by Julia Mossbridge, Maria Welch, and Jeff Tarrant
Nonspeaking individuals have been widely misunderstood for decades (if not centuries). Regardless of whether the speech difficulty arises from autism, developmental delay, or stroke, people often assume that nonspeakers lack the capacity for complex thought or self-awareness. These assumptions have shaped educational practices, clinical approaches, and public perception, reinforcing the belief that an inability to speak reflects an inability to think. As a result, when some non-speakers demonstrate the ability to communicate through alternative methods—such as spelling on a letterboard, often with the support of a communication partner—their efforts are frequently met with skepticism. Critics question the validity of these messages, suggesting the responses may be unconsciously influenced or directed by the communication partner, rather than independently produced. However, a growing number of case reports and exploratory studies are challenging these assumptions by investigating an even more provocative possibility: that some nonspeakers with autism may be accessing and communicating their own thoughts as well as information they derive telepathically. This article examines the limitations of traditional testing approaches and explores emerging research into the nature of these communications.
One of the repeated requests of those who help nonspeakers learn to spell out their thoughts is “presume competence.” This request is necessary because humans have a natural bias to presume incompetence in interpersonal interactions when they see another person have a difficult time regulating and moving their bodies. We assume that physical grace is related to higher emotional intelligence (Dogerlioglu-Demir et al., 2023), for instance, because we want to trust that what is seen on the outside is paralleled on the inside. This works as long as the body is in a good working relationship with the mind’s intentions – but not when there is an intent-body disconnect. This can be a logical assumption some of the time – if someone is moving roughly or speaking ungracefully around others, perhaps they are signaling they just don’t want to be social. But this assumption can easily be wrong. There are three different systems that have to work together in the brain to create appropriate social movement: learning, desire, and ability. When we see someone behaving in ways that appear socially awkward or “inappropriate,” it is difficult to know which one of these systems might be involved.
Ability as the Bottleneck in Apraxia with Autism
Imagine a man at a dance party. He has learned how to dance socially, he wants to dance, and nothing is preventing him from dancing the way he wants to at that party – all three systems are working well (Figure 1, top), and others find his dance appropriate and fun. We draw the conclusion that he has a high emotional IQ (EQ), and he is more likely to be accepted as a CEO or spokesperson for a company (Dogerlioglu-Demir et al., 2023). Now imagine the same man (Figure 2, bottom), but without having learned appropriate movement (perhaps he grew up in a family that did not demonstrate appropriate movement), or without the desire to move appropriately (maybe he’s in a crappy mood and wants to be left alone), or without the ability (maybe he has one of several neurological movement disorders). We see his dance and know it isn’t appropriate – and we often leap to the conclusion that it is either a lack of learning about social dance, a lack of desire to dance, or some superficial ability to move appropriately (like a pulled muscle) that is getting in his way. Why? Because those reasons were more commonly the case for those of us who grew up in schools without integrating severely autistic and apraxic children. Many of us are not aware of the prevalence of apraxia, a neurological disorder that makes intentional movements very difficult, so we make incorrect assumptions based on what we know.
Here’s a real-life example of social misunderstanding that can occur often in the lives of families impacted by autism, which is often accompanied with apraxia. John is a bright eight year-old who loves life and his family. He does not speak to communicate because he has full-body apraxia that largely impacts the motor control needed for producing speech sounds. John is excited because his big sister is getting married, and he knows from listening to conversations that his mom, Faye, has waited for this moment for years. They are together at the bridal shower in a beautiful old Italian-style home on a peaceful lake. Faye recalls all of her daughter’s accomplishments during her younger years and realizes this day is the culmination of all those days of her growing into the woman she has become. But Faye is jarred back to reality when the whirlwind John bursts into the room with no acknowledgement of the social expectation of quiet. He runs up to the gift table, clearing it with one swoop of his hand, then immediately climbs under the table to hide with his head down and bottom pointed to the ceiling. Shower attendees make all sorts of assumptions about John: “His parents must have no skill in parenting or respect for the venue.” “John must be cognitively slow and unaware of others, their intent or their feelings.” “John is a bad boy and will probably end up in prison.” How sorry they felt for his sister on this monumental day. They feel he should be punished for what he has done.
Apraxic bodies that don’t speak well are often not in control of their actions, and appear to be less aware of others’ presence. This was the case with John. He was in fact fully aware of all the people in the room. He understood what this shower meant to his sister and parents, but he could not control his body at all, especially when he and his family were so excited. He felt shame and disappointment in himself. It had happened again… he had disrupted or possibly fully ruined another family event. Such a frustrating body he had.
With speech apraxia, many people take this disability very personally because speech is a key social skill. Even parents of a child whose neural systems are not working well together can assume there’s a learning problem or a desire problem, when in fact there is often simply an ability problem. This is exactly the case for most of the nonpeaking autistic population we’ve observed. In many cases, when parents discover that the meanings of words are already understood and there is a desire to communicate despite an extreme difficulty to speak, they are hugely relieved. Parents make this discovery through methodologies like Rapid Prompting Method, Spelling To Communicate, or other lexical spelling methods that support the child with a communication partner who works with the child over the course of years to move toward independently typing what they wish to say. Parents with this experience can be excited, relieved – and also often scared to believe it.
At this stage of their discovery process, parents are in a precarious situation. They so want to believe that the motor control piece is all that is missing in their children; they have already begun to find evidence for that. At the same time, it feels so revolutionary that it could be too good to be true. This is when parents’ efforts to understand their child can be negatively influenced. For example, one researcher in the field suggests that undue pressure to stay away from spelling methods is being unethically applied to parents (Graber, 2024) by methodologists in the speech and language pathology field, largely through the recommendations of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (2018). These recommendations include warnings that spelling methods may cause harm, and these ideas can be promulgated by many school district administrations.
Perhaps as a result of such pressures, many people remain skeptical of the idea that nonspeaking individuals possess intact—or even exceptional—cognitive abilities. The suggestion that these abilities can be accessed through alternative communication methods like spelling is often dismissed as wishful thinking rather than accepted as a valid means of understanding their inner world. Making things more confusing, for a minority of children, learning word meanings/spelling/grammar and/or the desire to communicate may in fact be impaired—and parents may fear this is the situation for their own child.
From Message-Passing to Mind-Discovery
Parents may be unsure about testing to see if their child is really communicating on their own, because the results might show that the child isn’t actually sharing their own thoughts—something that could be very painful and suggest their child has serious cognitive challenges. This fear can lead them to not try spelling at all or to abandon spelling after starting it. Alternatively, it might lead parents to continue using a spelling method, but never want their child to perform any sort of verification test that their child is spelling out their own thoughts, because they fear this verification test might reveal that the child’s communication partner (oftentimes the parent) is actually cueing all of their responses.
The standard for verification of message authorship is a “message-passing test,” a poorly named attempt to determine whether a nonspeaker is responding solely to communication partner cues. Passing the test means the nonspeaker must, like a parrot, spell the word or phrase that was just shown to them – and they must do this without the communication partner seeing it. For those who have speech apraxia reproducing an exact message is difficult as the motor, word retrieval, and repetition of intentional language is challenging. Further, for most of the history of the message-passing test, incompetence was presumed – so the test was administered without any consideration of the type of information the child is most interested in or can remember most easily (e.g., auditory, visual, movement stimuli, etc.). It therefore had a tendency to fail (Pavon, 2023), producing even more parental doubt. Recent advances in message-passing test design take these factors into account, and they have revealed that most nonspeakers with autism and severe apraxia can pass the test, and do clearly convey their own thoughts via spelling, even when their communication partners aren’t aware of the information they were told when their communication partner was not in the room (Pavon, 2023). This work is so recent, and frankly so different from prior work that fails to presume cognitive capacity among nonspeakers, that researchers are still working to determine the best approach to verifying authorship among nonspeakers.
This work is so recent, and frankly so different from prior work that fails to presume cognitive capacity among nonspeakers, that researchers are still working to determine the best approach to verifying authorship among nonspeakers.
Mind Discovery
Our research team is using an Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved approach to replicate and expand on these more engaging approaches to the message-passing test. In our approach, we give a little latitude in that our intent is to have the nonspeaker report on what they perceived in a target stimulus rather than providing exact wording. We presume cognitive and social-emotional competence among nonspeakers, so the message-passing test feels more like a “mind-discovery” trial, because with it, we are learning more about nonspeakers’ minds. So far, our results are impressive to parents and other researchers who have been able to observe our more rigorous pilot studies. A mind-discovery trial is a way to discover more about the minds of nonspeakers without immediate concern about telepathy or exceptional performance (but see next section).
The protocol for a typical “mind-discovery” trial is simple, and it continues to evolve as nonspeakers inform the research team about what works for them. This brings up a fundamental aspect of the protocol – we consider the nonspeakers we work with to be a critical part of our research team, and we think of them as co-researchers. So far, all of our co-researchers for mind-discovery trials are part of the speech and language pathology practice of Maria Welch, one of the co-authors of this paper, though we have given protocols and materials to several other families to experiment with at home.
There are two rooms and three individuals required by the protocol (Figure 2), Room 1 (where the nonspeaker or NS stays throughout the trial) and Room 2 (where the communication partner [CP] and the storyteller [ST] go) to leave the NS with the other co-researcher during appropriate times in the protocol. These rooms can be separated by any distance (including thousands of miles, using teleconference software for the ST but not the CP). For formal trials, we suggest rooms that have doors that close, do not share a joining wall, contain no windows where the other room can be seen, and are at least 20 feet away from each other. In Welch’s clinic, such rooms are readily available (and again, Zoom can work for Room 2 for the ST if the NS can regulate themselves with only the ST present on a screen).
At the beginning of a trial, there is a team meeting in which the NS, CP, and ST meet to discuss the trial. The trial is briefly explained to the NS, and the NS is asked if they would like to do the trial. If they would not, then another kind of project (perhaps a telepathy trial, see below) can occur. If the NS wants to continue, then the NS is asked whom they would like to be the ST and whom they would like to be the CP (if using Zoom, the ST must be the person on Zoom). Once the NS says they are ready, the CP leaves for Room 2. Once the CP is in Room 2, a randomly selected stimulus that has not been presented previously is presented to the NS on their device in Room 1. This is usually a story-like song, video, image, or brief essay. The ST observes the stimulus with the NS more than once. Once the NS says they are ready for the CP to return, the stimulus is removed from the device, the ST and CP switch places, and now the ST (who knows the stimulus) is out of earshot and visual range of the NS (who also knows the stimulus) and the CP (who does not). Questions appear on the NS’s device in Room 1, and the CP supports the NS in answering 2 to 4 questions. The questions can be multiple choice between several alternatives or free response, depending on the needs of the NS. At least one question asks for additional elaboration and is open-ended. These open-ended questions are where mind-discovery comes in for those students who can freely respond using spelling. From the answers to free-response questions, we learn from the NS what the stimulus made them think about. All responses can be scored via independent human judges or via AI using the approach innovated by our collaborator Damon Abraham (Mossbridge et al., 2025). Finally, when the NS says they are done responding, the ST returns to the room and the team debriefs (Figure 3).
Whenever possible, we use materials of interest to the nonspeaker, methods of communication that work for the nonspeaker, and the choice of CP and ST personnel by the nonspeaker. Recently, in a successful mind-discovery trial, the stimulus was a story about Notre Dame. When his communication partner returned to the room and the storyteller had left the room, the nonspeaker told his communication partner about Gothic cathedrals. He expressed his wish that Notre Dame would be rebuilt after the fire, even though the story did not mention the fire. This helped us learn that he knew more about the topic than we thought. We asked him if he thought anything needed to change at this point with the protocol, and he spelled, “All good.” We were relieved – he had many good ideas for improvement up until this point, so much so that the process of creating the protocol led to more mind-discovery for everyone.
Telepathy as an Extension of Mind Discovery
In her spelling sessions with her students, Maria had continual experiences of her students telling her about aspects of her life she had never shared with them. She had already done some work with Dr. Diane Hennacy and had been interviewed on The Telepathy Tapes podcast about these experiences. Meanwhile, co-authors Jeff Tarrant and Julia Mossbridge were already familiar with the controlled laboratory research on psychic capacities and had conducted some research with exceptional human performers themselves. So The Telepathy Tapes documentary team asked to film our research team doing our mind-discovery research with Maria’s students – with a focus on using telepathy trials as an additional mind-discovery tool.
The protocol for a typical “telepathy-discovery” trial is based on the mind-discovery protocol worked out with the nonspeakers, and is as similar as possible to the mind-discovery protocol while still rigorously exploring nonspeaker telepathy (Figure 4). It relies on two rooms and three personnel: the nonspeaker (NS), the communication partner (CP) and the sender (S). The NS and the CP remain in Room 1 throughout the trial, while the S only meets with the NS and CP in Room 1 for team meetings at the beginning and end of the protocol. The rest of the time, the S is in Room 2, trying to connect lovingly with the nonspeaker and sending them a stimulus, while in Room 1, the NS works with the CP to answer questions about what the S is sending. For formal telepathy-discovery trials, we use the same distance and precautions against auditory or visual leakage as in a mind-discovery trial. If the S is on Zoom, they must turn off their camera and audio during the time they are reading the story and during the time the NS is answering the questions about the story
Thus far, this telepathy-discovery protocol has been successful with multiple students in our pilot studies. It’s early days, but we have established that the S can be another nonspeaker, a parent, the usual communication partner, even a stranger – whomever the NS chooses as the sender. We stress the importance of connecting lovingly between rooms, because we believe that feelings of unconditional love are key to positive, exceptional human performance. Love may not just boost accuracy (as in [6]), but it very often seems to ensure a good experience for the whole team. More importantly, we have learned more about the unique experiences of the S with respect to how they feel when they are attempting to send a message to each different NS – and we have again learned about the minds of nonspeakers in terms of how each unique nonspeaker accesses information telepathically. Some nonspeakers seem to pick up more of the visuals, others are more interested in audio, and still others focus on particular words. Whatever comes through we assume is the most interesting aspect of the stimulus to them, and based on co-author Julia Mossbridge’s prior work indicating that stimulus interestingness supports anomalous information reception (Mossbridge et al., 2024), this assumption is grounded empirically as well.
We also have learned a lot from researcher errors. For example, we have mis-associated the questions being asked with a story being sent from the other room when we were co-researching with a NS who is primarily visual. No one knew this was the case until the debriefing meeting. So, the NS had to respond to a question with a choice that was not appropriate for the story. The story was about airplanes, with a picture of a sleek jet fighter, but the choices to describe the topic did not include airplanes. The question posed to the NS was, “Was the story read in the other room about: a photograph, a piano, a surfboard, a whirlwind, or a mountaintop?” The NS chose “surfboard,” which looked a lot like the jet fighter. Interestingly, using AI cosine similarity scoring with our co-researcher Damon Abraham (Mossbridge et al., 2025), in the results from formal trials, we will be able to quantify the similarity between the picture of the jet and a surfboard, and compare that similarity to the similarity between all the other choices and the picture.
Nonspeakers and Communication Partners as Co-Researchers
Finally, we’d like to close with the importance of working with trained and supportive communication partners (perhaps as separate from parents) and interested nonspeakers as research partners. We have found that working directly with parents without the buffer of a communication partner or teacher can lead to misunderstandings and concerns about the project or its goals. Working with a speech-language pathologist who has been trained to help nonspeakers move toward independence may be key to engaging nonspeaker input into the protocols that will best work for them. And if nonspeakers are not presumed to be cognitively competent enough to have their own opinions about the protocol being used to understand their minds, it is not clear why the mind-discovery or telepathy-discovery trials would be useful in the first place. After all, the decision has been made by the experimenter that they themselves already know best.
How was running a 4-minute mile discovered to be a real human capacity? Big Hawk Chief, a Pawnee runner famous in 1876, was not believed to have really run his 3-minute 58-second time (Sears, 2015). It took a progression of technology and publicity—stopwatches, videos, stories in the news, and finally acceptance of Roger Bannister breaking the ribbon within 4 minutes in front of many witnesses at Iffley Road Track. Really, this was a case of participatory science—the witnesses believed what they observed under controlled conditions and reported their findings. As we move toward formal trials, continuing to explore exceptional human abilities within the ethical framework of participatory science is not just groundbreaking—it is essential for understanding minds that currently lie beyond our comprehension. In closing, we encourage everyone to consider how participatory science can become the new normal in our lives and work (see the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences).
Acknowledgements
We are first grateful to the parents and students (our co-researchers) who have given their time, emotional space, and full selves to allow this research to become successful. This study could not occur without generous gifts from an anonymous donor as well as Steve Fields, and we are grateful to all future donors who hope to help us bring this work to fruition. The co-authors of this article are grateful to the entire extended research, software, and administration team, which also includes Damon Abraham, PhD, Natalia Meehan, David Joffe, Mary Ann Harrington/Anthony, Polly Washburn, Joseph Mossbridge, and Eric Smith, PhD. We also thank TILT: The Institute for Love and Time for administering the grant, Ky Dickens and Nicole Daniele of The Telepathy Tapes for introducing the three co-authors, and the following organizations that do not necessarily have an opinion about this particular work and are publicly affiliated with at least one of the authors:
JM: University of San Diego Dept. of Physics and Biophysics, Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, the Alfred Lee Loomis Innovation Council at the nonpartisan Stimson Center, American DeepTech, Mossbridge Institute;
MW: The Welch Practice, Inc., American Speech and Hearing Association, Mossbridge Institute, University of Virginia;
JT: NeuroMeditation Institute, Psychic Mind Science and Expanded States of Consciousness Research Institute.
Dogerlioglu-Demir, K., Ng, A. H., & Koçaş, C. (2023). Gracefully yours: Would snap judgments of one’s subtle graceful movements lead to inferences about their emotional intelligence? Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 75, 103484. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2023.103484
Graber, A. (2024). Ethics dialogue: Spelling to communicate – Reply by Abraham Graber. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-024-01022-z
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2018). ASHA warns against Rapid Prompting Method or Spelling to Communicate. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. https://www.asha.org/slp/asha-warns-against-rapid-prompting-method-or-spelling-to-communicate/
Pavon, G. (2023). Probing facilitated communication beyond the state of the art: New scientific approaches to test limits, potentials and underlying mechanisms (Doctoral dissertation, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom). https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/52453/
Mossbridge, J., Cameron, K., & Boccuzzi, M. (2024). State, trait, and target parameters associated with accuracy in two online tests of precognitive remote viewing. Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition, 4(1), 88–121. https://doi.org/10.31156/jaex.24743
Mossbridge, J. A., Green, D., French, C. C., Pickering, A., & Abraham, D. (2025). Future dreams of electric sheep: Case study of a possibly precognitive lucid dreamer with AI scoring. International Journal of Dream Research. Advance online publication. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/IJoDR/libraryFiles/downloadPublic/854
Sears, E. S. (2015). Running through the ages. McFarland.
Welcome to Mindfield 17(2) on neurodivergence and communication. In their editorial, Jacob W. Glazier and Anastasia Wasko highlight the popularity of The Telepathy Tapes, connecting public interest and research in neurodivergence with extrasensory communication. They urge honoring the humanity of neurodivergent people while imagining a future that integrates psi into everyday life. They also present …
by Diane Hennacy with Jacob Glazier and Anastasia Wasko
by Julia Mossbridge, Maria Welch, and Jeff Tarrant
