Dan Engber
Appearances
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And the implication there is like, yeah, you know, okay, maybe you're so skeptical you think Mia's mom is a you know, a grifter or something. But like there are so many parents out here who feel that their kids have telepathy. Like it can't just be a whole army of grifters.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
I think it is a profoundly intimate act. I've had facilitators facilitate me, and it is... I mean, you're sitting with a stranger, or I was sitting with a stranger, and she puts her hand on mine, and I don't know what to tell you. It's just like suddenly you're holding hands with someone, you feel close to them, right?
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
There's just such a desire to, I think we all have a desire to connect and feel understood and feel like we're understanding people. Now, raise that desire to the hundredth power if you're talking about a mother or a father trying to connect with their child.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
to the thousandth power if that child is non-speaking, and it's always sort of hard to exactly understand what's going on in your child's mind. I mean, the desire is even shortchanging it. It seems like the most urgent need I can possibly imagine is to find a way to communicate with your child, and here is this thing, and at first it's frustrating, it's not working, and then, wait, what?
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
What's that? A glimmer of something. Like we're doing this method and we spelled out a word and then it flowers from there, right? And then now we're spelling out short sentences and now my son is writing poetry and now I'm learning about all this stuff. Like, oh, he's got a girlfriend and he's telling me all about that.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
It's like, what more could you want than have your kid tell you about their first love? And so you can just see how the drive to make this thing work and to find meaning in it is so intense. And I think that is both very moving and very dangerous.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Right, yeah. And this podcast actually invokes something that I didn't realize it, but has been present since the start of facilitated communication, which is just that, okay, if it is the case, if you're facilitating me and the messages that are coming out are actually, you are subconsciously writing those messages yourself, right? At some point, you might think, hey, wait a second.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Dan just spelled something that was in my head, right? It's just a natural effect of how you have this Ouija board illusion, right? Just eventually, I might type something or spell something that, you know, information that only you know that I shouldn't know. And so this is in some way just a byproduct of the Ouija board effect, right?
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Exactly. So it's really, it's just like you hit this fork in the road early in the process, right? There's two problems here. If it is really true that the facilitator is the one who's actually creating the messages, there's two problems. One is If the speller knows something that the facilitator doesn't know, the speller can't spell that out. That's the message passing test.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
That was the test that the scientists used to debunk this whole thing. So that's problem number one. So you have to deal with that problem. Problem number two, though, is exactly the opposite. Okay, why does the speller seem to know things that are in the head of the facilitator? Like they shouldn't, why can they do that?
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And so you can either see that happen and go, you know what, I'm a little worried that this method doesn't work. And then you move on to other interventions to try to help the non-speaking person. Or you say, oh, I know what it is. The spelling is valid and they have ESP.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Yeah, the podcast gets into it. I mean, there's a certain point right at the beginning. It's not clear what we're even talking about. It's just, here's this girl, Mia. She can read her mother's mind. And as it goes along, it gets into the history of facilitated communication, the scandals. There were false sexual abuse allegations. There were the debunkings of the 90s.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And so the podcast has to engage with that, right? And what the host, Kai Dickens, does is she basically acknowledges that all that happened. She says, but look... People were experiencing telepathy from the very beginning. And also the method has improved. We now have these new versions called rapid prompting or spelling to communicate. And they're much better.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
A man named Akhil. Who is, you know, according to the podcast, telepathic and can also speak to the dead.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And he does this without being touched. So for her, it's like, there you go. That's proof.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
I mean, this is, again, it's one of the complicating things about this. It'd be nice if you could just say, oh, FC is fake and everyone who uses it is, you know, the message is coming entirely from the facilitator. But it's just such a diverse set of practices and it involves such a diverse set of people and people-facilitator pairs. It's just like a very complicated question.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Now, Akhil, you watched the video of him. He's not being touched by his mother. But there are cases where he appears to read her mind by typing into an iPad keyboard, and she's not touching him or the keyboard.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
I mean, it is really impressive. It looks like telepathy, but she is very involved in the process, right? She's making sounds. She's moving. And I think it just goes to show how this influence, what I would say is like unconscious influence over the creation of the messages, can happen in many different ways. Like it could happen if you're holding a person's hand.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
It could happen if you're holding their shoulder, putting your finger on their forehead, holding the letter board for them and not even touching them. And my belief is that in the case of Akhil, it's through these other cues. You can see in the video,
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
She's, like, leaning her body to one side or the other in concert with the direction that he has to move his finger to hit the next key on the keyboard. So he has to type, you know, A-R, and those are on the left side of the keyboard, and she's kind of leaning to the left. And then he has to type I-P-O, which is on the upper right of the keyboard, and she, like, leans her body in that direction.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Now, in order for Akil to pick up on those cues... I mean, the level of attunement that he must have to what, you know, she is, you know, perhaps subconsciously wanting him to do is truly exquisite. I mean, it's amazing.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
On the other hand, what's your other choice here is to believe that he really is telepathic and speaks to the dead. So you're confronted with, you know, two extraordinary skills, one far more extraordinary than the other.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Yeah, so Dickens says that communing with the dead is, she describes it as a very common gift among these telepathic spellers. I mean, there's something funny about it, I'm sorry, about the fact that this is, you know, you've rejected from the beginning the possibility that this is a Ouija board thing. Mm-hmm.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And then the power that has emerged is like literally the conceit of a Ouija board is talking to the dead.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Yes, the people are talking to angels, they're prophesying disaster, they're treating cancer, they're, you know, reading hieroglyphics. The list of powers, I mean, again, in episode one, it's like, oh, I know what number my mom is thinking of. By episode 10, it's in a really, it's like I'm astrally projecting to a place called the hill where I am reading The Great Gatsby with angels.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
We hear about a telepathic parrot. We hear about a group of elephants that for some reason is able to observe a memorial on a specific day of the Gregorian calendar. Like the claims really just – it's almost like once you've accepted that telepathy is possible, once you have broken out of what Dickens refers to as the materialist mindset – Anything is possible. Everything is on the table.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Yeah. There's a part in the Rogan interview where they're just taking this to logical places. Like once you accept the premise, Rogan is like, imagine what the government would do with these kids. Isn't that disgusting? That's the first thing you think about.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
If someone's extraordinary, like the X-Men. Yeah. Right. And Dickens is like, yeah, that's a totally valid concern.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
I discovered that sliding my can of seltzer around on this table is sort of like an ASMR thing.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Yeah, so, I mean, it really, it was getting big in December. It was climbing its way through the Apple audio charts. And then Joe Rogan got into it. On his Christmas Day episode, he said, Here's the thing about all this. no, I think telepathy is real. And he talked about this podcast. It is real. Have you listened to the telepathy tapes? No.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And then it immediately, the telepathy tapes shot to number one. And it's really been like in the top 10 almost ever since. So I think it was that moment of like, I think... He could be getting tapped by Joe Rogan. It's funny, if you actually watch the video of that episode, Rogan is wearing like a jester hat with bells, I guess, for Christmas.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
But it just makes it, you know, extra funny to have him talk about like how this, no, this is seriously is real. And he's dressed literally like a clown.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Yeah, just last week, Kai Dickens was on the show for two and a half hours. And I think what you see there, just to your question of like why now, is the way that, you know, different sets of, I mean, I would say sort of conspiratorial beliefs start to overlap and gravitate towards each other. And sometimes it's very clean, and it makes sense, and then other times, like, little tensions emerge.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
So for Rogan, and he says this, he talks on and on in this podcast about, oh, yeah, you know, there are these skeptics who just, they're afraid of sounding stupid, and they just like to accept the mainstream narrative, and Dickens totally agrees, and, like, you can see how their worldviews are just, are copacetic, right? Like, yeah, why not telepathy? And you've proved it, and that's amazing.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And they're, like, loving each other. And, like, to the extent that... you know, Rogan has a whole set of other beliefs that I don't know if Dickens has, but like they're bonding in having figured out the truth, you know, about what they won't tell you, what like the elites, media elites don't want you to believe.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And so, I don't know, I really, I was like, oh, this is the moment right here where, you know, there is such resentment against the standard narrative, the elite narratives, that any counter narrative,
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
is appealing there have been people using spelling for decades as we talked about there have been people who believe that spelling reveals telepathy for decades there are people who believe a lot of kind of weird things but i think they until now they've all been kind of living in their own worlds and now in i would say in this moment those people are kind of finding common cause they're realizing that they kind of share an outlook with respect to the narrative maybe
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And it was seen in this, you know, in this whole tradition of liberating people with communication issues from, you know, basically the prison of lowered expectations just because, you know, they might not do well on an IQ test if they can't talk. But if you give them a way to communicate, they can reveal who they really are.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
I mean that there have been communities of people like living in their own realities, but that's just sort of like a private reality. And there are people who, for example, believe that childhood vaccines are deadly or cause autism or have other, you know, many, many other harms. And they're sort of... living in their slightly more public private reality.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And there are people who believe in UFOs, and they have their own community. Of course, these people have been around all this time. But I think there are moments in, if I can be so grand, in American history where the inhabitants of all these private realities kind of band together, and it becomes more, less like a menu of choices than, you know, a full meal. That's what I mean by the alliances.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
So, I mean, just to give an example, Diane Hennessey Powell, the scientist in the show, you know, she is anti-vaccine, who spoke in an event with RFK Jr. RFK Jr., has likened people who are skeptical of spelling to pediatricians who deny the harms of childhood vaccines. So right there, there's an alliance between anti-vaccine activists and spellers.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
I mean, I think sometimes the counter-narratives are true, and it is good when they get an airing and become ascendant. It's just, I think what is interesting to me to observe is the way it's like open season on counter-narratives, right? And so you're seeing this negotiation among... adherence to counter narratives and it's playing out even like in the federal government.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And so it's become, I mean, just to give one example, I'm sorry, this is going to sound far afield, but I think it speaks to the central point here. So we have an anti-vaccine activist in charge of health and human services. There's also, we're going to have a COVID contrarian take over the National Institutes of Health.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Both those people, Jay Bhattacharya and RFK Jr., are into essentially paleo diets and the idea that carbohydrates are what's causing so much chronic disease in this country, as I understand it, okay? So now maybe you're getting this other group that has been making this counter-narrative argument about nutrition, that the problem is not calorie intake but sugars, right?
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Like, now they have a foot in with this administration. This is just like somehow there's, you know, common cause between the sugar is toxic crowd and the anti-vaccine crowd and the, you know, like COVID contrarians. And as I have said, like, you can draw these connections over into the world of spellers and telepathy. Like, I just think...
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
if you mapped out all of these different groups with their own hobby horses, some of which I think are reasonable, like the reasonable arguments to have about what nutritional policy should be. But there's just these new alliances. That's what's interesting to me about this moment.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
By holding the person's hand or forearm or possibly their shoulder or touching them in other ways or holding the keyboard or the letter board in front of them, it's the facilitated part of facilitated communication means someone has to be there to help. It always involves someone else there doing something to help the person type.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Okay, the setup is she starts by, this is kind of her entree into this world. She hears a woman named Diane Hennessey Powell. This is a psychiatrist based in the Pacific Northwest who's written a book about ESP. and is very interested herself in the topic of people with autism who, in Powell's view, have kind of a savant skill for reading minds or ESP or psi phenomena.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
So Dickens hears Powell on a podcast and gets the idea that she wants to pursue this, and so she starts working with Powell to... get some of these people and to design, you know, experiments, ways to test them. And then she's going to film it and record audio from it and talk about it. And so that's where the podcast starts.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
So they set up in a rented house in Glendale and they fly in a family from Mexico. All the spellers are, you know, only go by their first name.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
So it's this girl, Mia. I think she's a teenager. And they start running these experiments.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Then she'll show that number to Mia's mom behind a screen. Mia has a blindfold on. They've taken extra care to make sure, you know, they've covered up any mirrors in the room, even a TV screen. Parents. That's a reflective surface there, the TV, so we need to cover that.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
So they're taking a lot of care to make sure only Mia's mom is seeing this number. And then Mia's mom, who is the facilitator, sits next to Mia, and Mia spells out, using, you know, her letter board, what her mom has just seen, or she says what the number is.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
So that's the test. That's the telepathy experiment as described in the first episode of the show.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Well, I hate to say this to a podcast host, but, like, I think the problem here is there's sort of, like, a pernicious problem with audio that is in play here. Boo.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
It's all about voices and people's impressions. And it's so intimate, right? And I think these are all things that are echoed in the people with telepathy, supposedly with telepathy as well. So I think it's worth talking this through. In listening to the podcast, you're hearing Guy Dickens, the host, just be so amazed by what she's seeing.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And then one of the members of her crew, she describes as this real, like, skeptical guy, this real materialist. And he kind of has a conversion in real time on the podcast.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
So for the listener, you're not even hearing Mia. Of course, Mia doesn't speak. That's the point. But you're hearing the people who are seeing Mia, and you're getting their reactions, and they are so amazed, and it is so sincere that that emotion just transfers to you. Also, the podcast is really... I would say amateurishly produced.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
I talked to one podcast producer who described it as having kind of like a Blair Witch effect, which I thought was apt. It's like that just makes it feel a little more real somehow.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Okay, so what is not described in that first episode is how spelling works, which involves the facilitator, in this case with Mia, her mom, sitting on the sofa next to her and placing her finger on Mia's forehead the entire time that Mia is spelling. Okay. So, I mean, this is just, what does that mean? I know what it means.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
But, like, I think if the average listener of the podcast were to watch the videos, and there are videos on the podcast website, you pay $10, you can become a member, and then you can watch the videos. It's just, like, gives you a first sense of, wow, this process of producing the answers, you know, the messages from Mia is... It's very intimate. It's collaborative. Something here is going on.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
It's not Mia on her own with a pen and paper writing out digits. It's this intensely cooperative process to produce the messages. And that is a signal for what could really be going on here, which is this method, again, going back to the 1970s in Australia, has long, long, long been known to have a problem, which is it can be really, really hard to tell
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
She said, Kathy, she's telling me this, and she's telling me that, and you've got to see it. So one day she came over to the house, and she said, Stacy, I know you're excited after all these years. You must have something you want to tell Mom. And Stacy types out, I love you, Mom.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
a lot of tests were done of people using facilitated communication to see if they could ever spell out a message with information that their facilitator didn't know. So if the problem is maybe your facilitator is really the one writing the messages, well, there's an easy test for it.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Like, okay, let me show you a picture of a sandwich, and then while your facilitator's not in the room, bring him back in the room, tell me what you saw. And the reality was, few, if any, people using FC could pass that test.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
I think this is really important. It is extreme. You could have read and reported on this at great length, as I have, and it's still extremely hard to tell what's going on when you're seeing it with your own eyes. So I think that's sort of how the podcast works.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
The people, the host, the camera guy, they're seeing it with their own eyes and then reacting, and they're reacting the way most people would react, seeing this with their own eyes, which is not like, hey, this looks fake, but rather, this looks real.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
Well, I think what is so easy to miss or so hard to grasp, even if you know what you're looking for, is this idea that this might be working something like a Ouija board where, you know, a couple of people, two or more people put their hands on something.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And just the uncertainty of having multiple hands on it, I think it's called a plushette on the Ouija board, the thing you're sliding around to different letters. Sure. It kind of feels like it's moving on its own, even when you're doing it, right? But even understanding that, this is my point, even knowing that a Ouija board is a toy or a game, it works.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
You know that a spirit isn't moving this thing, and yet it kind of feels like, well, who is moving it?
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
No chance, as far as I'm concerned. I can't read minds. I will admit that up front. But I just, I've interviewed a lot of spellers. I've interviewed a lot of spellers' moms. I've never met one that I thought was lying about it. There's one part in the podcast, actually, where Kai Dickens is, like, addressing the skeptics that she knows are out there.
Radio Atlantic
The Mind Readers
And she just says, the idea that the facilitators might be somehow creating these messages is, I forget the phrase, like, unambiguously false. Like, she just rejects outright the possibility that there's any unconscious influence from the facilitators, from the parents. And then she quotes one of the parents saying, the thing is, Kai, we can't all be lying. Right.