Is telepathy real, and what does that mean for our reality?

Exploring the hit podcast The Telepathy Tapes and its implications for reality at large.

This essay is a part of Cosmic Junkyard, a series on the world’s most interesting unanswered or unanswerable questions. I share posts like this — mostly explorations of the weird, pliable boundary between science and spirituality — twice per month, so subscribe to get them in your inbox.

Thanks for reading and wondering along with me.

Like many, many other people, I’ve been listening to the podcast The Telepathy Tapes over the past few weeks. It’s currently one of America’s top podcasts, and it’s centered around one very fascinating question: Are nonspeaking autistic people actually communicating telepathically?

The podcast begins by following television producer Ky Dickens as she interviews a series of nonspeaking autistic kids and their parents. The first few episodes center around few featured families who undergo a series of tests, which seem to prove that the kids can read their parents’ minds.

Many of these parents long-ago realized their kids’ abilities when the children were able to find hidden candies or know certain computer passwords. Most originally thought they were completely alone in experiencing this phenomena, and most simply seem to want answers about what it all means.

Things only expand and deepen from there, as the nonspeakers reveal that they meet with other nonspeakers on a non-material plane called “the hill.” The podcast hits its stride in the sixth episode, when Dickens begins to explore several well-documented tales of telepathic animal communication. She uses this as a segue into deconstructing scientific materialism, which is basically the hypothesis that the physical world is all that actually exists. Within this theory, all that really exists is matter/material, and therefore everything follows the same fundamental laws.

But this is a flawed paradigm, Dickens and a host of other thinkers she cites in the episode argue, and has stymied a great deal of research into things like the possibility of other realms, spirits, clairvoyance, and magic. She specifically invokes Rupert Sheldrake, whose talk on this topic was removed from TED and which I’m linking here.

Telepathy sounds like a wild, out-there concept, but is it? Dickens asks. After all, our phones send signals to one another. Why shouldn’t our brains, which are inarguably more advanced systems than our iPhones?

If the revelations on this podcast are to believed, the autistic nonspeakers’ telepathic abilities may be a pathway into merging science and spirituality. Serious research on this subject could prove the existence of realms we can’t see, that we’re all connected, and that our lives extend far beyond death, among other revelations that have long since evaded science’s glare. It could also prove the existence of some kind of unified field — some kind of God-like or genuinely Godly web across which telepathic signals can fly like neurons or shooting stars.

I have to admit that when I first started listening to this podcast, I was feeling skeptical. I started it shortly after writing an article on deep-sea conspiracy theories, for which I’d spent a fair amount of time reading posts and watching videos about people who claim to have witnessed bizarre, inexplicable things out on the open ocean or under the waves.

The internet, and the history of humanity at large, is rife with stories that seem completely absurd to the scientific materialist’s mind. Many, many, many people say that they have experienced alien sightings, ghost interaction, NDEs, and all manner of other extraordinary things I often write about on here.

So many of these stories must simply be made up, I thought as I began listening to the podcast. Products of a desire for attention, or tricks of the light.

Yet there’s another possibility. What if they aren’t all made up?

What if some these parents, and some of the thousands of UFO-sighters and clairvoyants and energy-sensors and dream-walkers who populate the earth, are telling the truth?

Could everybody, every parent in this podcast and every child and teacher and scientist and cameraperson, really all be lying?

The podcast’s second half makes the resounding choice to believe in these nonspeakers and the teachers and parents who have experienced their gifts. It fans out from the telepathy idea, exploring various nonspeakers whose experiences reveal that, as Dickens often repeats, telepathy is just the tip of the iceberg. She goes on to interview and profile nonspeakers who seemingly can remote-view the lives of strangers, predict natural disasters, and much more. Really, it’s a trip from start to finish.

In one episode, she profiles a nonspeaking autistic adult whose parents and caregiver both say he channels songs to them within lucid dreams. In another, she interviews a family whose son died — though many of his nonspeaking friends said they knew he was going to die in advance of his death. They also say his funeral was full of angels, and claim to know he now is helping other kids in a place in the afterlife that seems awfully like heaven. Apparently, he still can occasionally visit them sometimes on the hill.

Meanwhile, a bonus episode features a non-autistic teaching assistant who underwent a near-death experience in early 2024, and who claims he actually was able to visit the hill several times. He and another teacher also claim that some of the kids he met on the hill could verify his presence there by reciting information he’d told them while on the hill.

The nonspeakers are a relentlessly honest bunch, Dickens emphasizes numerous times, so she finds it highly unlikely that they would make all this up. Importantly, they also communicate through a method called spelling, which involves pointing or signaling to letters shown to them on a board. Spelling is actually quite controversial, given the argument that sometimes spelling facilitators might accidentally facilitate nonspeakers’ responses with small, imperceptible cues. In general, but particularly due to the nonspeakers’ reliance on spelling, The Telepathy Tapes has dredged up quite a bit of controversy, and the podcast has been repeatedly and heavily criticized by The Atlantic and many other major outlets.

But spelling also seems like the best shot at unlocking the inner lives of these people, many of whom are treated and taught like young children throughout their entire lives. According to the podcast, the nonspeakers really are in there — and in fact, they may be in touch with a much higher reality than most of us can reach.

Through spelling, many of them are able to share profound insights and deep wisdom. They all seem to argue that compassion and love are the most important things in the world.

There have been legends about telepathy and extrasensory communication since time immemorial. You actually see many of the same themes found in The Telepathy Tapes popping up in tales of Indian yogis, and the book Autobiography of a Yogi is full of tales of enlightened masters seeing the future, transcending space and time, and returning to communicate after death. In these stories, the yogis seem to earn the ability to do this through incredible focus, meditation, renunciation, and sheer will. The book is written by the renowned spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda, who says he saw many of these miracles with his own eyes.

Of course, the Bible features stories of similar miracles — burning bushes, fiery angels, Jesus walking on water and making water from wine. History and folklore are also full of tales of magic, gods and goddesses, house spirits and elves, prophecies and revelations.

Are all of these, all of them, made up?

I doubt it. And that doubt, my friends, is a door.

There is undeniably something very special about The Telepathy Tapes, which has resonated with an unusually wide audience and is arguably playing a major role in bringing these ideas, which are so often easily laughed off and disregarded by the scientific establishment, to the mainstream. It may be critical in sparking deeper research into topics in this realm.

One thing that some of the nonspeakers often say, though, is that it’s difficult to engage with others telepathically who don’t have some form of compassion for them and some amount of belief or receptivity to the idea of telepathy itself. So if this is true, it’s easy to imagine that scientific research done by complete skeptics may not be effective.

This might seem absurd, but the fundamental principles of quantum physics tell us that by observing something, we always alter it. Why should telepathy be any different?

As I listened to the podcast on several long drives on snowy highways, I found my doubts fading as the story pulled me in. I soon began looking for signs all around me — and finding them in fragments of rainbow lights and angel numbers on the side of the road.

I think it is vital that this podcast is shining some light on the place where science and observable phenomena brush up against the sublime and the sacred. I really hope it does inspire deeper research and deeper thought. If we can prove beyond all doubt these nonspeakers are telepathic, that opens up a thousand new realms of possibility.

Yet sometimes we must also look past a need for truth, and simply admit it: The world is far more magical and mysterious than we can know.

I fully understand that so-called “magical thinking” can become dangerous, especially when it leads to a disregard of critical, existential risks like climate change. At the same time, we are cutting ourselves off from so much possibility by disregarding what hasn’t be proven by science yet entirely. I believe science and so-called “magical thinking” can actually mutually enhance one another and push each other to new heights, and I also believe that with the advent of AI and quantum physics occurring at the same time as rising discussion about things like telepathy, manifestation, and the like, we’re in the midst of a truly extraordinary paradigm shift.

The final episode of the series, which has been renewed for a second season, mostly features the words of nonspeakers, communicated through spelling and read by artificial voices or friends and loved ones. All of the nonspeakers, without fail, seem to have an extremely important message for humanity: We must treat each other with grace and compassion.

That’s a message that holds up regardless of the validity of each individual story in the podcast. And maybe, just maybe, that was the point all along.

Have you listened to The Telepathy Tapes? What do you think of it? Let me know in the comments below, and thanks for reading.