What If It’s Not Nonsense?
Telepathy Tapes, Pt. 1
What If It’s Not Nonsense? (Telepathy Tapes, Pt. 1)
So there’s this podcast called The Telepathy Tapes, and listen—I wasn’t looking to fall into a rabbit hole. I just wanted to hear what all the noise was about. But five minutes in, I was locked in. Hyperfocus activated. Because apparently, there are nonverbal autistic kids out there spelling out words, colors, numbers—stuff they weren’t shown, weren’t told, didn’t see. And somehow they’re getting it right.
Like… accurately. Repeatedly.
And before you write that off as YouTube junk or another pseudoscience wave, here’s the part that caught my attention: the woman leading the charge, Dr. Diane Powell, is a Johns Hopkins-trained neuropsychiatrist. She’s not just some random podcast guest chasing clicks. She’s spent over a decade testing this stuff because families kept sending her videos of their kids doing the impossible.
So, now you’re probably where I was: skeptical but intrigued.
In the podcast, Powell talks about these home recordings and experiments where the parent (usually the mom) is shown a secret word or image, and the child—who can’t see it, and isn’t told anything—is brought in. Then they start pointing, letter by letter, on a board. And yeah, they spell the word. Sometimes full sentences. Sometimes math problems. Sometimes they point to a specific color that matches what their parent saw.
It’s being called telepathy. Not the dramatic movie kind. More like survival-based mind-to-mind connection between a parent and a child who can’t speak but needs to say something. And if that phrase alone doesn’t hit you somewhere deep, I don’t know what to tell you.
I’ve seen enough in this field—and enough in myself and my kids—to know that autistic people often perceive and process the world in ways that get underestimated. Especially nonspeakers. Especially when their intelligence is constantly misread because their output doesn’t match their input. So when people start reporting that these kids are somehow reading thoughts or syncing up with their caregivers on a level we can’t explain—I don’t scoff. I slow down.
And yeah, I know how science usually handles things it can’t quantify. It doesn’t. It shelves it under “fringe,” calls it anecdotal, and waits for the noise to die down. But what if that impulse to dismiss is part of the problem? What if we’re missing something real because we’re only trained to see what fits the model we already know?
One girl spells “crocodile.” Another picks the exact number her mom was shown. These aren’t prompted cues. And the parents? They look more surprised than anyone.
Do I think it’s all legit? I think something is. Something worth listening to.
Even if it’s not capital-T telepathy, it’s communication. It’s something bigger than we’re used to recognizing, and we owe it to these kids not to flatten it down to coincidence or wishful thinking.