I was away on vacation the last week, hence no posts, but am now back to my usual schedule. In fact, I hope to be a little more consistent starting this summer because (if you follow me on the SGU you already know this) I am retiring from my day job at Yale at the end of the month. This will allow me to work full time as a science communicator and skeptic. I have some new projects in the works, and will announce anything here for those who are interested.

On to today’s post – I recently received an e-mail from Janyce Boynton, a former facilitator who now works to expose the pseudoscience of facilitated communication (FC). I have been writing about this for many years. Like many pseudosciences, they rarely completely disappear, but tend to wax and wane with each new generation, often morphing into different forms while keeping the nonsense at their core. FC has had a resurgence recently due to a popular podcast, The Telepathy Tapes (which I wrote about over at SBM). Janyce had this to say:

I’ll be continuing to post critiques about the Telepathy Tapes–especially since some of their followers are now claiming that my student was telepathic. Their “logic” (and I use that term loosely) is that during the picture message passing test, she read my mind, knew what picture I saw, and typed that instead of typing out the word to the picture she saw.

I shouldn’t be surprised by their rationalizations. The mental gymnastics these people go through!

They’re also claiming that people don’t have to look at the letter board because of synesthesia. According to them, the letters light up and the clients can see the “aura” of each color. Ridiculous. I haven’t been able to find any research that backs up this claim. Nor have I found an expert in synesthesia who is willing to answer my questions about this condition, but I’m assuming that, if synesthesia is a real condition, it doesn’t work the way the Telepathy Tapes folks are claiming it does.

For quick background, FC was created in the 1980s as a method for communicating to people, mostly children, who have severe cognitive impairment and are either non-verbal or minimally verbal. The hypothesis FC is based on is that at least some of these children may have more cognitive ability than is apparent but rather have impaired communication as an isolated deficit. This general idea is legitimate, and in neurology we caution all the time about not assuming the inability to demonstrate an ability is due purely to a cognitive deficit, rather than a physical deficit. To take a simple example, don’t assume someone is not responding to your voice because they have impaired consciousness when they could be deaf. We use various methods to try to control for this as much as possible.

So this was not an inherently bad hypothesis, but their approach to controlling for this possibility was to have a facilitator hold the hand of a non-verbal client and “help” them to spell out responses on a letter board (or keyboard or whatever). This was based on the much less plausible hypothesis that non-verbal clients were mainly limited by physical coordination and not cognition, and while they could not point to the letters on their own, they could subtly indicate to the facilitator which letter they intended to point to. I don’t fault early FC users for testing this hypothesis – in fact, I fault them for not properly testing it, but rather just going full steam ahead using and promoting the method. When FC was properly tested it utterly failed – it turns out the facilitators were doing all the communicating (mostly through the ideomotor effect). In many cases the clients were not even looking at the letter board, and they were spelling far faster than is plausible given the premise that their main limitation is motor function.

FC moved to the fringe for a couple decades, although kept popping up with different clothes. Recently, however, FC has been given a boost by a popular podcast, the Telepathy Tapes, which adds a new wrinkle to the FC pseudoscience. To first back up a bit, however, one of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is the logical fallacy called special pleading. One of the core ways in which science proceeds is to come up with a way to test your hypothesis. If my hypothesis is true, then the result of this experiment or observation will be A, if it is false, then the result with be B. If the result is B, then you modify or discard the hypothesis. But pseudoscientists will often, upon getting the falsifying result B, make up a special excuse for why B was the result, to rescue their hypothesis from falsification.

The Telepathy Tapes is a massive exercise in special pleading to rescue FC from clear falsification. ESP or telepathy, the ability to read minds, is invoked to explain away all of the many reasons why the evidence falsifies FC. For example, if you secretly show the facilitator a rubber duck and the client a teddy bear then ask the client what they saw, the answer is invariably a rubber duck – because the facilitator is doing the communicating and does not know what the client actually saw. The makers of the Telepathy Tapes, however, conclude that the client read the mind of the facilitator and communicated what they saw – classic special pleading. This is also a great example of using one implausible claim to apparently support another implausible claim. This is the process that Janyce is referring to above.

She then goes on to describe another example of massive special pleading. Another fatal flaw in the FC evidence base is that often times clients are not even looking at the letter board. If you want to see how impossible this is, just try to one finger type with your eyes closed. In other words, you cannot feel the keyboard to center yourself, you have to rely entirely on proprioception to know precisely where your finger is in three-dimensional space to hit the correct key. It’s basically impossible. But apparently these clients who have severe motor impairment can do it. This is as solid proof as you can get that the clients are not doing the communicating.

But if you are just making shit up, and magical shit at that, you can easily invent some BS reason why they can do this, and that is where the synesthesia argument comes in. They argue that these mind-reading non-verbal clients also have “synesthesia” in which they can see the aura of the keys or letters, apparently in their peripheral vision. Seeing auras has nothing to do with actual synesthesia, which is when one sensory modality bleeds into another, or gets crossed with another in higher-order processing. So, for example, a synesthete may be able to smell colors, or feel numbers. The number three may feel rough to them, while four is smooth. So I guess they are saying their clients can feel the auras of the letters, and therefore don’t have to look at them.

This is as close to pure magical thinking as you can get. It is a fantastic example of pseudoscience – of why we need to processes of science in order to constrain our thinking about reality. Otherwise our ideas will tend to drift off into fantasy land. We will see patterns where they don’t exist, and we can construct intricate and complex webs of special pleading to explain any set of observations. Proper blinding and hypothesis testing is needed to slice away all the nonsense so that only reality remains. The people involved with the Telepathy Tapes are not doing that. They are simply engaging in pure fantasy. Unfortunately, in this case, their clients are their victims. This is not a benign practice at all, and can cause tremendous harm.