Telepathy and Autism

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

[Author’s Note. This is a two-part blog. It would be best for you to read the first part and listen to the video whose link I have provided before going on to read the second part of this blog.]

Have you heard of The Telepathy Tapes? If not, you’re about to. I keep being urged by various professional friends of mine to listen to them, but I’ve always been too busy with more important things, such as filing my nails and remembering to take my inhaler, so as to continue breathing. However, after reading the following enthusiastic recommendation from a good friend of mine, I decided to put my nail clippers aside and listen to the first episode. Here’s what my friend sent to me to get me to sit on my duff and lend an ear, actually two, to a really amazing and provocative podcast…

I have been incredibly inspired over the last two weeks listening to all 10 one-hour episodes of The Telepathy Tapes. The host Ky Dickens describes how she embarked on a heart and mind-bending journey into the mysterious world of telepathy in non-speaking individuals with autism. 

She features personal stories and expert interviews, uncovering a phenomenon she never thought possible. Through a mix of personal anecdotes, scientific exploration, and interviews with experts like Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a Johns Hopkins-trained neuropsychiatrist, she unpacks the mysterious connection between parents and their non-speaking children who seemingly can read minds. 

The first episode takes you on a journey across the globe, meeting families who have experienced this phenomenon firsthand. These interviews bring listeners into a world where telepathy may not just be possible, but commonplace. 

This opens up a conversation about the potential of the human mind that mainstream science has largely ignored, inviting us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about communication and consciousness. So inspiring!!! And as word of this spreads rapidly, this has the potential to be a profoundly inspiring game-changer. I can't recommend these interviews highly enough.

You can find the first episode here:

All 10 episodes can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/@TheTelepathyTapes

The first episode in the series takes about 45 minutes. Like most podcasts, it has a series of annoying commercial interruptions, but you can click on them to skip them. So, when you have the time, sit back and enjoy learning about the connection between autism and telepathy.

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The first person (of three who almost insisted that I stop what I was doing and start listening to The Telepathy Tapes is a dear friend of mine named Deb. I knew that she had raised an autistic child, and that he had exhibited some evidence of telepathy or other paranormal abilities. So, when I decided to write this blog, I asked Deb if she would be willing to describe some of her experiences with her son, Patrick.  

What follows is her account of some of these uncanny experiences. I hope they will intrigue you and induce you to listen to more of these Telepathy Tapes about this fascinating phenomenon.

Patrick is my beloved "bonus" son, who I have raised, together with my husband, Bob, since he was a little tyke. He is now 34, and has been one of the greatest spiritual teachers in my life. He was largely non-verbal in his younger years, and it was then that he began to teach me how to communicate soul-to-soul. No words necessary. Just deep feeling, tuning in, and somehow reading the intuitive and spiritual cues that most of us verbal folk miss on a regular basis. For Patrick, speech was often not only confusing, but a distraction from his uncanny ability to tune into the most important things - that were felt, and not spoken - largely by the unseen world.

The first time his "sixth sense" gifts became crystal clear to me was at about age 8. I had retrieved a robin's nest that had fallen from a tree in front of our house during a storm, and brought it into the house to show it to him and have him touch and hold it. I then read him a story from the library about how mother robins built their nests, laid their brilliant blue eggs inside, and hatched their young. He watched and listened intently, but responded only with one word: "eggs." This one word made me very happy. At least it was a word, and he spoke. 

Over the next few days, we read the story several more times, and the nest continued to fascinate him. He stared and stared at it. It was what followed next that was something I will never forget. He gently pulled me by the hand to lead me outside (as he often did when he wanted something but could not communicate in words) - and led me to the underside of our deck in the backyard. There was nothing under the deck except some old gardening equipment of my Dad’s, and was not a place that we ever took Patrick to play. It was an unfinished area, muddy, and dark. He looked at me with wide eyes and repeated that one word: "eggs." 

I didn't know quite what to make of this, looked around, and saw nothing. I asked him what he wanted, as his receptive vocabulary always far exceeded his expressive vocabulary, and he then pulled my hand again, this time leading further under the deck to a corner where the muddy ground met the concrete foundation. I was more than a bit confused, and then I saw them: tiny blue robin's eggs, cracked, with sadly no viable chicks. I was stunned - not only because he led me there after touching the nest and hearing the story - but because the tree from which I had retrieved that nest was in the front of the house, and nowhere near that area. 

Of course these were eggs from a different nest, I thought, and I was happy because he was making an important connection between the nest, the story, and the eggs. But how did he know that those cracked blue eggs were there, in the dark corner of that muddy spot under our deck, where he never, ever went? Not only did he never go there, but it was quite difficult to even reach, and we kept him out of the yard most of the time anyway as he often "eloped," wandered, and had wandered off in the woods behind our house in the blink of an eye many times. Still quite startled, I led him back inside the house. After we were back inside, he insisted (again by pulling my arm towards the direction he wanted to go, this time more forcefully) that we put the nest (which he had picked back up) out onto our upper deck, and repeated the word "eggs."  

I tried to explain to him that mother birds liked to choose where they put their nests, that there was no tree there, and that the nest would be unprotected and would probably blow away. "Eggs," he repeated. 

I smiled, and we came back inside. Later that evening, my husband moved the nest up onto the railing of the deck, so that we could sweep the endless number of Maple "helicopter" seed pods that had whirled their way onto our deck that Spring. That was that - or so we thought.  

Patrick watched that nest each and every day, apparently hoping that a mother bird would take up residence in his nest, and lay her eggs there. Although endearing, it was almost painful to watch at times, as no mother robin in her right mind was going to lay a clutch of eggs in that location, and my husband and I secretly hoped that the wind would blow it away and it would be "out of sight, out of mind," so to speak. That was our mistake. 

Close to two weeks passed. Through wind, rain, and many more Maple helicopter pod aerial "bombings," that nest never moved more than an inch or two, and we could not explain it. There it sat, as if glued by some invisible force to the top of the deck railing. Patrick watched it each and every day. He just stared and stared at it, looking up to the sky every now and then as if to catch a glimpse of the mother bird that he desperately hoped would finally come flying by to determine that Patrick's recycled nest was acceptable, and lay her eggs there. Day after day he silently watched. 

One morning, I went upstairs after my morning coffee to wake him up for school. He opened his big blue eyes, smiled from ear to ear, and said, "eggs." His smile made my heart sing because he often did not smile or show positive emotion outwardly. Patrick ate very few foods at that time, so he was clearly not asking me for eggs for breakfast, as he never ate them. I smiled a big smile back at him, gave him a tight morning hug, and started to try to get him dressed for school - but he was not having any of it. He started screeching, moaning, flapping his hands (which he often did when he was excited, agitated, or frustrated), and loudly repeating the word "eggs" while insistently pulling me down the two flights of steps from his bedroom to our deck.  

"Eggs!" he yelled, sounding quite excited this time, looking again at his beloved nest. I gasped when I saw what I thought was absolutely impossible! A mother robin, sitting, quite contently, on "eggs." Tears of joy came rushing down from my eyes. I could hardly believe what I was seeing, and, more importantly, what I was feeling. How did this mother robin choose this "fixer-upper" nest that was sitting right there, out in the open, no tree in sight, completely unprotected by anything at all? But more importantly, as with the remnants of the cracked blue eggs under our deck, how did Patrick know they were there that morning? How did he know that she was there? 

Although we were able to see glimpses of the eggs underneath her, and watched her intently with Patrick every day, we never saw them hatch or fledge. We came home one day after a bad rainstorm, and the nest was just gone. Although we looked and looked, we could find nothing, and never knew what became of them. But the bigger question in our minds was exactly how Patrick had "known" all of this. We could not explain it then, and we cannot explain it now - at least not completely. We just knew, that he knew. And if this seems extreme, I would be the first to agree that it was. 

I believe, however, that Patrick's strong intuition and ESP had likely been a part of his inner life for quite some time, but we were unaware of his experiences as there was no way he could tell us about them. We simply had to be led by the arm, by Patrick, and shown. Something "extreme" was needed to get our attention. This was the first of many times over the years to come, that Patrick "led" us to things he intuitively knew, especially about the natural world around him, as well as the humans that he could not communicate with verbally. At that time, he could not speak much at all, spell, count, or dress himself, did not use a communication device (these were not nearly as commonly used then as they are now), was still in diapers, and could not do much of anything else that a neurotypical 8-year-old could do, but he could do that. It wasn't wishful thinking. He really did that.

This opened our eyes and hearts to many other similar experiences, both big and small, over the coming years. We kept journals about everything regarding Patrick's in-home behavioral program, the team we had hired, and the expert autism consultants we searched for around the country who were few and far between back then. We made it a point after the "sixth sense eggs occurrence" as we called it, to add entries about many of these "anomalous" experiences. This came naturally to us given our academic training, as did a healthy amount of skepticism, but over the years, Patrick made believers out of us.