The Telepathy Tapes

I must be hanging with the wrong people. I seem to be the last to know when a podcast goes viral on the internet. What happened to the days when everyone watched All in the Family at the same time? Are we supposed to pick up programs by telepathy? Speaking of, have you heard of The Telepathy Tapes? It won a 2025 Webby Award for best Indie (Independent) Podcast, drawing a bigger listening audience in late 2024 than The Joe Rogan Experience. 

In Season One, documentarian Ky Dickens follows the families of non-verbal autistic children who believe they can read minds. But that’s just for starters. Some even are said to get together in a metaphysical chat room called The Hill and commune with each other. Given the nature of the subject, Dickens’ father worried she was throwing her hard-earned credibility away.

Dickens’ 2023 documentary Show Her the Money examined how women have been cut out of the venture capital world, earning five Best Documentary awards at various film festivals. In 2017, her film Zero Weeks on the family-leave issue was presented at the White House by Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama during the Obama administration.

Dickens says she has been advocating on behalf of kids with special needs since her high school days. She followed her heart on this one. But unlike her previous subjects, the funding for this documentary wasn’t materializing. There was no category for a topic such as The Telepathy Tapes. Just as she was about to give up, an idea popped into her head. Why not try a podcast? 

The series opens with Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a Johns Hopkins-trained neuroscientist and former faculty member at Harvard, now in private practice. Powell started off studying savant syndrome in which people with significant mental challenges also have extraordinary knowledge or talents, ranging from concert piano playing to producing complex mathematical formulas. But Powell also came across some parents who reported they couldn’t hide birthday presents or candy in their homes without the telepathic knowledge of their non-verbal children. 

Critics claim The Telepathy Tapes are based on pseudoscience. The main criticism is focused on the method used in the series to communicate with the autistic non-verbal subjects. The technique is called Rapid Prompting Method (RPM or, in short, spelling. The child points to letters on a board, often held by a facilitator. Those who are able, type on a keyboard. The American Speech-Language and Hearing Association has published its long-held position that this is not a scientifically valid method of communication. It is closely related to the discredited technique called facilitated communication.    

Autistic children who can’t speak are typically diagnosed with dyspraxia in which there is some kind of disconnect between their brains and their body, often leaving kids with a sense of being trapped in their body. Because of their limited motor ability, studies have suggested parents or facilitators are unconsciously prompting the subject, calling it the Ouija board effect. 

Dickens challenges this claim through repeated testing, lived experiences, and storytelling of the families she has come to know. On the podcast, one mother says her non-verbal child was able to describe her errands in detail, while he was at school. We hear a description of a blind child who can read an eye chart by reading his mother’s mind, as long as she is looking at the eye chart. 

Even the skeptical podcast crew was baffled when kids being tested got onto their password-protected cell phones. As the series progresses, individual personalities emerge in their late teens and early 20s. A young man from Atlanta named Houston, along with friends John Paul and Lilly, were brought together through their mothers. The mothers all seem to agree that they meet up in a kind of telepathic chat box called The Hill. 

Dickens claims The Hill comes up among non-verbal autistic children worldwide. Sometimes it goes by different names, but the descriptions are similar. They share information and comfort one another in a metaphysical space. Houston reports that if you lie, you lose access. 

John Paul’s family knows he’s in the chat room when he is sitting on his bed with as many as five pillows over his head. John Paul says it’s like the root systems of trees that communicate underground. We learn that John Paul calls Lilly the love of his life. There is a cute intimacy between them, more telepathic than physical due to the dyspraxia. Dickens describes Lilly as a pretty blond with a bit of a punk rocker vibe who knows how to read a room. Lilly calls us verbal types the voice users. But at times, more sarcastically, The Muggles. In the Harry Potter universe, Muggles are people with no magical ability, unaware of the hidden wizarding world.

Dickens says one non-verbal kid wondered why all the testing was needed. Can you test love? he asked. This prompted the question, what is love? His answer: anything that unifies. 

Season Two of The Telepathy Tapes broadens the topic range from near-death experiences to how the human creative process works. The film documentary version of The Telepathy Tapes is expected to be released this spring. See thetelepathytapes.com for release dates and viewing information and to listen to the podcast for yourself. To read more about critiques of the series, see an article published in The Guardian in April 2025 (‘It can break you’: life for parents of autistic children can be exhausting. One podcast is offering hope. Is it real?).