The Telepathy Tapes and the Trap of Certainty: A Case for Wonder and Not Knowing
…A response to Jonathan Jarry’s: “The Telepathy Tapes Prove We All Want to Believe”
Buckle up, this is a long one. A few weeks ago, I recommended The Telepathy Tapes to my social network—a captivating podcast exploring the extraordinary experiences of non-speaking individuals with autism who seem to possess remarkable abilities, including telepathy. I wrote:
It’s a stunning, beautiful, and compelling entry into these topics…It tells the story of non-speaking people with autism who have extraordinary skills - telepathy, precognition, and other abilities that defy conventional notions of time and space. It is about how the traditionally reputable science that was done on this phenomenon was completely disregarded and marginalized. It is about how we preferred to relegate these people into boxes of non-functional outcasts rather than opening doors to other ways of knowing. It is about consciousness, quantum physics, neuroscience, and expanding how we might comprehend reality. And ultimately, it is about love and how we might be better people for having wondered a little more, known a little bit less, and perhaps as a result, experienced connection across time and space in profoundly different ways.
A few weeks later, a friend sent me this article from Jonathan Jarry, a “science communicator with the McGill Office for Science and Society, dedicated to separating sense from nonsense on the scientific stage.” Reading it, you quickly know where his article is going: an indignant takedown of the podcast, relegating it – and its gullible listeners – to the category of “pseudoscience.”
Note: Yesterday, Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell and Dr. Bryan J. Williams published a critique addressing similar themes. Their work provides a complementary perspective to the ideas explored here, and I highly recommend reading it alongside this piece.
I strive to be a bridge builder, swimming across the sciences, humanities, and public sphere. I dream of expanding our understanding of what we know and how we know it, and in turn, unleashing creative potential and compassion in the world. To be able to do this, though, I need to reckon with critiques, hold them lightly, listen deeply, and evolve in appreciation of their provocation. As a personal exercise, I decided to approach Jarry’s critiques of this podcast with mindful intent—not as a rebuttal or a takedown of a takedown, but as an opportunity for deep listening and genuine curiosity. My hope through this exercise is to contextualize each critique within a larger context—how we navigate knowledge and the unknown, and how the grip of belief's certainty constrains our ability to transform and connect.
The Critique
If I were to sum up Jarry’s critiques, they would be as follows:
The narrator and accompanying scientist lack credibility.
The podcast’s insights, based on a specific methodology for communicating with non-speaking and partially-speaking individuals with autism, lack empirical validation.
The slippery and contextual nature of telepathy discredits its possibility.
These questions fit into a longstanding history of parapsychology’s quackery.
Let me try to engage these one-by-one.
CREDIBILITY OF NARRATOR
Critique #1: Ky Dickens is a biased narrator, her beliefs fueled by her personal history.
Critique #2: Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell is a quack, exemplified through her license suspension.
If we excluded scientists and academics with personal motivations, history would lose countless innovators; Einstein, Curie, Frankl, and the Clarks all drew from personal stakes to drive progress. Is it possible—or even desirable—to achieve such a gold-standard objectivity? Dickens openly shares her motivations. Does this transparency make her less credible? In my view, it does the opposite.
The delicate balance here lies in how we understand belief and what we do with that understanding. For Jarry, it seems that belief precedes perception—if we want to believe something, we will see it. From this perspective, such preordained "sight" is suspect and should be discounted. I partially agree. Beliefs do shape us. They allow placebos to work. They frame the architecture of our lives. But does that inclination reduce belief to discardable fantasy? If belief shapes our reality, both in the extraordinary and the mundane, does it invalidate the experiences presented in this podcast? For me, it does not. Does it influence the experience and how it’s interpreted? Absolutely.
To discredit Dr. Powell, Jarry points to a suspension related to her clinical practices, while Dickens attributes the suspension to her subversive work. Regardless of the suspension's legitimacy (see more details about this in their rebuttal), conflating Dr. Powell’s research with her clinical practice is misleading. Beyond Dr. Powell’s legal case, Dickens underscores a broader, well-documented issue: scientists investigating extraordinary phenomena frequently encounter stigma, rejection, and career risks, which stifle boundary-pushing research.
METHODOLOGICAL RIGOR
Critique #3: Spelling to Communicate and Rapid Prompting Method are discredited communication techniques.
Critique #4: It is easy to influence the people in these studies, for example, by subconsciously or consciously cueing the child.
While this is not my area of expertise, my preliminary research into scholarly journals discussing these communication methods demonstrates that while there is anecdotal evidence supporting their use, robust empirical validation is lacking. However, much like other extraordinary phenomena that do not fit into conventional paradigms, these accounts warrant nuanced and thoughtful investigation rather than outright dismissal.
Jarry’s cherry-picking of the potential flaws of Dickens’ tests gives short shrift to the care taken by Dickens and crew—who are cognizant of the critiques of facilitated communication—to avoid influence by parents and caregivers. I would encourage you to listen to/watch the Telepathy Tapes’ material to reach your own conclusions. From my perspective, even if there’s a chance that a few subconscious signals may have inadvertently influenced the carefully designed tests, it feels disingenuous to overlook the vast range of experiences shared by the individuals, parents, educators, and others—especially when Dickens is so transparent and thorough in addressing such criticisms. One can continue to refine and strengthen the rigor of research and its presentation without a blanket dismissal of all claims.
CONTEXTUALITY
Critique #5: Scientific tests have yet to reliably replicate telepathy.
Critique #6: The context-dependence of telepathy—evident in Mia’s experiences with select individuals—and its sensitivity to factors such as anxiety, negativity, and crowds, undermines its credibility.
At the heart of this critique lies the argument that telepathy doesn’t exist, with its contextual nature offered as evidence against it. To address this, we must explore both general studies on telepathy and research focused on telepathy between closely connected individuals.
Telepathy has been the subject of extremely rigorous studies, most notably using a sensory-deprivation approach called a ganzfeld experiment. Ganzfeld experiments have been repeated by dozens of researchers over the past four decades and stand out as a class of studies that surpass the six-sigma threshold. This means that, after analyzing all known experiments on the topic, the overall odds of the results occurring by chance are calculated to exceed a billion to one (see Dean Radin’s work for more on this).
While individuals like Mia can only communicate with certain people, this does not necessarily invalidate the phenomenon. Neuroscientific findings on close relationships, which show shared neural patterns during experiences of empathy, and the concept of inter-brain neural synchrony—where meaningful social interactions align individuals' brain activities—may provide a starting point for exploring such phenomena. That said, the specific research on telepathy within genetically or closely connected people have yielded mixed or inconclusive results (see here and here for examples). I’m not sure why context raises such red flags for Jarry. Context matters in most everything I know. Why would telepathy be different?
PSI’S HISTORY OF QUACKERY
Critique #7: The study of psi is rife with pseudoscience.
The focus of Jarry’s argument is that parapsychology has long been plagued by a disproportionate amount of pseudoscience. While quackery exists in many fields—such as those highlighted in parapsychology or, more recently, in business academic research fraud—the question remains: are we more attuned to potential quackery in parapsychology because its claims challenge our deeply ingrained assumptions about the Western worldview?
It is important to look at the data itself. Dr. Etzel Cardeña provides one of the most comprehensive reviews of experimental evidence and theories surrounding psi phenomena, presenting a rigorously compelling and scientifically sound case for their existence. Similarly, in his book Real Magic, Dean Radin provides robust evidence from thousands of experiments conducted using traditional scientific methods, demonstrating that six categories of psi phenomena—including telepathy and implicit precognition—consistently surpass the six-sigma threshold of statistical significance, a benchmark typically associated with groundbreaking scientific discoveries. In my examination of these studies, I find it increasingly difficult to ignore the persuasive nature of the data.
Because these claims chafe against norms, they require extraordinarily rigorous methodologies. Over time, parapsychology has enhanced its statistical methodologies to address skepticism from materialist science and to detect subtle effects. When studying more decisively recognized phenomena, minor statistical errors may not significantly impact results. However, in parapsychology, where effect sizes are typically small, even minor errors can be consequential. This heightened sensitivity to statistical precision means that parapsychology is held to a higher scientific standard. It is worthwhile to highlight here this recent study out of the University of Virginia, demonstrating that despite their high belief in psi phenomena, psi researchers demonstrate a commitment to sound reasoning about evidence that is no different from that of skeptics.
Jarry’s claims also overlook the significant backlash that researchers face in this field. He fails to address the career risks, lack of funding, or personal and professional costs that come with studying these phenomena. He also disregards the mainstream censure of such ideas, exemplified by the controversial banning of Rupert Sheldrake’s TED Talk on morphic resonance—one of the few videos removed from the platform. These omissions are crucial, as they ignore the broader challenges faced by those who challenge conventional scientific boundaries, underscoring why this conversation matters: such obstacles not only hinder progress but also stifle open exploration of ideas that could potentially expand our understanding of the world.
So What?
Jarry’s tone is one of refutation, presenting himself as the brave maverick he criticizes, claiming to have lifted the wool from our gullible eyes. According to him, our beliefs are driven by what we want to believe, making us vulnerable to deception. He deconstructs the podcast into its individual fragments, constructing a cohesive argument atop each tenuous detail.
But what if there’s something more at play here? Why does this podcast strike a deeper chord within us? What if it’s tapping into something dormant, stirring a long-forgotten part of ourselves and the collective?
Whether or not we can prove these phenomena through current scientific methods, people are having extraordinary experiences. Not just those on the fringes, but individuals everywhere—including Nobel Prize winners, scientists, and public intellectuals. While we have yet to develop the science to consistently validate these experiences, the question remains: what do we do with them? We can dismiss the experiences outright, assuming that everyone involved is either lying or mentally unwell. Or we can expand our thinking and ask, "What if?" Doesn’t science progress by taking seriously and grappling with data that does not accord with its theories of today?
I do this work because I believe we’ve lost touch with a deeper, more expansive connection that links us to each other and to something beyond. That’s my bias. I sense that by broadening my experience of knowing and being through both science and experiential practice, I can move closer to that connection. In science, I dissect the parts, knowing that I will never uncover the whole. Jarry writes that when we approach surprising events with the belief that some things cannot be explained by science, we hinder our progress in understanding the world. My approach differs: science may yield only partial answers, yet it is worth exploring—worth the pursuit, even if it brings us just a little closer.
For me, so much of this work lies in intent. My intent is to expand, to embrace complexity, and to cultivate a balance of humility, wonder, and rigor. Engaging with Jarry’s critique revives this intent, offering reminders of why and how to thoughtfully grapple with ideas I find implicitly challenging:
Hold the storytellers gently, explore how our beliefs weave the fabric of perception, and intentionally balance our certainties on precarious ledges of instability.
Where there are anecdotes but not empirical validity, explore in new ways, with more creativity. Let’s not discount people’s experiences because we have not yet found the tools to validate them.
Not knowing can open the door to exploration, inviting us into a collective wonder rather than division, one that welcomes contradiction, complexity, and compassion.
