senior lecturer University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Abstract: In the waning weeks of 2024, a brand-new podcast shot to the top of the charts, eclipsing Joe Rogan to become the most popular in the nation: The Telepathy Tapes. This ten-episode series makes an extraordinary claim: that profoundly autistic and nonverbal adolescents and young adults – long considered severely cognitively impaired – are not only actually brilliant, but telepathic and clairvoyant. Despite the fact that evidence for these superpowers was obtained using a thoroughly debunked intervention called facilitated communication, the podcast has been uncritically embraced by millions of listeners, including parents, social media personalities – even Rogan himself. The Telepathy Tapes is not the first to assert what I have called the “intact mind” in autism. This paper contextualizes the podcast in the history of autism discourse, tracing the origin of this assumption, its stubborn persistence, and the harms it poses to severely intellectually and developmentally disabled people who will require a lifetime of intense care. Finally, what, if any, ethical obligations attach when disability, science, lived experience, and entertainment collide?
Keywords: autism, intact mind, Telepathy Tapes
Learning Objectives:
After participating in this conference, attendees should be able to:
understand the intact mind assumption in autism.
analyze popular media depictions of autism through the lens of the intact mind assumption.
identify the material harms that the intact mind assumption has had, and continues to have, on profoundly autistic and intellectually disabled individuals and their families.
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