is the telepathy type test. Kind of, with a key difference. They're showing two different pictures. They're showing one picture to the facilitator. So in this example, a picture of a shoe. And one picture to the person with autism. In this example, a hat.

• 16:39Speaker 08

  And then you ask the person with autism, what do you see here?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  What you would want them to write would be hat.

• 16:45Speaker 08

  Yes. And if they type shoe, then, then where did that come from?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Very fishy. That's because that's what the facilitator saw, not what they saw.

• 16:53Speaker 08

  Yes, yes.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Ah. In the telepathy tapes, the person with autism is being asked to spell out what someone else sees. And here, they're being asked to spell out what they themselves see. Hmm, right, right, right, right. The Frontline documentary is really useful because it actually shows what these tests were like. And they talk about what happened when they ran tests like this with Betsy.

• 17:17Speaker 10

  When Betsy was shown a picture of a dog, she didn't type dog, but sneakers. What the facilitator saw. When Betsy was shown a boat, she didn't type boat, but sandwich. What the facilitator saw.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  And that happened in every test they tried. Every single test. Of Betsy or in studies as well? In studies as well. Every single test? Yes, there was an autistic program in, in New York that had been using facilitated communication with 12 of their autistic students. Getting good results, they thought, but they said, oh, maybe we should test this, make sure. They tested each student in the same way. I asked Catherine what happened.

• 18:04Speaker 08

  And they didn't get a single correct response.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Not one?

• 18:09Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  And this has been repeated many times.

• 18:11Speaker 08

  There were a whole bunch of studies that came out in the 90s that, that just one after another, after another, were showing failure.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  How often do they find it was, in fact, the person with autism who was doing the communicating?

• 18:22Speaker 08

  In well-designed studies, not at all, never.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Never?

• 18:26Speaker 08

  Right.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Wow. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, so in the case with Betsy, the investigators concluded that the sex abuse allegations were totally unfounded. And so, do we know?

• 18:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Why the facilitator was doing that?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the Betsy case, we do know what's going on here because the facilitator like came out and talked about it, wrote a paper about it.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  And she explained that, you know, she'd had some doubts in the beginning, like, oh, am I really, am I moving Betsy's hand, or is it really Betsy? It's kind of hard to tell. But there was so much momentum and it was so exciting to think that she was making breakthroughs with her student that she kind of let herself believe in it.

• 19:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, OK, so it's almost like this subconscious response? The facilitators, I mean, if they're not actually doing it on purpose, I would have thought it was just really just trying to help, trying to communicate.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's usually what people think is going on. It's actually called the idiomotor effect, the Ouija board. You don't, everyone thinks they're not, well, I don't know, I would sometimes move the planchette on purpose, but many of us

• 19:33Speaker 01

  just think we're not moving it, but then it does move and especially it might move to a letter that makes a lot of sense after the previous letter. And how does that happen? There's also something called the Chevrel pendulum illusion, where you're, you think you're holding the pendulum steady in the air, but when you think about moving it to the right or to the left, or up or down, suddenly it starts moving that way. And you're like, I'm not even doing that. But it's just like the, your brain is sending these very tiny signals to your hand. And, and that is enough to make very small movements that can have very big consequences, you know?

• 20:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Aha, so can we go back to the telepathy tapes now?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, because just to be clear, these abuse allegations we're talking about, that's part of the frontline documentary, not the telepathy tapes.

• 20:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, yeah, OK, so then to go back to that pirata example, the pirate.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah, so that's the question, right? Is that what they're doing?

• 20:21Wendy Zukerman?

  What, did the kid have a facilitator on hand?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yes, in every, in all of these cases, the person with autism is speaking via facilitator. It varies in exactly what the facilitator is doing and how they're communicating, but there's always somebody else there that has to be there. It's not fully independent. And it's typically the parent who's the facilitator.

• 20:44Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:45Wendy Zukerman?

  So the?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  The one who's supposed mind is being read.

• 20:49Wendy Zukerman?

  The mom is looking at the pirate and also holding her kid's hand?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Well, yes and no.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  So what they're doing in the telepathy tapes is not technically facilitated communication in the classic sense, because they're not literally holding the person's hand and hovering it over a board. What they're typically doing in the telepathy tapes, they hold up a letter board, and then the person with autism points, and then they call out P-I-R. And in fact, the host of the podcast, she said, she just said at one point, like, oh, there was this controversy with facilitated communication, but this is different, this is different. And the big thing that they point out is, we're not really touching the kid in the same way that they were touching them before. This method is often called spelling to communicate, or just spelling.

• 21:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm. So what does Catherine say about that?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Well, she points out that, you know, it's problematic that the facilitator is also the transcriber of the message. Like, if you're holding a letter board, A, you can move it around slightly, and B, you can say, oh, you've selected the letter P. Oh, now you've selected the letter I. That gives you a lot of latitude in deciding where exactly the person's finger went.

• 22:06Speaker 08

  So they will decide when a letter was selected, and they'll decide in an ambiguous case which letter was selected.

• 22:14Wendy Zukerman?

  Because someone could be pointing in between the letters F and G.

• 22:18Speaker 08

  In between, and in some cases, believe it or not, nowhere near. And so there are videos where you can actually, the person is using a transparent letter board, so from watching from the other side, you can see letters sometimes being called out that we're not pointing to at all.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  And also, they are often touching. So like, there's a hand on the back, or in the case of the mom and the daughter from Mexico, the mom is often touching the daughter's forehead, or holding her chin.

• 22:45Wendy Zukerman?

  In the telepathy tapes, did you watch the videos?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  I did. So there are videos available for some of the tests. You have to pay a small fee and become a member, but it's on their website. And I did watch them. In fact, I watched some of them with Catherine. I didn't see any obvious examples where you see someone pointing at a T and the facilitator calls out P or something like that. But it's clear from these videos that typically the facilitator is really involved in one way or another. So we watched one where the daughter is sitting next to the mom, but they have a partition between them. The mom is shown a random number generator on someone's iPad and this random number 978 is generated. Here I'm watching it with Catherine. The mom sees that the number is 978.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  They take away the partition. She's kind of gently touching her on her forehead. Yeah, and here she's got the letter board up.

• 23:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, so what you could clearly see was that the mother was touching the girl, just not, didn't happen to be her finger, and that there were changes in how hard she was, in her pressure, the pressure that she was exerting on the daughter's temple and cheek. And so that might have been all that was needed to chew the girl about when to actually make a selection.

• 24:03Wendy Zukerman?

  And this, I mean, it doesn't need to be intentional, right? I mean, you could be doing this without even realizing it.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Easily. We know that's true. And actually, the fact that this could be subconscious really explains a lot, I think. If the person facilitating is spelling out their own thoughts but doesn't realize they're spelling out their own thoughts, that explains why they might genuinely think, oh, my God, this person is reading my mind.

• 24:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm, of course.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  But there was one case that didn't really make sense, and I couldn't figure out how it was possible. This is a young autistic man and his mom. He seems to be able to read his mother's thoughts by typing them out independently on a keyboard. So in this case, no one's holding up a letter board for him. Kai describes them as not touching. And I watched the videos online, and that's true. There's nobody, they aren't touching. So their telepathy really does look pretty convincing. So for this, I called up Jim Todd. He's a professor of psychology at Eastern Michigan University.

• 25:12Speaker 11

  And I teach conditioning and learning in general.

• 25:17Speaker 11

  The basics of behavior, the kind of basics of behavior that you kind of need to know to parse some of this stuff out.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Like with Catherine, I watched one of these videos with him. Can you see my screen?

• 25:28Speaker 11

  I can see your screen, yes.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  So in this video, the son is sitting next to the mom. And he has like an iPad sort of device that when he touches the letter, the device says the letter out loud in like this robot voice.

• 25:41Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  So in this test, the mom has shown an image. The son can't see it. It's a picture of a crocodile.

• 25:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  And the son is asked to spell out what his mom can see. And we can see him pick out letters on this device. And the computer starts spelling out, "crocodile."

• 25:56Wendy Zukerman?

  Ha, ha, ha, ha. G. I. Ha, ha, ha. L. E. Crocodile.

• 26:05Speaker 11

  Well, it's mom is moving her hand and her body in sequence with the letters. It's just signaling.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Do you want to see the tape, Wendy?

• 26:16Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, I want to watch it.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. So Kai shows the

• 26:22Speaker 01

  The mom.

• 26:23Wendy Zukerman?

  A picture of a crocodile.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Did you see it? Did you see what Jim is? What Jim saw?

• 26:30Wendy Zukerman?

  From the mom.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 26:32Wendy Zukerman?

  Just play it again.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Okay. And look at the mom, not the son.

• 26:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, she's moving her hand.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Every time he moves a

• 26:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  He selects a letter just before that she has moved.

• 26:43Wendy Zukerman?

  She's moving her hand and in a very deliberate way, whether she is conscious of that deliberateness. But it's just not, it's not if, yeah. Why, oh, yeah, for sure. Did you ask Kai why didn't she move them away from each other, knowing what she clearly knew about facilitated communication?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  I did reach out to Kai to ask specific questions like that.

• 27:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  But her team said that she was too busy working on season two of the celebrity tapes and making a documentary about it as well.

• 27:10Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  So she couldn't get back to us.

• 27:13Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow, that's very frustrating.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I also reached out to the mom in the crocodile video and I didn't hear back from her either.

• 27:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  So, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I will say, in the episode, they say a lot of stuff about how, oh, we can do this across the room. And then they start to do that, but then the son becomes uncomfortable and doesn't cooperate. And so they say, well, he needs to sit next to his mom for the emotional support.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  So stuff like that happens.

• 27:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm. I mean, what's

• 27:48Wendy Zukerman?

  What's sort of, I guess, interesting is there is some lovely communication happening between the parent and the child. It's not telepathy, but clearly they have learnt a language with each other that when the parent touches the kid or makes this signal with their hand, they point to a letter. I mean, they have a language together and that there is sort of something lovely about that, I guess.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can make that argument. I mean, in that video we just saw, it does seem like the young man is having a good time, like enjoying being with his mother. But I've seen plenty of other videos from other sources that showed this technique where it doesn't really go that way. And Catherine has too.

• 28:39Speaker 08

  A lot of the time, the child doesn't look like they really want to be doing this.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  You know, I have noticed that, but I don't really understand necessarily what I'm seeing. I don't know much about people with severe autism. So when you see someone like, like kind of trying to get away or calling out or saying, "I'm sad," there was a video of a girl who was doing this. She went, "I'm sad."

• 28:57Speaker 08

  I've seen it.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Is that what they're, like, that seems like she's saying she's sad and she doesn't want to be doing that.

• 29:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, it certainly does.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And in fact, a professional organization called the American Speech Language Hearing Association has explicitly said, "Don't use these methods of communicating, this facilitated communication, the newer ones that are sometimes called like spelling to communicate or rapid prompting method, don't use them."

• 29:21Wendy Zukerman?

  This stuff happening on the telepathy tapes.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yes. And one reason why is that they say, "These methods strip people of their human right to independent communication."

• 29:30Wendy Zukerman?

  So, does this put a cap on the telepathy tapes then?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. As far as the whole people with autism are telepathic thing, because, you know, the show goes on to say a lot of other stuff, extraordinary stuff. But all these extraordinary claims, they're all hinging on this supposition that the folks with autism can send messages to their parents or their teachers. But we know now that the way they are doing this is with these like letterboard methods or similar methods that are totally bunk. And we can't trust that it's the kid's message coming through. In fact, we shouldn't expect that to be the case based on all we know

• 30:16Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  about how unlikely this is to work.

• 30:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, it's like the, uh, the fruit, the podcast keeps creating more fruit, but the, the tree is rotten.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh. Well, I can't wait for season two then.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if I'll be listening.

• 30:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Correct.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  But, you know, this doesn't put a cap on our episode because there is a lot more to talk about. When it comes to the, the science of telepathy, um, there's a lot to tell you. I did promise you that, right?

• 30:47Wendy Zukerman?

  That's right. The, the, all of these repeatable studies over decades of research.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I looked into that. So after the break, I'm going to tell you about the pretty like bonkers way that scientists have tried to test for telepathy and the results that are actually quite surprising.

• 31:05Wendy Zukerman?

  Coming up.

• 31:15Wendy Zukerman?

  Today's Ask Wendy Anything, Ask Me Anything, is brought to you by Amazon. Whether it's delivering medication to your door with Amazon Pharmacy or 24/7 virtual care with Amazon One Medical. Thanks to Amazon, healthcare just got less painful. So for our little Ask Me Anything, senior producer Rose Rimmler has come to me with some listener questions that have been gathered through social media. Hey, Rose.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Hey, Wendy. Our first question comes from Kelsey on Instagram and she asks, how do you wade through all the misinformation and inaccurate information to get to the truth?

• 31:53Wendy Zukerman?

  Ooh, love this question because I feel like we do so much homework on this show that no one gets to see. So when someone asks this kind of question, I'm like, yes. For me, when I'm making an episode, my first step is to go online and try and understand what is the misinformation, or at least what people are saying about a particular topic. A diet, for example. You'll start to see, you know, people are saying that it makes them smarter and gives them all this energy and makes their body look a certain way. And so I'll start to turn that into scientific questions. Does this diet affect your brain? How does it affect your body? And then I'll just dive into the scientific research and start chatting to scientists.

• 32:36Wendy Zukerman?

  And I won't stop until I feel like the answers have really started to coalesce, where I feel like I've got the scientific consensus, or as close to it as possible, and now I can start to build an episode.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Sounds good. Someone named Nishala, also on Instagram, she asks, "Have you ever considered doing stand-up? There is talent here."

• 32:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, thank you. So I actually did stand up a couple of times.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 33:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, when I was doing a job I didn't really like, and I wanted to put some fire up my [BLEEP]. Yeah, just [BLEEP].

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Here is why I do not do stand-up comedy anymore. Because, Rose, would you like to hear the one joke that I remember?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  From your routine?

• 33:27Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yes, I do.

• 33:29Wendy Zukerman?

  Was something like this, was something like this. Okay, so, um...

• 33:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Tuna are so amazing. Aren't they these amazing creatures? They're just so majestic in the ocean, just so beautiful. And it's amazing that evolution created this creature that swims in a little capsule with lemon and pepper all in there. So it's so convenient that we could just eat it all out.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  That's five out of 10, I'd say, maybe.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  We'll let Nishala be the judge of that one.

• 34:11Wendy Zukerman?

  All right, let me know. Did I make the right call sticking with science journalism? Thanks, Rose.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Thanks, Wendy.

• 34:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Today's Ask Wendy Me Anything was brought to you by Amazon. Thanks to Amazon, healthcare just got less painful.

• 34:30Speaker 12

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• 36:34Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Rose just told us why we really can't believe the telepathy you might hear about on the telepathy tapes. But now we're gonna broaden out to the land of how science has tested telepathy, Rose?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I talked about this with emeritus professor of psychology, Chris French. Until recently, he was the head of the Anomalousity Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London.

• 37:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Anomalousity psychology means stuff outside the norm, maybe even the paranormal.

• 37:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, right, right.

• 37:12Speaker 17

  I accept that there are some really interesting and challenging ideas out there for skeptics. I mean, some of the evidence isn't easy to dismiss. And certainly, when you get skeptics who say there is no evidence for the existence of telepathy or precognition and so on, that's just nonsense.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Chris has spent much of his career looking at paranormal stuff in a rigorous way. So he tries to figure out if it's real or if there's a more mundane explanation. So you're a professional party pooper?

• 37:47Speaker 17

  I am indeed, yeah. I don't get invited to, well, I don't get invited to parties at all because of my overwhelmingly negative personality.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Okay, so one common way to test for telepathy involves something called the Gansfeldt Protocol.

• 38:02Speaker 17

  It's based on the idea that if there is such a thing as telepathy, it may well be that it's a very, very faint signal in comparison to all the background noise.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  So the Gansfeldt Protocol, and by the way, Gansfeldt is German for whole field.

• 38:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  So the experimenters set someone up in a very controlled, very subdued environment so that the telepathic signal has as much of a chance as possible to come through.

• 38:26Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  So the people in the experiment will wear headphones with white or pink noise playing. They make sure there's nothing for them to see by putting on these goggles on their eyes. They look like...

• 38:39Speaker 17

  Half ping pong balls, one over each eye. And you, obviously, light could still get in there through the gaps. So you use cotton wool just to plug that up. And then you tape over the eyes. And then you have a red light bulb. So if they open their eyes, all they'll see is red. So it's not that, you've got no sensory input, but you've just got a uniform sensory input. And it basically, it's a very, very nice, comfortable, relaxing situation to be in. And people typically report that after a while, they relax and their head begins to fill with imagery, you know?

• 39:14Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm, mhm. And at this point, someone sends... An image of a pirate crocodile.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So someone's in another room.

• 39:25Wendy Zukerman?

  In another room.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  In another room, and they're looking at an image or maybe a video clip. And they're really focusing on it, and they're really trying to send it to the other person.

• 39:37Speaker 17

  And the sender would try to concentrate on that target image and send the information to the receiver.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Just by thinking about it really hard.

• 39:45Speaker 17

  Just by thinking about it real hard, exactly.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  So then, after some time, the person takes off their silly ping pong goggles, comes out of the room. They're shown four images or four video clips. And they say, which is the one that was being beamed to you? So they pick one. And so if you were just picking by chance, you would get this right 25% of the time.

• 40:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  But lots of these studies find that people pick the right image or the right video clip more than 25% of the time.

• 40:10Wendy Zukerman?

  How much more?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  32% of the time.

• 40:16Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  That number comes from a meta-analysis that came out just last year. They looked at over 100 experiments done in the Gansfeldt condition over the last 50 years.

• 40:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  It includes some studies on clairvoyance and other psychic phenomena tested using the Gansfeldt Protocol, but it's mostly tests of telepathy. And the authors concluded that there was a small but statistically significant effect here.

• 40:42Wendy Zukerman?

  That is intriguing.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  That's not all. You can find something similar with other tests that have been done, like these telephone telepathy tests. You tell people that they're going to get a phone call from one of four specific people, and they have to guess as the phone is ringing, which of these four people is the one calling them. By chance, they should get the right person 25% of the time. A lot of studies find they get it right more often than that, 30 or 40% of the time.

• 41:08Wendy Zukerman?

  So what do you, what does, what does Chris make of this?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Well, so this meta-analysis, this Gansfeldt one, it made a big splash among the telepathy crowd.

• 41:20Wendy Zukerman?

  No doubt.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  It was definitely referenced on the Telepathy Tapes podcast. And so I asked Chris about it. Did it rock your world?

• 41:26Speaker 17

  No, because I've had my fingers burnt with meta-analyses before. I mean, meta-analysis, I think is, you know, is a very useful tool, and I think we should take this latest meta-analysis seriously. But whether or, whether I'm going to say, yes, okay, I'm convinced now, I'm going to hold back a little bit because there have been so many twists and turns in this tale.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. This isn't Chris's first radio, and it's not his first Gansfeldt meta-analysis claiming a 30% hit rate.

• 41:53Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  He said that there was actually something very similar back in the 90s. He was younger, more naive then, right?

• 42:01Speaker 17

  And I read that and thought, oh my God, wow, this really looks like very powerful evidence.

• 42:06Wendy Zukerman?

  So what are these analyses doing wrong?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Well, there's a few funny things that are going on here. So we know that in studies about paranormal stuff, if the test is done by a believer, they tend to find an effect. While if it's done by a skeptic, they tend not to find an effect. Like, imagine that you're more of a skeptic, like Chris, and you run one of these telepathy experiments, and you find that people guess right 25% of the time. As a skeptic, when you get a result like that, you might say... Oh, OK, all right. No effect here. Done, right? If you're a believer, you might look at that and say, "Mm, I'm gonna go look through the data again." I would have expected something else to happen. So I'm gonna go and I'm gonna look through the raw data. Maybe I'll get rid of some outliers.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Maybe I'll find a piece of the data and I'll just look at this subgroup.

• 42:55Wendy Zukerman?

  Bob wasn't really concentrating during the experiment.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna throw out his data.

• 42:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  And vice versa. You know, if you're a skeptic and you get a result that says telepathy is real, you might start combing through that data very carefully, you know?

• 43:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, yep.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  So to avoid this, there has been a movement, and this is especially true in psychology research, to preregister your study. So you basically publish a protocol ahead of time, saying, "This is how I'm gonna do the study. This is how I'm gonna analyze my data." And then that can't happen, right? This like tweaking and nudging after the fact.

• 43:32Wendy Zukerman?

  Well, less so.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Less so.

• 43:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  And when you look at that meta-analysis, they're not looking specifically at studies that were preregistered. So it's really hard to know if we can trust them.

• 43:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, no. This makes me so sad. I'm like, scientists, do your job properly.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  I know. Well, funny you should mention that because not long ago, there was a very concerted effort to do a proper study on psychic phenomena.

• 43:59Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  So specifically, they were trying to replicate a study from 2011 on precognition. So like predicting the future, basically?

• 44:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  The way this study worked, they had a computer program they were showing to people with a picture of two curtains. And they asked people, "Of these two curtains, which one has an erotic image hiding behind it?"

• 44:24Speaker 01

  So the people would guess, and then, only then, would the computer program assign the erotic image randomly to one or the other slot.

• 44:32Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, so this was... You would try to, oh, predict what the computer would do. And unknown, and unknown, basically.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:41Wendy Zukerman?

  OK, wow.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  In the original study, people got this right more than 50% of the time.

• 44:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Which the author suggested could mean they were actually predicting the future.

• 44:54Wendy Zukerman?

  Sure, okay.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  There was a lot of attention on this study at the time.

• 44:58Wendy Zukerman?

  No doubt.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and skeptics said, you know.

• 45:02Wendy Zukerman?

  Can I just ask, if you got it right, did the curtains open and then you got to see the willy?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  I believe so, yes. Or what I, or they actually controlled for people's sexual preferences. So if you wanted to see a willy, you might get to see a willy. If you wanted to see a booby, you might get to see a booby.

• 45:22Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, so they replicate the study?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so because a lot of skeptics said like, ah, we don't like this part of your methodology, or this thing you did about your stats. What basically happened is that the skeptics and the believers got together, designed a new research protocol, designed a new study they both agreed on. They pre-registered it. They said, this is the protocol we're gonna use.

• 45:42Wendy Zukerman?

  Great.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  This is, and this is how we're gonna do it, and how we're gonna analyze it.

• 45:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  It took five years, it took 10 labs participating, 30-ish authors. Skeptics and believers working together to look to see, is there an effect here?

• 45:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow, a new future is possible. And what did they find?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  When all this was said and done.

• 46:06Speaker 17

  It produced absolutely no effects whatsoever to support the existence of precognition.

• 46:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, that's the suggestion being if we were to rigorously test telepathy, putting the skeptics and believers all together, perhaps we would see the same effect, but I guess we don't.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  We don't have the same exact thing for telepathy, but a lot of the issues that this precognition study were confronting are very similar to issues that people have with telepathy research. So, I don't know, I think it's pretty damning to telepathy as well, but would love to see a similar group effort.

• 46:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Doing one of these, some of these studies.

• 46:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Can I ask, what is the mechanism, the purported mechanism of telepathy? Like, how?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that.

• 46:53Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, are they reaching for quantum physics here?

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yes, they are. Quantum entanglement specifically, which is about like this weird connection between subatomic particles where they seem to influence each other. And it doesn't matter how far apart they are.

• 47:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  And I did, actually, I did talk to a physicist who I was referred to by someone who's who's sort of telepathy friendly as a physicist who's also telepathy friendly. He's open minded about it. And I asked him, does quantum entanglement, could that explain how telepathy works? And he said, no. And I said, do we have any known physical explanation for how telepathy could work? And he said, no. And he's like, look, maybe it happens, but if it's happening, it's happening outside of physics as we understand it. And I'm open to that. I'm, well, that's what I'm open to. Like, there's stuff about the spirituality we don't understand.

• 47:44Wendy Zukerman?

  So where does this leave you, Rose?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  All right. So especially considering that there's no known mechanism that this could work. Looking at the research, the Gansfeld, the telephone telepathy stuff, you've got to believe one of two things. One is that the telepathy vibes are there, they're just very weak and very fickle. Or you can believe that there are no vibes. What do you think, Wendy? Weak, fickle vibes or no vibes?

• 48:18Wendy Zukerman?

  I mean, I think that the vibes, when people say they're experiencing something like telepathy, are like intuition and other human vibes that are not paranormal, is what I would, whether it is a parent who loves their child, their nonverbal child so much, and there is some communication there and there's something nice being shared, it's just not paranormal. And when two friends, you know, one calls the other and one says, oh, my God, I knew you were gonna call, they probably haven't spoken in a long time and they love each other and there's some intuition there, which is beautiful.

• 49:03Wendy Zukerman?

  And we don't need to reach for... The we don't need to reach for quantum physics or telepathy. We could just reach for our common humanity to explain this.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, which I think we underestimate when we come up with a paranormal explanation. The human mind, the human body, common shared humanity, you know, whatever that is. Like, that is impressive enough to produce a lot of these incredible things that happen between people. And that's good enough for me personally.

• 49:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Do you want to try, all right, we've been working together for a long time. Do you want to try send me, think of an image, think of an image.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  OK, I'm looking, how about this, I'll look at a painting on my wall.

• 49:47Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  I'm looking at it really hard. Wendy, I want to send this image to Wendy.

• 49:52Wendy Zukerman?

  OK, OK, so the first thing going through my head is what image would Rose have on her wall? But that's not, because then I'm immediately thinking, da, OK, OK. Jellyfish, bird, um, OK, but, all right, what image is, all right, I'm going to close my eyes. I don't have ping pong balls, but I close my eyes. OK, what? Are you thinking about it really hard? I don't think you're thinking about it hard enough, Rose. You're thinking about other things.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  I'm furrowing my brow.

• 50:18Wendy Zukerman?

  OK, is it, um, is it an ocean view? Um, no, no, no, no, a cat, a cat.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  No, but you know what's so funny?

• 50:26Wendy Zukerman?

  It's an ocean?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  No, you mentioned a jellyfish, you mentioned a cat. I do have pictures of both those things in my apartment. I just am not having, that's not the one I'm looking at. I'm looking at a, a, a painting of flowers, poppies.

• 50:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  The cat picture's right here. So if I'd happened to look this way, you would have gotten it right. And we would have been like, well, holy [BLEEP].

• 50:49Wendy Zukerman?

  All right. How many citations in this week's episode?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Uh, this week we have 51 citations.

• 50:53Wendy Zukerman?

  51, and if people want to see them in all of their glory, read more about telepathy. Where should they go?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  They can click on the link to our transcript. That's where all the citations are, and that link is in the show notes.

• 51:05Wendy Zukerman?

  Excellent, and if anyone wants to send us any curtains and let us try and guess what kind of erotic image is behind them.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Did you just ask people to send us dirty pictures?

• 51:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Curtains, Rose. I've asked them to send us pictures of curtains. Pictures of curtains, alright. Find us on Instagram at science underscore VS.

• 51:32Wendy Zukerman?

  You can say hello to me on TikTok. I'm at Wendy Zukerman. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy.

• 51:44Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from me, Wendy Zukerman, along with Akedi Foster Keys, Merrill Horn and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munga, So Wiley, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Zolton Keketj, Professor Stefan Schmidt and Janice Boynton. Special thanks to Enrique Perez, Isabel Lura, Lindsay Chana, Lily Kim and Lauren Silverman. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. But if you are listening on Spotify, you can follow us and tap the bell icon

• 52:29Wendy Zukerman?

  so you get episode notifications when new episodes come out. And if you like what you're listening to, please give us a five star review because it helps people find the show, which is awesome. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.

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