Science Matters

Why "The Telepathy Tapes" are like Uri Geller

Boyce Rensberger

(2/2025) Our country may be experiencing another Uri Geller moment. Let me explain.

If you were following the news in the 1970s, you may recall that name. Geller was an Israeli performer who claimed supernatural powers such as the ability to bend spoons with his mind and to recreate drawings made by somebody in another room. He could even read other people’s minds.

He gained such fame that he was tested by the Stanford Research Institute, undergoing eight days of experiments in which, as the SRI scientists wrote, Geller "has demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner." A report of the SRI findings appeared in Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals.

Geller even appeared on Johnny Carson, the long reigning king of late-night television in those days. Carson had set up some materials and asked Uri to demonstrate his powers with them. Note that Geller usually worked with objects that he himself supplied. This time Geller appeared to try hard but eventually failed, making the excuse that his supernatural abilities don’t always come to him. Paradoxically, that failure only boosted the guy’s fame because it showed that he wasn’t simply a magician, doing tricks by sleight-of-hand. A magician would have succeeded.

In fact, professional magicians did soon perform Geller’s tricks and could attest that they were simply using ordinary magic tricks to fool the eye. Geller admitted that magicians could duplicate his feats using sleight-of-hand, but asserted that he himself possessed supernatural powers to do those things. Magicians also found flaws in SRI’s method that would have allowed Geller to cheat.

That brings me to today’s Uri Geller moment.

This has not yet made it to the couches of today’s late-night shows, but in January it dominated our currently prominent medium of podcasting. In the first week of January "The Telepathy Tapes," as the podcast is known, knocked "The Joe Rogan Experience" off its usual No. 1 place on Spotify’s chart of the Top 100 podcasts. Then it held on to No. 2 and as of this writing in mid-January, it is the fifth most listened to podcast in America.

The show claims that nonverbal autistic children have supernatural powers, especially to read the minds of other people. The host visits several autistic children and their parents and records interactions that appear to show that the abilities are real. For example, a mother is shown a word and thinks about it, and the child then spells out the word by pointing to letters of the alphabet printed on a panel held by the mother.

But wait, there’s more. The podcast runs for ten one-hour episodes. Some of them claim that mother and child communicate through something called dream telepathy, which uses no words at all. The show even claims that the phenomena offer "a new scientific paradigm where consciousness is viewed as the most fundamental building block of the universe."

Tantalizingly, the show says that nonspeakers may be tapping into a "foundational consciousness … connecting them to others’ thoughts, glimpses of the future, and knowledge beyond the physical world." The text introducing one episode says the phenomenon "opens the door to possibilities that defy conventional science."

So it would appear. But as this column is named, science matters! That’s why I’m writing about this. I was prompted to look into the current controversy by a famous scientist I know who heard about the telepathy claims, searched online and happened on a story I wrote in The New York Times in 1975 about magicians debunking Uri Geller. She thought this might be the same sort of phenomenon. I think it could be.

At this point, though, I want to tell you about a horse named Clever Hans. I’m not changing the subject. It might explain a key factor better than anything else. Perhaps you have heard of this.

In the early years of the 20th century, a horse in Germany created a sensation when it was claimed that he could do arithmetic, tell time, read and spell German, and more. For example, how much is two plus two? Hans would tap his hoof exactly four times. How do you spell "Hans"? The trainer points to a series of letters on a board and Hans taps his foot when the trainer reaches the correct letter.

So real did the phenomenon seem that the German government created a commission to examine Hans. Eventually a skeptical psychologist carried out various tests and realized that the only thing Hans was doing was watching his trainer for subtle movements that the trainer inadvertently made when Hans tapped the correct number of times or he pointed to the correct letter. Horses are good at sensing subtle movements of people. It’s important to state that Hans’s trainer was honestly unaware that he was giving signals to his horse. The phenomenon is known as the Clever Hans effect.

Now back to the telepathy claims. They almost always involve the parent holding a letter board, or alphabet board, in front of the autistic person and having that person touch letters to spell out the word that the parent has in mind. It’s a technique called facilitated communication that was developed decades ago in the belief that it could help nonspeaking persons to communicate. A more recent version uses a computer keyboard, either holding it in front of the subject or, in what’s called facilitated typing, having the parent steady the person’s hand over the keyboard.

Rigorous studies of such activities have concluded that the facilitator is causing the nonspeaker’s finger to touch the letters that spell the expected word. To be sure, the facilitators may honestly deny that they are guiding the other person’s hand or moving the letter board to the correct position. But—and this is key—when the facilitator is someone who does not know the expected word or number, the process fails.

Today facilitated communication is considered pseudoscience and major professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have condemned its usage. Yet advocates continue to promote it in what scientific societies term as part of a cult.

The Telepathy Tapes are the newest outbreak of this unfortunate practice, regardless of whether the advocates are charlatans or are merely self-deluded by the Clever Hans effect. Today, more than ever, we should know that the world is full of con artists.

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