Talk Tracks Ep 8: The Skeptic Who Couldn’t Debunk The Telepathy Tapes

Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens, and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the Talk Tracks. In this series, we dive deeper into the revelations, challenges, and unexpected truths from the telepathy tapes.
The goal is to explore all the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, and yes, even unexplained things like psi abilities. If you haven't yet listened to season one of the telepathy tapes,

I encourage you to start there.

It lays the foundation for everything we'll be exploring in this journey.

We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers,

thinkers, non-speakers, and experiencers

who illuminate the extraordinary connections

that may defy explanation today, but won't for long.

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Back to the stay. Becca Kramer is a nuclear engineer by training, a writer, and a mother of two.
She first reached out to our team because, in her own words, she was on a mission to disprove the claims made in the telepathy tapes. What began as a skeptical deep dive turned into something much more complicated and much more human.
Motivated by her scientific instincts and intellectual honesty, Becca set out to fact-check every aspect of season one. She read over 100 peer-reviewed studies, spoke with experts across multiple fields, and carefully analyzed everything from the eye-tracking data to the scientific foundation behind the ideomotor or Ouija board effect that some people like to point to when they try to invalidate spelling and therefore disprove the telepathy.
Her intention, though, was not to validate. It was to find flaws.
But what she found challenged many of her assumptions. I thought it was critical to feature her on the talk tracks because she did the legwork that I was hoping many journalists would have done by now.
Many professional journalists who I truly believe want to do a good job keep pointing to old arguments about spelling that just don't hold up. It takes someone to go through this history page by page to understand all the nuances and complexities to end up where Becca did.
Catherine Ellis, our series coordinator, sat down with Becca to unpack what this journey was like, to be confronted with evidence you don't expect, how science sometimes fails to ask the right questions, and why some phenomena may not be explainable by the frameworks we've relied on. This conversation is a reminder that skepticism, when paired with humility and openness, can become a bridge to the truth.
All right, Katherine, take it away. Becca, thank you so much for doing this and being on the podcast.
I would love it if you could just briefly introduce yourself and give us a little bit of your background. Absolutely.
Hi, I'm Becca Kramer, actually an engineer, nuclear engineer by training, but right now I'm a mom of two little kids and a writer. So I was actually doing research for a book, and that's kind of how I stumbled into all of this.
So Becca hears the telepathy tapes, and she becomes obsessed with reconciling the unbelievable claims she was hearing with the concrete world. And she really, really dove into the research in many ways.
It was like she was doing an extensive fact-checking on Kai and the families. So it's been several months in the work, over a hundred peer-reviewed studies read, several books.
I've talked to several experts and different industries. It's been quite the journey.
So for me, I'm such a diehard skeptic and truth be told, like annoying atheist is kind of how I came into this. But I have been working on that side of myself.
I think your first email was like, I listened to the telepathy tapes and I couldn't stop thinking that I need to prove it wrong. Or your whole goal was to prove that Akil was not using telepathy to type, to communicate, to spell, to communicate.
But did you start out not believing or how did the telepathy tapes impact you when you first heard them? I was feeling really inspired by the tapes. And I remember thinking, how has this not been like on CNN? Like we've proven freaking telepathy people.
How is this not just what everyone's talking about? It's all I get to talk about. I mean, I was recommending the podcast to everyone.
Like, this is the most clear-cut, you know, captured footage of any kind of psi phenomena that I'd ever heard of. So I was so interested.
So when I hadn't seen it, I just hadn't really thought much about it. And then I saw that it had been, you know, widely debunked by specialists and was just shocked.
But it had been a couple months since I had listened to it. So I was like, okay, maybe I just was really wanting something to be out there.
But I couldn't move past it. So I re-listened to the tapes.
The re-listening was such a different experience after reading what experts were saying. And since it's audio only, you don't see them communicating.
So you don't know how crazy it is to say that they're communicating through their parents. so it just seemed, it was just, it was heartbreaking and I was almost going to turn it off.
And then I hear Katie mention how Houston always finds what she hides physically. He goes and finds it.
And I was like, that has nothing to do with how they're communicating. And so it's just like little crumbs.
So I kept listening. And so it's just little crumbs like that.
And then I get my engineering hat on and I take notes, listen to the whole thing, watch the videos. And yeah, seeing Akil, reading his mother's mind, Manisha, from the other room.
There's no way.

And I was like, couldn't believe, too, that experts were aware of this and were still saying there's a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation

for how this is occurring.

So I was like, all right, I'm going to prove Akhil's not reading his mother's mind. And that's kind of what I set out to do.
That's how it started. And then it just kind of, it was so bizarre.
It was like, I would kind of get discouraged and I almost say, you know, okay. And then some big aha thing would happen.
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Okay, great. This famous horse from 1904.
His name is Clever Hans. And Clever Hans was discovered to be an intelligent horse who could also read people's minds.
So people would travel from all over the world to meet Clever Hans and ask him, how old am I? Or what year was I born? Or mathematical questions, truth or false questions. Scientists came to study him, and the owner was like, please.
He was just as convinced as anyone. After extensive studying, they find that Clever Hans, the way he communicates is he taps with his hoof.
So you say, how, how, so I'd go, how old is my son? And he would tap six times. What you don't realize the questioner makes some subtle movement once you tap the right answer.
So, you know, he taps six, I would slightly lean back. Clever Hans is a clever horse, he'd stop tapping.
And he's right. And they definitely confirmed that and they coined this the ideomotor effect.
Ideomotor effect, that is like, turned into, I think, like, Psy Phenomena's worst enemy because ideomotor effect has been assumed to be capable of I believe much much more than it's truly capable of so that movement is kind of what led clever Hans to be mislabeled as intelligent. What's interesting is the current research now, like disproving spelling, still mentions Clever Hans.
It still mentions ideomotor effect. So I learned that that is the primary explanation for how non-speakers are being controlled by the facilitator.

Somehow the facilitator's subconsciously cuing them to select the letters.

But there's this big gap that occurs to what's actually humanly possible.

And I wanted to understand that.

How can researchers be so convinced of this ideomotor effect? This isn't even terribly important, but the main study they reference, this Kazuka study out of Japan, was like 1997. But since I have a physics background, I could figure out that the way this study was set up is terribly flawed.
They really simplified their measurements almost with confirmation bias to kind of get the results they were looking for. But regardless, so that doesn't even need to make sense because regardless of that, just this cuing theory that they're somehow being cued, it doesn't hold up when you really dig into it.
So for the cuing theory, I think Clever Hans tapping and you lean back when he said the right answer. Why can't that be true about the non-speakers? Wow.
So technically, it could if the non-speaker is scanning every option. So imagine you're the non-speaker.
I would use my keyboard right in front of me. If I'm trying to guess what someone wants me to select, I would have to scan each letter and then you sense maybe a shift in pressure, an exhale, whatever.
It's a little convoluted. But let's just hypothetically say that that's possible.
You would need to at least be closest to that letter to select it, if you're just guessing, which is

what they're claiming is happening. So I see that, or I, you know, start to really figure that out,

but then I see these proficient spellers. You've seen them, I don't know if I've seen any do that

level of scanning. You know, occasionally they have to sort of get their finger oriented, but

I've never seen just pure scanning in that way to where it would even make queuing possible so I even kind of dug into it and all my plans to write this up but if you look into information theory you really can only transfer one bit of information with a cue, regardless of what that information is,

if it's to select or move a little over or down, whatever, one bit. To get them to a letter, it would require five bits of information.
That's just impossible. That's like superhuman, superhuman cueing and superhuman sensing.
But why are scientists so comfortable with these assumptions? And that's what really kept me coming back. Like if this is true, ideomotor effect is the most fascinating thing happening in science right now because that's crazy's crazy.
So that's kind of where I had my other eureka moments. So this is while I was in a down moment thinking maybe this isn't happening.
And I'm trying to learn more just about spellers in general. And I watch the documentary Tell Them You Love Me.
Are you familiar? Yeah, I've seen it. What this led me to find is they show footage of the test that they use to prove that communication's invalid.
Like the double blind. Yes.
So the double blind, they call message passing tests. And it's this young girl, Betsy and her partner, they're sitting on a couch next to each other.
Betsy appears calm and the facilitator next to her is not touching her, not controlling her arm or her hand. And they're using a letter board.
They show Betsy and the facilitator a picture of a key, and Betsy, on her own, points to the letters K-E-Y spells key. But then they show them a picture.
I can't remember what the pictures are, but assume the facilitator sees a dog, Betsy sees a cat. Betsy writes D-O-G.
She writes dog. She writes what the facilitator saw.
But watching it, you know, watching it on the film, Betsy, one, is barely even looking at the board, which after hearing Akil say that he can see through his mother's eyes made a little more sense. What if she's using telepathy and that's how she can so effectively type what her facilitator sees? And that would make sense.
So then it was like, holy crap, what's happening? So I just start going through all the studies. There's like 40, like almost exactly 40 studies analyzing.

They're considered the robust studies of facilitated communication because they include these double blind tests, these message passing tests.

All of these message passing tests involve showing the facilitator something or asking the facilitator something and then asking the non-speaker something else. It's actually like a perfect test for telepathy, you could argue.
So I was like, oh, well, that's not going to help me disprove Akil reading his mom's mind. So I was like, I can't use any of that in this research.
So I had to stick with it. And honestly, it was the figuring that out.
And then that's kind of when I got into like the neuroscience of it as well. It's called psychophysics.
And there's this, there's this study of reaction times and, you know, the thresholds of perception, human limits of detecting stimuli. This is a whole science.
The people claiming ideomotor effect is happening are not psychophysicists. They're speech and language pathologists who are like, this is crazy.
There's no way someone could just start spelling like this. So they just pick the first answer they're even familiar with, which is ideomotor effect, which I completely get.
I totally understand why scientists have made these conclusions. I don't think it's been negligence or ill will.
I think that it's just the perfect storm of misinterpretation. And then, of course, a completely new phenomena, possibly, that was causing lots of false negative tests that gave us a lot more confidence in ideomotor effect.
So it's all just kind of wild. Right.
Yeah. I appreciate what you're saying about why scientists have come to the conclusions they've come to.
I mean, it's certainly easy to explain this with the ideomotor and sort of just leave it at that. But what's great is that there are also scientists who are digging deeper than that conclusion and are interested in exploring the fact that this form of communication is in fact authored by the non-speaker invalid.
I think that's interesting what you said, that the idiomotor effect could really only account for one aspect of cueing. Like it couldn't be five different things at once.
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So keeping that in mind, what would be a good way to test this to eliminate that sort of that thought? Yeah, I think, you know, we could do more measurements, like perhaps have EMGs attached to muscles and just evaluate muscle movement between pairs. I think you could reduce sensory potentials.

So, you know, like a keel, if, you know, maybe sound.

But even then, you only can cue in one way.

Their finger has to be by the letter.

So you can really show a cue cannot contain specific letter information. That's just not possible.
I wonder if you could study that at like, how far would their finger need to be from the board before they make a selection to ensure it's not ideomotor. But to be frank, we have not ever proved that the idiomotor effect is responsible for failed message passing tests.
We've never proved that. We have failed message passing tests.
We know idiomotor effect is a thing. We assume its ideomotor effect but that's what i was surprised by that was like the the kazuka study out of japan that was poorly designed that's what it was attempting to do to show it was actually you know the ideomotor effect they didn't provide the muscle measurements and they used a strain gauge that didn't even tell you what direction the force is who the force was coming from and then it cherry-picked its data at the end so it was flawed in multiple ways but so yeah it's like one we haven't even actually confirmed a false message passing test does not mean idiomotor effect that's just that was just the reasonable explanation at the time.
And that was given when they thought they were overtly controlling their arms, like you said, with facilitated communication. And what I learned through the debunkings to experts, scientists, researchers, spelling is facilitated communication to them because it involves a communication partner, which they consider a facilitator.
And that's when I learned like these message passing tests. I mean, they've been anointed the gold standard.
And until a method can pass one of these message passing tests, researchers almost feel like they're able to just turn their heads. Did you pass a message pass? Oh, no message passing test? Okay, nope.
And I don't need to speculate why one hasn't been passed yet, but you can make a really strong case for regardless of passing this test or not, for reasons we don't understand, it's just not reasonably possible to control the letter selection in the way they're claiming. It just isn't.
And I think that's why you have so many families now that are maybe even losing a little faith in the scientific process because they're like, it's right here. It's right in front of you.
How can you tell me this is explained, that we know what this is? But I get it because they have 40 studies seemingly explaining it. But if you really dig in, they're not explaining it at all.
They're just failing. Yeah.
Well, can you explain what you mean by a message passing test? What is that exactly? Yeah. You know, for rigorous scientific studies, you got to have a double blind, which essentially means the, I'm going to say communication partner.
The communication partner and the non-speaker have to be blinded to what the other is seeing. They can't know what the question is to either or.
They can design these studies where they're still sitting next to each other. It's still respectful.
It's, you know, that I know that is possible, but they'll do these studies and they'll show the partner, let's say one image, they'll show the partner a dog, and then they'll show the non-speaker a cat. And there's no published studies of the non-speaker, you know, saying the answer is cat.

There may be a miscommunication or something where they will answer the non-speaker.

They'll answer what the answer is cat. There may be a miscommunication or something where they will answer the non-speaker.
They'll answer what the facilitator was asked. Yeah.
I am interested in knowing what is told to the non-speaker before starting that test. Do they know that they're supposed to be typing out what they're shown? That's a really good question.
Like, how is it? And I'm, and I know there's been so many that there's probably different ways. And then you have to wonder, like, well, are they, is there a gotcha moment or, you know, wording is so critical.
And also the stress of, you know, being one, have knowing your intelligence is being dismissed and tested, you know, being one, knowing your intelligence is being dismissed and tested, you know, that I can only imagine how that could affect the results as well. Yeah.
Yeah. I would love to know that information.
And then I think it's also a lot of people with autism, whether they're verbal or not, have issues with regulation. And I think being in these settings where, number one, you can feel that the energy of the person doing the test is sort of this gotcha or I'm going to prove you wrong, is never an environment where someone can thrive.
I mean, I always compare it to like, when I used to play sports, it's like playing at your opponent's home is always more difficult because you have a crowd full of people discouraging you and not wanting you to succeed. And then when you play at your home, it's a crowd of people who support you and believe in you.
And you always that that really affects you and changes the way you perform. And then to be in a body that you don't feel connected with, that's easy to be dysregulated.
You're in a strange environment. You're with people you don't know.
The only person you know is your communicator who you trust. I can see why that might not be the best way to test somebody on something like this.
So I would love to see tests done where instead of trying to have them conform to the way we function, maybe we go and meet them where they are and have them explain it to us. Because after spending time with this population, it is so obvious.
I mean, anybody who spends, spend a whole day with someone who's nonverbal and you will not walk out of it going, ah, there's nobody in there. They don't know what's going on.
It's so obvious that they're in there, that they understand everything happening. You know, just my personal experience watching people spell from, you know, we've started shooting the documentary and I've seen some of the non-speakers who were mentioned in season one.
And I watch them move their eyes to the next letter that they want to tap on the letter board. Now, how is that someone else telling them what to do? I see them motor planning.
Oh, I want to go for the I. I'm going to look to the upper right.
Now I want the A and I'm looking to the left down before my finger even goes there. That could be something that's studied.
Like, can we track their eyes? Can we, you know, I do think there hasn't been enough taken into consideration. Absolutely.
I'm glad you mentioned that the eye tracking study, that's Dr. Joswell's work and he it's interesting because i read them those studies and they're they're excellent they are rigorous they're peer-reviewed they are not included in these decisions of whether or not to allow it because they don't include a message passing test and i've even gotten to speak with a researcher that doesn't believe in spelling, doesn't accept the pro-spelling research.
And they're a speech language pathologist and have more than one reason to think seemingly miraculous. But this eye tracking study is so, it's so critical.
Because when we get into talking about what the human brain is able, like cuing, you know, what the human brain is able to sense and then move toward, the eye tracking study really does show, unless the partner is just literally putting the board in front of the finger, you know, just overtly controlling the communication, which would be so obvious. Yeah.
You know, there's no way to cue, like we said, the specific letter or even a location on the board. It's just not possible.
So it feels like a little bit of a bad faith argument. When I see reasons for what could be happening that make more sense, and the reasons, interesting though, because the reasons given, they all, they make sense, they add up individually.
But then when you're in the reality of it, you're viewing it as a whole picture, it is not possible. So it's like these little individual parts are technically possible.
Yeah. But it's what is being claimed with a proficient speller, with a keel, the speed he goes to each letter.
I watched one video that was actually getting debunked on YouTube. And I'm watching this video and he's going quickly, like less than a second to each letter.
And then maybe he has to have her a second to kind of gain control. And then he selects.
And because Manisha's in the shot just kind of slightly moving, they're like, see, she's controlling the communication. And then the key here is that's not a bad faith argument.
It's just based on studies that could very well have been impacted by consciousness sharing, Because there are many, many studies out there that show a non-speaker can spell what their communication partner sees when they're not touching. And so since that is on the record in many scientific papers, two people sitting side by side.
They're not touching. The one person can spell what the other person is looking at.
That's freaky. They never thought, oh, maybe it's something else, guys.
They go, oh, no, it's ideomotor effect because they were comfortable with ideomotor effect.

We studied it. They just, it just makes, they just never, I mean, it brings in like five different disciplines in science, you know, we've got physics and psychophysics and neuroscience and a little engineering.
And so it's convoluted for sure. And that's what's so cool.
And a little bit what frustrates me is that why can't we be more comfortable with not fully understanding something instead of just quickly slapping on something that, like you said, feels comfortable or is an easy conclusion to draw?

Because to me, the study of science and math, you know, when someone is interested in that, I always think, oh, my gosh, there's so much I don't know. And there's so much about the world that I want to learn and explore.
And I think that's how science came to be in general. So why as scientists or experts, are we not more open to a possibility instead of just quickly dismissing it or not wanting to look into it? That was really something that's been kind of eating at me is like, how is this happening? And I learned that you really have to separate it out because there's two different claims being made.
And they both involve a lot of different science and they're tricky the one claim is telepathy is possible which is a lot for a researcher to to consider so they're going to go for the first explanation so that that is not happening because it's i mean it's the biggest paradigm shift of our ever. I mean, it's crazy.
That's why I'm obsessed with this. It's nuts.
Yeah, yeah. But to shift that, it's like, of course, you're going to cognitively choose ideomotor effect.
You're going to land there. It's a way more comfortable place to land, I think, for researchers.
It's been studied. It's all the reasons I gave.
And you can just land there and move on. And that's what all the debunking articles have done.
They're just landing there. And that's why I'm so shocked.
No one has dug in more. We're all just okay with this Like, I keep, like, the emperor has no clothes, you guys.
This is nuts. So I think, you know, we start there.
But to get back to, like, how, why can't, you know, why don't we be open? These recommendations to not use spelling are coming from major scientific bodies that set the standards for education. And the truth is there are education methods out there that don't work and that are even harmful.
It's just unfortunate, but it's true. And so we have science and these bodies of researchers to help us determine what actually works, what's safe.
You know, I don't want my kid being tested out on some weird method that doesn't work or could actually hurt them. When you provide it to the masses, it needs to be vetted and understood.
And so there's this, you know, expectation of using, they call it evidence-based methods in teaching. And since all the FC studies and the lack of double blind studies for spelling, they claim it's not evidence-based.
And I totally get it. They believe it's dangerous because when this all started in the 90s, facilitated communication, there were a lot of abuse allegations.
And what's heartbreaking is, you know, looking back, that's not surprising. It's an extremely vulnerable population.
And they used these message passing tests to determine whether or not these non-speakers' words were valid. And what if they were connecting to some, I don't know, something else, telepathy? That's what we call it because it's what we're familiar with.
Their words could have been valid. So that broke my heart to even consider.
But that being used as the sole reason why this is dangerous, this is harmful,

don't use this as a parent because you could harm your family, that to me seems unacceptable. So looking at Vermont, they have guidelines in place for if any kind of allegation comes up,

you just get an independent facilitator, an independent communication partner, and you can validate claims. Done.
If that's the only thing, keeping it, you know, to claim it's not safe, you know, it's the whole, the least harm principle in medicine and education. You know, you have to make the least harmful assumption above all else, above evidence-based, least harmful assumption.
And from what I can see, and I don't want to get too like, this is not my area, but I would love to help others that, man, it sure looks like from where I'm sitting, the evidence is inconclusive at least. And if we can deem it inconclusive, then I think once it's all out there, I mean, this could be a serious human rights violation to not consider this and to not act immediately.
If there is any chance this is what's happening, you know, copy Vermont, put a, you know, put protections in place, get some guidelines down, but let these non-speakers communicate and then go study more, go learn more. Who knows? But it feels like they're requiring them to provide, make it evidence-based when to me, it's like, no, no, if there is any chance this is what's happening, we ethically are responsible to allow it.
And right now, not only are we not allowing it, we're penalizing it. I get it.
Again, like no one's purposely being harmful. I think everyone in this space really believes they're protecting these people and doing what's best, you know? And I think Akil and everyone in the telepathy tapes was so brave to come out because not only are they in a fringe group of spellers, they're in a fringe, fringe group of spellers boldly claiming telepathy because telepathy has always been the thing that would push a speller back into darkness to, no, we don't talk about telepathy because the message passing tests, a failed message passing test looks just like telepathy.

And so I get why there's, it's just this huge disconnect and nobody's wrong. You know, there's no bad guy.
And from what I'm seeing, it's like, wow, if we could get people to see these truths and to open just a little, we could, I mean, it could, it's like, I think like 500,000 people have non-speaking, minimally speaking autism in the U.S. Like it could, this is a big deal, you know? Yeah.
Mm-hmm. And that's why I just can't, I can't drop it.
So thank you so much for giving me a little time to tell you about it. Yeah.
Well, thanks for having a heart for this. It sounds like you've been sort of called to be invested in this, which is cool.
What are your plans moving forward?

I'm working on an article. I'm getting it submitted that kind of outlines a lot of this research.
So in the near term, really just getting this out there and communicating it as good as possible and maybe trying to connect the right people, just kind of seeing where this crazy universe takes me.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, thank you for explaining all the research you did and your findings and everything like that. And, you know, hopefully there will be more studies.
I think there are in the pipeline to help better understand spelling to communicate and potentially telepathy. I think there are people out there who are open to researching more.
They're just maybe not the people in charge of, you know, getting it in schools or having it widely accepted. But it seems like we're probably on the right path, which is encouraging.
Yeah, just leading with truth and leading with love seems to be the best way forward. Absolutely.
Okay, well, thank you so much, Becca. This is so great.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I've been really enjoying this work, and I hope I can continue.
That's it for this episode of The Talk Tracks, but new episodes will now be released every other Sunday, so stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones, that knit together our reality. Please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind.
Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Original music was created by Elizabeth P.W.

Original logo and cover art by Ben Kendore Design.

The audio mix and finishing by Sarah Ma.

Our amazing podcast coordinator, Jill Pichesnik.

The telepathy tapes coordinator and my right hand, Catherine Ellis.

And I'm Kai Dickens, your writer, creator, and host.

Thank you again for joining us.