Facilitated communication, or “FC,” is the supposed ability of people who can’t speak and are severely handicapped to “communicate” by having a “helper” guide them in pointing out letters or words. Wikipedia describes it this way:
Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique which claims to allow non-verbal people, such as those with autism, to communicate. The technique involves a facilitator guiding the disabled person’s arm or hand in an attempt to help them type on a keyboard or other such device that they are unable to properly use if unfacilitated.
There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person. The facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board and dowsing rods. Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object). In addition, in numerous cases disabled persons have been assumed by facilitators to be typing a coherent message while the patient’s eyes were closed or while they were looking away from or showing no particular interest in the letter board.
James Todd called facilitated communication “the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities.”
And indeed, I thought FC had been discredited a long time ago. (I posted about it here in 2017 when the idea was used as an excuse for sexual assault.) But no, it’s reemerged with the publication of new bestselling novel, Upward Bound, touted by, among others, the New York Times, which lately has a real penchant for woo. The novel (#305 on the Amazon overall list today) has drawn huge attention because the author, 28 year old Woody Brown, is severely autistic and cannot speak. Yet he got a degree in English from UCLA followed by an MFA degree at Columbia, doing all assignments through a facilitator—his mother Mary. She herself worked as a “story analyst for Hollywood studios.”
I’ve put a video below showing Brown “writing” by pointing at a letter board held by his mother, who then interprets the pointing. It’s not convincing.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The novel is below (screenshot goes to publisher).
And yes, the NYT appears to have bought the whole thing, assuming that Woody actually wrote the novel. Read their article by clicking below, or finding the piece archived here).
A couple of excerpts from the NYT:
Woody Brown knew he wanted to be a writer when he was 8 years old. Around that age, he made up stories about his alter ego, Cop Woody, a hero who went around saving people.
The tales stunned his mother, Mary Brown. She’d been reading to him since he was a baby, but never imagined that he could create his own elaborate plots.
As a toddler, Woody was diagnosed with severe autism. Doctors concluded he couldn’t process language, and said it was pointless to explain things to him or talk to him in complex sentences. Whenever Woody spoke, it sounded like shrieks and gibberish.
But Mary came to realize that her son understood more than he appeared to. He would become hysterical if they deviated from their daily routine, but if she explained why they had to stop at Target before getting lunch at McDonalds, he would calmly follow her into the store. At 5, Woody learned to communicate by pointing at letters to spell out words, using a laminated card. He began responding to Mary’s questions, first with single-word answers, and later with short sentences. When he started spelling out his Cop Woody stories, Mary recognized some of the plots, which were lifted from the headlines. Woody had been following the news on the TV and radio.
“That’s how Mom figured out that I was listening to everything,” Woody told me when we met on a recent morning at his parents’ home in Monrovia, Calif., where he lives. To express this, Woody tapped letters on a board with his right index finger, while Mary, who was seated next to him on the couch, followed his finger taps and repeated the words aloud.
When he learned to communicate by spelling, it felt like an escape hatch had opened, Woody explained.
“Miraculous discovery,” he spelled. “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open — left ajar, not flung wide, because the majority of people still doubted me.”
. . .While not strictly autobiographical, the stories in “Upward Bound” are shaped by Woody’s experience. He describes the agony of being unable to share his thoughts or control his verbal and physical tics, and the frustration of being underestimated by people who look at him and see an uncomprehending, mentally disabled person.
“I wanted to reach neurotypical readers, the well intentioned people who don’t realize that we are the same inside,” Woody explained. “I have all the thoughts, dreams, longings and intelligence as any neurotypical person. I just present a little differently.”
The author of the piece, Alexandra Alter, visited Woody and his mom, and describes the interview as if Woody himself were answering her questions by pointing at the letterboard. The only reference to the possibility that it’s Mary rather than Woody who is speaking is this:
Some of the communication methods Mukhopadhyay teaches have drawn criticism from language experts who argue that the person holding the board might be influencing or misinterpreting comments from a disabled person. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association doesn’t recommend the method, and put out a statement in 2019 warning that the resulting words might not reflect the disabled person’s intentions.
There are also skeptics who doubt someone as severely autistic as Woody can form and express sophisticated thoughts, much less write a novel.
Mary said she isn’t surprised some people question Woody’s abilities — it took her years to recognize what he was capable of. But she bristles at critics who say the way they communicate is harmful or manipulative.
“How on earth am I harming him?” she said.
Mary has also faced questions over whether she’s influencing or shaping Woody’s writing, which she insists she isn’t. When Woody is conversing, his finger flies across the board, but when he’s writing, Mary makes him spell out each word slowly. He can also type on a keyboard, but prefers to write with the letter board, because his poor fine motor skills make it hard to hit the right keys, and the time spent fixing typos makes him lose focus.
That’s the only reference in this long, glowing article to the possibility of facilitated communication, and there is no reference to the long, sad history of FC—a history that has made investigators almost universally say that it’s the facilitator and not the disabled person who is doing the “speaking.” (For a free Frontline documentary showing this, go here.)
Now it’s time for you to see Woody communicate. This video comes from NBC’s Today show, and Woody’s novel is breathlessly pronounced “deeply heartfelt and moving” and “authentic” by Jenna Bush Hager (W.’s daughter). Pay attention to the pointing by Woody and interpretation by Mary. Seriously, I cannot see at all a string of meaningful words.
As one correspondent wrote, “[Woody] is frequently not looking at the board while pointing, AND, when they show what he’s pointing to, it doesn’t correspond at all to actual words. I’m actually blown away that they showed this so clearly.” Indeed! Didn’t NBC get a bit dubious about this, much less the NYT, whose reporter saw the same thing? All I can say is that if this is really facilitated communication from Woody, it would be the first real facilitated communication ever documented. But it wasn’t tested, as they did no test on Woody. (They could, example, test his abilities by having Mary interpret things that only Woody knows, or using another facilitator.) Has Jenna even heard of facilitated communication?
Now I’m not ruling this out as authentic communication, but the demonstration above doesn’t increase my priors. Shame on the NBC for buying this without doubts.
Fortunately, at least two people wonder if Woody’s novel is his own composition or Mary’s. The first is Daniel Engber at the Atlantic, who wrote the critical article below (archived here if it’s paywalled).
Engber watched the NBC clip, and says this:
But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.
Katharine Beals, a linguist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania who has a son with autism, has studied Brown’s controversial method of communication since the early 2000s, and she has cataloged the ways in which it fails. She told me that she found the clip from NBC to be upsetting. Beals conceded that it can be hard in some cases to say whether such communication is real—but not in this one. “This isn’t subtle,” she said. “You can see that he’s not pointing to the letters.”
On YouTube, where the clip from NBC is posted, viewer comments are aggressive, ranging from ridicule to accusations of fraud. These are snap judgments based on a single, highly edited video; in the end, there is no way to prove or disprove from afar Brown’s capacity to write. But several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, have issued formal warnings against the use of Rapid Prompting, a training method for communication from which Brown’s approach is derived. “There is uncertainty regarding who does the spelling,” ASHA says. And given that the method may mislead, “children and their families can incur serious harm.”
Of course there is a strong desire by Mary, and all facilitated communicators, to believe that they’re merely translating someone else’s thoughts—all the more reason to do appropriate tests and controls.
More from Engber
I emailed Brown, directly and through his publisher, to request an interview and ask if he or his mother would explain the spelling process as it appeared on the Today show. I got an emailed statement back. “I can understand why people are curious—even skeptical—about my method of communication,” it said. The statement continues:It is mysterious and confounding to see a severely autistic nonspeaker perform acts of scholarship and fiction writing if you don’t presume intelligence in a disabled person. I have been using the same green board since I was in middle school and I find the letters and colors very calming. A keyboard requires specific aim and is unforgiving of error. I have a distinct brain but imperfect aim. This may look chaotic but in this way I keep up a steady rhythm with my finger that helps me stay on track. I am no savant. I came to novel writing like most published authors. I have read many books, attended good colleges, and got my MFA in writing at one of the country’s best programs. The only difference is that I communicate in a different manner.
Clinicians quickly came to understand that the method was susceptible to a very powerful “Ouija-board effect”: A facilitator could unwittingly deliver subtle and subconscious prompts—gentle pressure on a person’s wrist, perhaps—that shaped the outcome of the process. When the typers were subjected to formal “message-passing tests,” in which they would be asked to name an object or a picture that they’d seen while their helper wasn’t in the room, they almost always failed. Even kids who had produced fluid written work seemed incapable, under those conditions, of saying anything at all.
By 1994, the method was broadly disavowed. Yet a core group of true believers continued to promote its use. The New Jersey professor was among them. So was Mary Brown. In 2011, Mary posted on an autism-community website that her son’s use of facilitated communication had “helped him keep up at grade level.” The post has since been taken down, and FC has given way in recent years to its purportedly more reliable offshoots: Rapid Prompting and a similar approach called Spelling to Communicate. Now, instead of holding the speller’s hand, most facilitators hold the letter board instead. At first glance, the risk of influence seems less acute.
But wait, another fan of pseudoscience likes it! Yep, it’s RFK, Jr.:
ASHA has described Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate as bearing “considerable similarity” to FC and thus as “pseudoscience.” But a formal disavowal by experts simply isn’t what it used to be. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared himself a fan of these methods: Doubters are delusional, he said in 2021; they remind him of doctors who still deny the harms of childhood vaccines. In January, Kennedy appointed two letter-board users and an expert trainer in Spelling to Communicate to the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, an audio series about nonspeaking autistic children who allegedly display their telepathic and clairvoyant powers via letter board has been listed among Apple’s most popular podcasts for more than a year.
Sales of Upward Bound are soaring too. Following the Today show segment, Brown’s book reached Amazon’s top-10 list for books of any kind. This was preceded by a platinum-level rollout that included starred advance reviews, awestruck and largely uncritical features in The New York Times and The Guardian, and testimonials from A-list novelists including Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Rivka Galchen, and Mona Simpson. This is the kind of marketing that any debut literary author would kill to have.
Critics of Rapid Prompting and related methods are aghast. “This really feels like a crescendo,” Beals said. “It’s really, really out of control.”
. . . The problem is, reasonable doubts about the book have been overlooked as well—by Penguin Random House and by the media outlets that have hyped it. (The dewy-eyed feature in the Times does provide, in passing, an attenuated paraphrase of ASHA’s statement about Rapid Prompting.) Then there is the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work. Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”
It’s always unwise to take something on faith, particularly something that has been previously discredited and whose present instantiation can be tested but wasn’t. Although Engber likes the book and recommends it, he’s dubious about authorship. Likewise, I am not willing to accept Woody Brown as the author.
Neither is Freddie deBoer in the article he recently put up. Its title tells the tale (click to read):
deBoer is even more skeptical than Engber:
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novel Upward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.
The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests…. This is the inconvenient, damning reality.
So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling,” which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.
The Times article never grapples with the evidence. Instead, it substitutes anecdote for science: the mother “realized” her son understood more than expected; the facilitator “saw tension evaporate.” But these are precisely the kinds of subjective impressions that controlled studies were designed to test and, where appropriate, falsify. The best we get from the review’s author, Alexandra Alter, as far as an acknowledgement of FC’s discredited reality lies in these paragraphs:
It goes on, but you get the points: Woody is likely not composing anything himself, the writing is probably due to his mother, the NYT and NBC are uber-credulous, and the buying public, eager to embrace woo and a feel-good story, is making the book a best seller. Oh, and this credulous acceptance of a method discredited for years is harmful to autistic people, to science, and to reason as a whole.’
deBoer spends a lot of space attacking the NYT, as he’s done in the past, but he does give some insight into why the paper is touting FC so hard:
As with so many recent bad publicshing decisions, rehabilitating FC reflects the paper’s increasing dependence on a subscriber-driven business model, where maintaining the sensibilities and emotional investments of its core readership – affluent brownstone liberals who would prefer the pleasant version of reality, thanks – often takes precedence over adversarial truth-telling. In an earlier era, when advertising and broad retail circulation were more central to its finances, the Times had greater latitude to challenge its most dedicated audience. Today, with digital subscribers a) the dominant revenue base and b) heavily drawn from demographics that are highly educated, high income, and progressive-leaning, there’s a clear incentive not to alienate a readership that is drawn to narratives of underdog triumphs and redemptive uplift. Facilitated communication fits neatly into that worldview, offering a reassuring story about disability that flatters the moral intuitions of well-meaning readers while sidestepping the far more difficult reality. The result is a kind of audience capture that encourages credulity precisely where skepticism is most needed. Who wants to read a downer story about genuinely non-verbal, deeply disabled people on their phone while they ride the 4 train uptown to take Kayleigh to her $20,000/year dance lessons?
This may well explain the Times‘s recent touting of religion, whose factual claims could also be seen as pseudoscientific (indeed, Ross Douthat’s evidence for God, presented in the NYT, is based on science). It does no harm to criticize religion, for the NYT subscribers are likely soft on it. If they’re not believers, they’re “believers in belief”: people who aren’t themselves religious but see faith as an essential social glue essential for “the little people” who hold society together.But Ceiling Cat help you if you promote nonbelief!
h/t: Greg
Addendum by Greg Mayer
Let’s leave readers with a happier thought. I’m reading a novel, “Upward Bound,” written by a young man named Woody Brown who was diagnosed with severe autism as a child and thought to be incapable of sophisticated communication. He still struggles with speech, as our Times colleague Alexandra Alter explained in an excellent recent profile of him. But he’s an effective writer, complaining in “Upward Bound” about caretakers’ tendency to let their autistic charges idle “as if time means nothing to people who have nothing but time.” His book takes readers inside the thoughts of someone like him. And it’s a revelation that forces you to ask: How much do we overlook in people — how many gifts do we fail to nurture — by making overly hasty judgments? Woody’s mom believed in him. Then college and graduate-school professors did. Then editors. Tapping letters on a board to spell out his answers to Alexandra’s questions, he told her: “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open.” Now he’s free — and he’s flying.
[ Quote, bold added ]:
But she bristles at critics who say the way they communicate is harmful or manipulative.
“How on earth am I harming him?” she said.
[end quote ]
Oh boy. There’s a peek at the abyss in that quote.
“Blocked & Reported” had a good episode about this scam last week.
Thanks Mike, that’s Jesse Singal’s outfit isn’t it?
I’ll look that one up. Pseudoscience in medicine is utter rage bait for me, more table thumping than even …the good people of Palestine! 😉
best,
D.A.
NYC 🗽
This YouTube video, starting at 7:25, shows Woody working with his mother on the letterboard. The YouTube poster has taken the time to transcribe all of the letters Woody is actually pointing at and his mother’s “translation” of them. It’s clear the mother is just “putting words” in Woody’s mouth as the letters have little to nothing to do with his mothers’ translation.
This is useful, but the counter to that would be a claim that these letters are a shorthand code that the mother understands. Like the script of a courtroom stenographer.
But the test for that would be do to a bunch of these to see if the same letters are indicated when the same word is said.
A shorthand where you use more letters than the actual word you are conveying.
His mother could tell us what the shorthand is so we can verify, but I doubt she would.
Oh boy! Here we go again…bad ideas never go away.
So Mary Brown ghosted her son’s education and also the book? How well would any of that gone if she had just enrolled as herself and the book, how would it have been received if she’d just submitted it as her own writing? It’s “facilitated” stuff all the way down.
I thought of a possible experiment: use a subject from a non-English-speaking family, and a facilitator who only knows English. Will the facilitator be able to interpret messages in the subject’s language?
It’s amazing how a simple experiment like this would go a long way into vetting these claims.
Amusing anecdote along these lines. My father was a scientist, and many moons ago when I was a teenager I was into heavy metal music. My uncle, who was quite “spiritual” clamed that loud and jarring heavy metal music had been “proven” to actually make a person physically weaker.
My father asked him about the proof. My uncle replied that Dr. Wayne Dyer had done an “experiment where he had a strong young man hold a music CD in his outstretched hand, and Dr. Dyer would press down on it. When the young man had a heavy metal CD his hand, it was much easier to press down than when he was holding a classical music CD.”
So my father immediately asked whether the experiment was blind…as in did one or both participants know which kind of CD the young man held?
When it was clear that it probably wasn’t blind, me (and my Uncle) got a crash course in real science. We all gathered different music CDs and my father had me (and my other young relatives) hold them and have the adults pressing down..with nobody knowing the identity of the CDs (or if there even was a CD in the case). We did about 20 trials and the results were completely random..apparently Dr. Wayne Dyer was full of it.
And the final piece of education was seeing my Uncle refusing to back down from his claims and resenting the entire demonstration…
It is an obvious fake, and the people to claim to believe it are either unwilling to pop balloons, or they are fools.
No harm is done to this young man, but the mother is committing fraud whether she knows it or not.
I think exploiting your child is harmful, especially if the child has autism or other mental health issues. Having people come to film your child like he is a performing monkey would disturb a lot of people with autism.
I hope the mother checked with medical specialists first, to ask whether this would indeed harm her son before she started inviting strangers to record him.
I don’t know anything about the ins and outs of this supposed phenomenon but, if it has been discredited, it is yet another discredited thesis that seems, like a hydra, to regrow out of the mud. That vaccines cause autism is another. Why do some errant ideas simply refuse to go away? Is it because each new generation brings along with it a new crop of gullibles?
This reminded me a bit of the cases of Koko the gorilla, who was said by her owners/trainers to use sign language, and Kanzi the bonobo, who was said to be able to communicate via pointing to a sign board. When I watched the latter closely, I was similarly very suspicious about whether he was really pointing to what his trainers said he was pointing to.
Was thinking the exact same thing.
Of course the NYT was duped. I’m not sure why anyone thinks that serious journalism is regularly being practiced there. It may appear from time to time by accident but it is not the norm.
Case in point…the “World is Flat” Thomas Friedman wrote in the NYT the following about this “terrifying development in AI”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/opinion/anthropic-ai-claude-mythos.html
But this is overblown bollocks. Immediately after Anthropic announced this ominous warning, people immediately began testing these claims. Turns out, Mythos is only marginally better at these of tasks finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities than much simpler, already available AI applications. Tasks that LLMs have been capable of for years, so not even a new AI function…nowhere near the “flying car” promises of true artificial general intelligence.
Cal Newport has an excellent summary of this here:
https://calnewport.com/is-claude-mythos-terrifying-or-just-hype/
My questions as always is why the NYT couldn’t apply any skepticism or do any research themselves before letting Friedman publish his nonsense. I can understand why someone like him with no background in CS or AI would not have the wherewithal to test these claims, but not why the NYT doesn’t have people in-house with expertise on this subject.
So the NYT are, again, willing dupes in the agenda of some other group. In this case, they fell for the marketing claims of Anthropic, which seem engineered to incite more panic and thus more investment capital into a technology that looks to be overpromising but underdelivering.
Expecting a columnist to “know better’ because he is a “professor at Duke” is naive, to say the least. Many of know professors at elite universities who, at best, seem incapable of critical thinking. Or, as we say in the vernacular, “couldn’t find their own tuchis with both hands and a flashlight”.
No, it’s not naive. Bruni could have at least done a bit of Googling to see what is known about autism and this kind of communication. And “to say the least”? What more do you want to say? Please try to be more civil, thanks.
I just want to say that holding a professorship is not a guarantee of intelligence. It should be, and I agree with you that Bruni did not do his homework. You are right: I should be more civil, and I apologize.
There is a history of cases of allegations of abuse of disabled children, based on facilitated communication. They are summarized in Wikipedia. Like the history of supposed Satanic cults damaging children, people’s lives have been devastated by these allegations even when they are in the end disproved.
“Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object).”
As I started reading this piece, my thoughts turned immediately to a ouiji board, which was then mentioned soon after. Perhaps it’s telepathy 😉
Whilst I think someone who knows a person well, may be able to pick up subtle, personal, communication signals, that’s a long way from writing a book. The mother seems to be making claims just like those of ‘psychics’ who either use Barnham statements or pure guesswork to dupe people that they know things that they don’t.
A few years ago I read about a study where immobile people were being assisted to communicate with brain waves. The study showed that some people were fully compos mentis despite being unable to move. I hope that the study went on to help more people.
Sadly, I think that this mother has invested so much in her delusion that even if the lad failed to identify 100 objects she hadn’t seen, it wouldn’t convince her that she is wrong.
“Perhaps it’s telepathy.” Boy do I have a podcast series for you! The Telepathy Tapes by the filmmaker Ky Dickens. It was at one time the most popular podcast in America on Apple. All taken apart in exquisite detail by Zaid Jilani on his substack:
https://www.theamericansaga.com/p/the-telepathy-tapes-is-taking-america
“Across ten episodes, we’re treated to a whirlwind journey through the lives of nonverbal autistic kids…whose families claim that they can read minds.”
“And the secret to tapping into this long denied superpower is America’s network of spellers — autistic, nonverbal children [like Woody] who everyone had wrongly believed had severely limited communication skills. It turns out they were the key to tapping into a much broader collective consciousness, and maybe even speaking to the dead.”
But all accounted for by a combination of parental empathy, anti ableism activists, and the ideomotor effect.
These things really matter. Facilitators faking the expressions of nonverbal disabled people can have terrible consequences for the disabled person.
“The documentary Tell Them You Love Me, which can now be watched on U.S. Netflix streaming, documents the case of a man being sexually abused by a professor named Anna Stubblefield who used facilitated communication with him to gain his consent. In another case, a woman actually killed her son because she believed that he was typing out that he wanted to die.”
I hope you saw the wink after my telepathy comment 😁 I miss James Randi so much!
I don’t think I could handle watching Tell Them You Love Me. It would get me so angry and upset.
I was interested in the research about communicating through brain waves because, if I was compos mentis but unable to move or communicate directly, I would want to be offered the option of euthanasia. It would be a valuable way to communicate, unlike pseudoscience. IIRC that research involved asking patients to imagine playing tennis, and the exertion triggered in the brain gave a specific pattern of brain waves. They used those waves as a way for the patient to give yes/no answers to questions. Hopefully, the research has moved forward a lot since I read about it.
Ha yes I got the /s tone for sure! All I really wanted to do was chime in on your telepathy insight: Yes for sure serious people have helped develop brain implants that translate thoughts into action on a screen or by a motor. But other unserious people have claimed that profoundly disabled and nonverbal autistic people can read minds and can talk to the dead (!).
The frustrating thing is that this would be so easy to test, using the same methods that were used to definitively prove what’s going on in FC. The simplest way, requiring no special equipment or setup, would be to have 10 photographs of random objects in a sealed envelope. One at a time, you show the first five to Woody and Mary, and have Woody spell out what he sees, with Mary holding his letterboard. He would presumably go 5 for 5. Then you show him photo #6 with Mary out of the room. She comes back in, and helps Woody spell out what he saw. Repeat for 7-10. If he nails all 5 again, well then, we’ve got at least a plausible claim. (Of course, one could repeat it under more rigorously controlled circumstances later for confirmation, to rule out sophisticated cheating or leaking of information.) But if the last 5 photos tested this way produce 4 or 5 fails, as seems likely, then that basically tells you the answer. Of course, such failure would immediately be met by Mary’s excuses: Woody was stressed out by the testing protocol, she misunderstood his pointing, Woody was pulling a prank on the testers, etc. She will surely not be shaken from her beliefs. But the truth would be readily apparent to everybody else. Why didn’t anybody from the book’s publisher, or anybody from the NYT, or anybody from NBC propose such a test? It would take 10 minutes, and be fairly (though not absolutely) conclusive either way. One suspects that none of those involved actually wants to know what would happen.
” He can also type on a keyboard, but prefers to write with the letter board, because his poor fine motor skills make it hard to hit the right keys…” I used to be a fast and very accurate typist, but as I progress through my eighties, I increasingly suffer the same keyboard problem. Would I perhaps benefit from using a letter board and a facilitator? The experience reminds me that my old, physically disabled pal Lorenzo M. often referred to all the rest of us as TAs —-for Temporarily Abled.
Comment by Greg Mayer
The Frontline documentary I linked to in my addendum, Prisoners of Silence, demonstrates simple methods for testing whether the source of a “facilitated communication” is the facilitator or the communicator. It’s free to watch online.
The film also documents the harm that can come to all involved, especially in the cases of claimed sexual abuse, noted by Cransdale above. The infamous Anna Stubblefield case shows that FC can even lead to sexual abuse of the “communicator” by the facilitator.
The NY Times, by the way, had excellent coverage of the Stubblefield case based on several years of reporting by the very same Daniel Engber who now writes for the Atlantic. This makes it especially curious that Bruni (a Times columnist), Alter (the reporter for the Times’ recent piece), and, to a lesser extent, Stephens (also a Times columnist), would get it so wrong. The angle on a story must depend very much on who’s writing on it.
GCM
“And it’s a revelation that forces you to ask: How much do we overlook in people — how many gifts do we fail to nurture — by making overly hasty judgments? Woody’s mom believed in him. Then college and graduate-school professors did. Then editors. … Now he’s free — and he’s flying.”
The above excerpt from Bruni illustrates deBoer’s observation: “affluent brownstone liberals who would prefer the pleasant version of reality, thanks.” But it does more. It transforms severe autism from a neurological disability over which we have little control into a social ailment where “we” can do something. Gaps in our scientific understanding give way to personal and collective will to act. One only need believe; any remaining “failure” is largely ours. Autism thus becomes a moral problem—and a political one—amenable to intervention not only by parents but also by those of the knowledge class who largely traffic in words: teachers, professors, editors, publishers, columnists, and ultimately, government.
Let’s be on the right side of history. Free Woody.
Yes it’s fake. Why couldn’t these people a keyboard if the only problem was the inability to speak?
The comments at the NYT article are skeptical (I only looked at a few highly recommended ones).
I’m glad you brought this to our attention (I unsubcribed to the New Woke Times, b/c institutions decay and it is a classic case).
Hell. I thought FC was entirely debunked by… well everybody. I even remember seeing the documentary some years after it was made when I was reading a lot about autism.
Terrible. I see Jared and Ms. Colagirl above had the same thought I did about Coco the gorilla. Great minds think alike!
D.A.
NYC 🗽
To me one of the most interesting insights included in this post is from Freddy deBoer’s Substack piece regarding the editorial bias of the NYT. My former career was in advertising and I look at it from that point of view. No one has more to gain from understanding who the NYT readership is (or more to lose by MIS-understanding it) than the people who buy advertising. So when you open your Sunday NYT, notice all the ads from Bergdorf, Tiffany, Sotheby’s, Range Rover, Cartier, etc. Not Honda lawnmowers, not Ford pickup trucks, not Whirlpool washer/dryers, not WalMart. As Freddy said and the advertisers know, the audience is highly educated, high income, progressive leaning. And maybe that’s fine. But it explains why the NYT has blinders on when it comes to many issues.