A podcast claims to show that autistic children with limited speech may be able to communicate via telepathy. What does the science say about the idea?
There’s a moment, 26 minutes and nine seconds into Disney’s Coco, where the film’s departed souls are trying to clear a customs desk in the afterlife. It’s a moment that Mary* can see clearly without ever looking at the screen. She’s seen Coco more than a thousand times, easy.
Mary’s sons, Ryder* and Murphy*, adore it. They light up when watching the film, pretzels in hand, and they stay, transfixed, right through to the end – the very end – every time. “My kids absolutely love credits,” Mary laughs.
At a very young age Ryder, her eldest, was diagnosed with “non-verbal autism-spectrum disorder level three”, which requires a high level of support. Her second son, Murphy*, was diagnosed with the same condition as a toddler. The children, now 6 and 4, have never spoken to their parents. They’ve never been able to vocalise that love of Coco, of pretzels, or of their parents. Not being able to communicate with her children is a challenge that, in a cruel irony, is hard for Mary to put into words.
“What I deal with on a daily basis,” she says, pausing. “It can break you.”
For the past six years, Mary’s life has been dedicated to supporting her two boys. When her mother died in an ICU in Sydney a few years ago, she barely had time to grieve. She drove back to her home in regional New South Wales, just hours after leaving her mother’s side, then removed all of the photos of her in the home. It was difficult to explain to Ryder and Murphy why they could see her in a picture frame but no longer FaceTime with their grandmother.
Mary speaks of the fear of leaving her home, her sons being excluded or whispered about. If they do make it to a shopping centre or a park, often their senses can be overwhelmed and they melt down. Mary’s arms and legs bear bruises from trying to protect her sons from self-harming. The exhaustion is constant – one study shows stress levels in parents of autistic individuals are similar to those of combat soldiers and Holocaust survivors – and the lack of sleep leads to caregiver burnout.
This is a reality that Mary says impacts her family “every moment of every day”. And her family is not alone. It is a reality lived in homes the whole world over.
It is into this reality that a new podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, appears. The 10-part series, which rocketed up both the Apple and Spotify charts at the end of 2024, offers an alternate reality for these parents, one in which autistic children who speak few or no words “possess gifts that defy conventional understanding, from telepathy to otherworldly perceptions, challenging the limits of what we believe to be real”.
