The Problem With the ‘Magical Children’ of the Telepathy Tapes

Ironically, for a podcast that seems designed to taunt all that is empirically provable, the numbers are the most impressive thing about the Telepathy Tapes. The series began 2025 at the summit of podcast charts in both the US and UK, and has remained firmly in the top 10 on both Spotify and Apple. While exact listener numbers aren’t disclosed by platforms, it seems safe to say that by now millions of people have heard the show’s breathless revelations about the supposed psychic powers of non-verbal children with severe autism. Is the podcast’s success the result of some rare production alchemy or some shift in the public mood? For Rupert Sheldrake, the show’s in-house author and parapsychological researcher, the popularity reflects “a widespread pent-up interest in telepathy because so many people have experienced it themselves, and observed it in dogs and cats, although in milder forms than in these telepathic superstars.”

The “superstars” Sheldrake speaks of are a cast of young adults and children whose stories are told as the podcast unfurls. One of them is Houston, who somehow appears capable of identifying numbers being held up on a series of Uno cards behind his head, a skill he uses to point out their equivalents on a board in front of him. Similarly, Akhil, a young man from New Jersey, is able to identify images on cards that aren’t visible to him, typing his answers on an iPad. Meanwhile, Mia spells out the word “pirate” after her mother looks at a picture of one in a book. In short, they seem able to perceive things they haven’t seen with their own eyes—which leads host Ky Dickens to assert that they are effectively able to read people’s minds.

Telepathy is just one of many dubious premises that the show explores, as Dickens—and several ‘expert’ contributors—take listeners on a rollercoaster ride that really does run the gamut, from communication with spirits of the dead, to astral travel and psychic viewing. The podcast, as well as the raw footage uploaded to its website, certainly makes for compelling consumption; despite the lack of scientific evidence for most of its claims, it has tapped into a post-COVID zeitgeist. Author and philosopher Jules Evans says that the Overton window—a term used to describe the range of subjects deemed acceptable for mainstream debate—has been blown wide open by social upheaval caused by the pandemic. “We’re less sure of what’s true and more open to fringe or deviant theories,” he says. “In this case, unfortunately, I think this will go the way of Uri Geller and other New Age ‘miracles,’ which people heralded as portents of a global spiritual awakening but turned out to be strictly a media phenomenon.”

The notion of a global spiritual awakening is something espoused by Dickens herself, who, during the show, claims: “If I had a million dollars, I’d want to open a healing and education centre where nonspeakers could work with the best minds in science and math and, you know, healthcare, so they could heal the planet and people and relationships and animals.” In an interview with Joe Rogan, Dickens was even asked whether the United States military (no stranger to experiments with telepathy) might enlist autistic children for its own gain, now that—as per the show’s claims—the news of their extrasensorial abilities is out there. “It’s a fair worry,” said Dickens. “But I will say, every non-speaking individual with these gifts that I’ve ever met won’t use it for bad or nefarious means. They’re interested in love, in connection.” But, Rogan countered, what if the children were deployed without knowing what they were doing? “They would know,” replied Dickens, happy enough to speak on their behalf. “They can read your thoughts and they know what’s up more than anyone, I think.”

“From being considered disabled, their child was suddenly humanity’s savior. Wouldn’t you want to believe that as well?”

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that the Telepathy Tapes has encountered criticism. Stuart Vyse, a psychologist and contributing editor to Skeptical Inquirer magazine, says that the podcast’s creators have “capitalized on stories of miraculous recovery from disability, stories so hopeful and heartwarming that many are reluctant to challenge them.” As much as one may want to believe that people with severe forms of autism are able to outclass their neurotypical counterparts with mysterious supernatural skills, Vyse tells VICE, “we cannot simply believe something because we want it to be true.” 

Everything in the podcast, Vyse adds, can be understood within the context of the scientifically discredited technique of facilitated communication, by which someone is required to help a disabled person type on a keyboard or other device through various unlikely means. “The evidence suggests that the words are coming from the helper, not the non-speaking person, and that the influence of the helper is unconscious in a Ouija-like phenomenon,” he writes on the magazine’s website. “Nonetheless, the non-speaking person is being manipulated by the communication partner.”

Science writer Daniel Engber, who has studied facilitated communication, comes to a similar conclusion. “It seems like the most urgent need I can possibly imagine is to find a way to communicate with your child,” he told the Atlantic’s podcast. While it “looks like telepathy,” Engber highlights how Akhil’s mother Manisha is very involved in the process. “She’s making sounds,” he says, “she’s moving.” All of this activity adds up to an “unconscious influence over the creation of the messages.”

This effectively leaves listeners confronted with the choice between two tantalizing, yet unlikely possibilities, he says: “Two extraordinary skills, one far more extraordinary than the other.” Either telepathy is real, or children with autism have an advanced ability to pick up on non-verbal cues from their parents and guess what they’re thinking. “Humans really do possess a superpower for connection, with unpredictable effects,” Engber writes in a separate piece for the Atlantic, alluding to what has been described elsewhere as ventriloquizing. “This is not telepathy, but it is connection—a connection so intense that I don’t think it would be far off to call it love.”

Love is also an unmeasurable, nebulous concept that defies scientific explanation. Of course, just because something is unmeasurable, doesn’t mean it’s not real—and what seems certain is that a lot of people want to believe in the supernatural, often for understandable reasons. “Parents want to believe that our neurodivergent children have hidden gifts that no one else sees but them,” says cognitive scientist Dr Scott Kaufman. “There’s a real emotional resonance there.” However, he says, upon closer scrutiny, “a lot of the claims made in the podcast haven’t undergone rigorous testing, and can have alternative explanations other than real telepathy.”

Ultimately, much of the podcast’s appeal—beyond grand pronouncements of how these magical children with autism may be able to steer humankind into a new golden age—comes from the seductively simplistic answers that it provides to incredibly complex questions. “From being considered disabled, their child was suddenly humanity’s savior,” writes Jonathan Jarry, a molecular biologist and misinformation expert from McGill University. “Wouldn’t you want to believe that as well?”

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