Dr. Katharine Beals
Appearances
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
So they will decide when a letter was selected, and they'll decide in an ambiguous case which letter was selected. Because someone could be pointing in between the letters. In between. F and G. 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.
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
So from watching from the other side, you can see letters sometimes being called out that we're not pointing to at all.
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
Yeah, so what you could clearly see was that the mother was touching the girl, just 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 cue the girl about when to actually make a selection.
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
A lot of the time the child doesn't look like they really want to be doing this.
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
No. It's just, I find it extraordinary that anybody thinks it's a compelling instance of telepathy. She's kind of the perfect person to talk to about this. 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.
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
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.
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
So it appeared to unlock what people were thinking was an intact or fully developed intellect in terms of having learned somehow to read, having mastered language, and so on.
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
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. This is the telepathy type test.
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
And then you ask the person with autism, what do you see here?
Science Vs
Telepathy: Is It For Real?
Yeah. And this has been repeated many times. There were a whole bunch of studies that came out in the 90s that just one after another after another were showing failure.