Why the Telepathy Tapes Matter

Or, taking the science of our interconnectedness seriously

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“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” — Bertrand Russell

“You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop.” — Rumi

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A woman sits in the kitchen with a deck of cards. Her son is in the living room on the other side of the house, where he has no ability to see, hear, or communicate with his mom. The woman flips over a card, and from the other room, the son guesses the number on the card correctly. Unlikely coincidence, but not impossible. We repeat the process 20 times, and with it comes another 20 guesses - all accurate. We’ve now moved into the realm of the impossible; to the place where it’s either a hoax or science fiction.

But what if it’s true?

If you aren’t familiar with it, there is a podcast called the Telepathy Tapes that tells this exact story, putting forward an incredibly provocative claim: that non-speaking autistic individuals have the ability to communicate telepathically.¹ The podcast takes us on an investigative journey that seeks to not only substantiate this claim, but to open our minds to an even more world-shattering view: that we are all connected at a layer of universal consciousness.

Hard to believe, I know. But what if we suspended disbelief? Not to accept the claims outright, but instead to stop momentarily and “hang a question mark on the things [we] have long taken for granted.”

Today, we take it as a given that materialism (the idea that everything in the universe, including thoughts and emotions, can be explained by physical matter and its interactions) is true. The resulting conclusion is that consciousness is purely a product of brain activity and that what we perceive is more or less what exists. But what if these assumptions are incomplete?

For millennia, mystics across cultures have described a universal interconnectedness. Strikingly similar accounts have emerged independently from opposite sides of the globe. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the Telepathy Tapes invite us to consider these ancient insights more seriously. Questions once dismissed as “woo” may hold profound truths: Is enlightenment real? Is consciousness independent of the brain? Is there a unifying force that connects us?

There is a wonderful book by Chuck Klosterman called But What If We’re Wrong that attempts to evaluate the present from the vantage point of the future. It poses the following question: if we were to speak with our descendants (let’s say people living in the year 3,000 AD), what would they think is absolutely crazy that we believe in 2025? Potentially, a lot. History easily illustrates the point. We don’t have to look that far back to have similar “wtf, how did they believe that” observations. Geocentrism. Smoking isn’t bad for you. The earth is flat. The miasma theory of disease. The list goes on.

I expect that our materialist worldview will be on that list.² The Telepathy Tapes are important not because they prove telepathy is real (they don’t), but because they push us to revisit our assumptions about the world. They are important because they invite us to take questions about the nature of consciousness and the science of our interconnectedness more seriously.

Below, I make a first attempt at doing this - at approaching the topic with curiosity and the eye of a scientist rather than with a closed mind. Not because I have definitive answers, but because I believe these questions are profoundly worth asking. More than that, I suspect the answers have the potential to be essential in our pursuit of creating a future that promotes human flourishing.

So let’s approach the topic with humility and see what we learn.

We don’t perceive Reality.

To take the question of materialism seriously, we need to first understand human perception and its relationship with reality. This is best explored through a simple thought experiment.

Imagine you had to process all the information in the world around you before making a decision. The temperature of the air that is gently blowing on your face. The soft humming sound of the light above you, which is interrupted by the distant bird chirping outside. Your resting heart rate as you read this piece…

It would be impossible to make decisions on the timeline required for survival. There would be too much information to process and simultaneously take action. Had we operated that way, our ancestors would have all been eaten by lions a long time ago.

Fortunately for us, this isn’t how our perception works. Instead, we operate on heuristics and predictions, trading accuracy for speed and efficiency - and the results are pretty astonishing. We not only survive, we thrive.

But this efficiency comes at a cost: we disregard vast amounts of information and prioritize survival over truth. Donald Hoffman’s research, for example, suggests that evolution's primary concern in shaping our senses was usefulness, not accuracy (for a good intro, see his TED Talk). Similarly, the concept of umwelt - an organism’s subjective sensory world - illustrates how reality is experienced differently across species. A bat navigating via echolocation perceives a fundamentally different world than a human (see Ed Yong’s An Immense World for more).

So, let’s take it as a given that humans don’t internalize all the information in their environment and thus don’t perceive the full spectrum of reality (what I will call capital R reality) as it is. This gives rise to a simple question: What would we learn if we did take in all that other information? What would it have to tell us about ourselves and the universe?

But what if we can perceive Reality?

The simplest way to answer this question would be to speak with someone capable of accessing this information stream. This brings us to a second question: Are there examples of humans who are capable of taking in more of this information than the average neurotypical brain?

The answer is yes, and a closer look at where this is the case leads to some interesting observations about the phenomena reported in the Telepathy Tapes.

One of my favorite researchers is a woman named Alison Gopnick. She wrote a book called The Philosophical Baby (for a great synopsis of the book and her research, check out this podcast). In it, she outlines the perspective that while most people tend to think of kids as an underdeveloped form of adult consciousness, that is entirely wrong. In fact, kids are a wildly superior form of consciousness, just along different dimensions.

The poetic analogy she uses is that a child’s consciousness is like a lantern - it softly lights up everything around it, casting attention on all the contours of its surrounding environment. If you’ve ever spent time with a kid, this makes sense. Kids are taking in everything. They can’t help but be present in their current experience. Adult consciousness, on the other hand, is more like a spotlight. It disregards most of the surrounding environment, instead focusing all of its energy on one particular target. It lights up one spot with great detail and, in so doing, can operate with a high degree of capability in that area.

The more analytical analogy Gopnick uses comes from computer science: the explore vs. exploit tradeoff. Kids are optimized to explore. They are taking in information (lots of it) to build their model of the world, which is why they can learn so rapidly. Adults are optimized to exploit. They use what they have learned and deploy it efficiently. Neither is right or wrong - the critical observation is that it’s impossible to do both simultaneously.

If we look at brain functionality, it tells an interesting story that (at least intuitively) aligns with Gopnick’s framing. After a child is born, it undergoes a rapid phase of growth in synaptic connections, reaching a peak of ~1,000 trillion synaptic connections by the age of 2 to 3 years old. From there, the brain starts the synaptic pruning process, whereby weaker connections are eliminated, and stronger ones are reinforced. The result is that, by the time you’re an adult, on average, you’ll have 500 trillion connections (~50% of the childhood peak). In other words, we start with an incredibly dynamic innate neurological range (e.g., a brain that is optimized to take in as much of the information about the world around us as possible) and, over time eliminate much of it to operate more efficiently in the world.

So are young kids experiencing capital R reality in ways that adults are not? Most 2 year olds cannot speak eloquently on this topic, so we can’t ask them directly, but my intuition is yes. Fortunately for us, there are a few other categories of people who illustrate brain functionality similar to that of a child who are capable of communication. Perhaps more importantly, they all report incredibly similar characterizations of the reality they are experiencing and the idea that we are connected at some fundamental level.

These groups include:³

Deep meditators. Scans (e.g., fMRI) of an individual in deep meditation show increased communication between brain regions that don’t usually interact (i.e., there is communication occurring outside the well-worn synaptic pathways). This phenomenon is also accompanied by a decrease in activity in what is called the default mode network, or DMN, which is associated with self-referential thinking (i.e., the part of the brain that conceptualizes you as an independent, thinking self).

People on psychedelics (like psilocybin mushrooms). Brain scans show that there are strong similarities between a deep meditator and an individual on psychedelics, like non-standard synaptic interactions and lower DMN activity.

Autistic individuals. One of the most common characteristics associated with the brains of autistic individuals is a lower level of synaptic pruning (and thus higher connectivity), in particular in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. It’s almost like their brain never transitions from the explore to exploit orientation that is required to operate as a fully functional adult in the physical world.

Wait a second. Aren’t the Telepathy Tapes about autistic individuals? Yes, they are. And it’s doubtful that is a coincidence.

Deep meditators, people on psychedelics, and autistic individuals all illustrate brain patterns that rhyme. And while they get there in different ways, they also all report a very similar framing for the nature of Reality and consciousness.

For meditators, one potential explanation for what’s happening is that the ability to eliminate the noise from external stimuli (in large part by focusing on your inner world) allows your nervous system to feel safe enough to take in portions of the information that it would otherwise eliminate. You develop the capacity to return to that childlike state, as the mechanisms you’ve installed to survive can be relaxed.

For psychedelics, the compounds in the drugs act like nuclear weapons for the psyche (unpacking this is a topic for another day). This can lead to a range of outcomes, but fundamentally they are increasing the volatility of information processing functions in the brain, which opens the aperture for experiencing reality in ways that are otherwise closed off.

Autistic individuals, on the other hand, are born with a different brain design. Historically, we concluded from this that severe autism resulted in underdeveloped intelligence (in the same way we’d characterize a 2-year-old as being an underdeveloped adult). Until recently, people far out on the autism spectrum (e.g., non-speakers, which are the focus of the Telepathy Tapes) could not communicate about their experience, and so this conclusion about their capabilities remained intact.

That communication gap changed over recent years, though with the advent of “spelling” (which is when autistic individuals communicate by pointing to letters on a board or using a keyboard to spell out words).⁴ And it turns out, now that autistic individuals can communicate, they report experiences that are fully in line with other people who have taken in this “extra” information from the world around them. Read any story about deep meditative practice, and you’ll hear reports about students saying that their guru could read their mind (for two more contemporary accounts of this checkout Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda and Be Here Now by Ram Dass). Speak with anyone who is well-versed in psychedelics, and you’ll hear stories about experiencing our universal connection. Now, we can add the reports from autistic individuals to the list.

Does all of this mean that consciousness is an independent thing that underpins the entirety of existence? Is telepathy real, and do we all have the ability to tap into it? Skeptics will say no, and I understand that skepticism. The above isn’t definitive proof. It’s not information drawn from rigorous scientific analysis (and for the nerds out there, it admittedly doesn’t meet David Deutsch’s definition of a good explanation).

That being said, it fits together incredibly well. Neurotypical humans disregard most of the information around them to function in the world. This isn’t a bad thing, in fact, it’s an evolutionary requirement for survival. Under certain circumstances, neurotypical brains are able to hit the “on” switch for this information stream, but it has historically been the exception and not the rule. Non-speaking autistic individuals sit on the other side of this adaptive spectrum. Their brains are wired in a way that allows them to pick up on a whole range of information that neurotypicals disregard. This gives them seemingly remarkable abilities (like telepathy), but the tradeoff is a lack of capability on "normal" functionality. Without support, they would get eaten by the lion (in the same way a 2-year-old would), but that’s because their input stream is overwhelming the other parts of their operating system, not because the system doesn’t work.

This isn’t a scientifically validated explanation, but it’s enough to make one question the boundaries of our beliefs about consciousness and the world we live in.

Zooming out: The massive potential at the intersection of modern technology and ancient wisdom.

The Telepathy Tapes are emerging at an interesting time. Stories like those described in the Tapes have existed for centuries but have always been disregarded. Increasingly, it seems like people now want to listen; like the Overton window is shifting, and these accounts are going from the fringes towards the mainstream. I can't help but think this is happening for a reason.

Technology is increasingly challenging our understanding of ourselves and our world. The rapid progression of AI requires a closer examination of what it means to be conscious and a reevaluation of what makes us truly unique as humans. Machines can now read a person’s mind by strictly evaluating brain activity. Recent breakthroughs in quantum computing are thought to draw computational power from other dimensions. We live in wild times that test the bounds of what we historically thought was possible.

Yet, despite having more material prosperity than at any other point in history (see Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now), humanity is grappling with unprecedented disconnection from ourselves, each other, and the natural world. The result is an increase in our collective suffering.

The existence of the Telepathy Tapes and the questions they push us to ask are essential to guiding where we go from here. We are at a moment in time where ancient wisdom has a lot to teach us, and where things that humanity discovered over 1,000s of years of experience (as opposed to experiments) are going to be unlocked and more deeply understood. I think this is incredibly exciting.

Wisdom and technology intersect? Hogwash, you say. The reality is this is already happening (albeit at a small scale). For a simple example, let’s turn to turmeric (yes, turmeric).

People in India have cooked with turmeric for thousands of years. Why? In part because it is delicious and its pronounced golden color adds flair to any dish, but also because it is incredibly good for you. An Indian grandmother cooking over an open fire 1,000 years ago wouldn’t have said to her rambunctious granddaughter “eat this turmeric, it is anti-inflammatory,” but she would have known as a part of a deep wisdom of her people that turmeric was a valuable part of her family’s diet.

More interestingly, she would have likely prepared that turmeric in a dish with some sort of fat (like oil or ghee) and a bit of black pepper. Why is that interesting? Fast forward to today, and the most recent science would tell you 1) that the compound curcumin, which is found in abundance in turmeric, has exceptional anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties, but 2) that raw curcumin is not very bioavailable and doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier (i.e., it isn’t absorbed well), and its benefits are only achieved when mixed with a lipid (i.e. fat) and bioperine (a compound in black pepper).

So, without knowing it, our Indian Granny had been preparing turmeric just the right way. She didn’t discover this through the scientific method, and instead landed on it through generations of collective intuition and trial and error. Science may not have had an explanation for what she was doing (until very recently), but that doesn’t mean the phenomenon of turmeric’s protective power wasn’t real.

This is a somewhat mundane illustration of the point, but what happens when wisdom and technological development intersect at a larger scale? When we look more closely at the wisdom shared over millennia about the power of being deeply present, the concept of enlightenment, and our universal connectedness? My intuition is that unlocking insights into these domains and the true nature of reality has the potential to >10x the quality of human experience and to revolutionize how we approach our existence in the world.⁵

And so I’m encouraging us all to take seriously the science of our interconnectedness and the ideas about the nature of consciousness that are put forward in the Telepathy Tapes. Not out of blind faith, but from the view that what we learn has the potential to dramatically improve our lives.

There are people out there already doing this - individuals like Mike Johnson with his theory of vasocomputation, companies like Jhourney that is diving into the experience and science of meditative states known as the Jhanas and Nudge, which is trying to use focused ultrasound to treat neurological disorders, and research labs like the Division of Perceptual Studies at UVA that are exploring near death experiences (NDEs) and reincarnation. We need more, though. So consider this a call to action - to take this research more seriously, to build products that might unlock its potential, and to explore its claims firsthand through your own practice.

Conclusion: An invitation to embrace the questions.

The Telepathy Tapes challenge us to reconsider the nature of reality and our place within it. They urge us to approach questions about our interconnectedness with curiosity, humility, and rigor.

In some ways, these questions are new additions to the domain of modern scientific exploration. In other ways, they are the oldest questions that exist, and they sit at the heart of the experience of being a human.

The beauty of the present moment is that we can embrace these two truths simultaneously - looking to both ancient wisdom and modern innovation to drive us forward - and in so doing, unlocking insights that enhance our understanding of the universe and our potential for widespread flourishing.

PS - Curious about the topic but not sure where to start the journey of learning more? Ping me and I’ll send you a list of resources. More importantly, come spend some time this summer at Edge Esmeralda, where there will be an entire week devoted to exploring the frontiers of consciousness research. And if you’re already building in the category, I’d love to hear from you too.

1. I use the term telepathy, given it’s the word used in the podcast, but I think it mischaracterizes what is actually going on. I believe it’s more likely that some individuals can tap into an information stream that is shared amongst all of us (let’s call that a shared consciousness), which is a concept that is elaborated on as the podcast progresses.

2. Without getting into a debate about what would constitute the materialist world view being “wrong,” at a minimum it is likely to be wildly incomplete. The best analogy here is the electromagnetic spectrum. For most of human history we believed in only what we could see (the visible spectrum), but it turns out the visible spectrum is a small portion of what exists (see graphic below). So it is possible that we will arrive at explanations for the nature of consciousness that fit into a broader framework for the universe, in the same way that radio waves now fit into our understanding of electromagnetism.

3. For some source material on all this, see:

• Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task

• The Meditative Mind: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of MRI Studies

• Default Mode Network Modulation by Psychedelics: A Systematic Review

• Short video with Michael Pollan on impact of psilocybin on the brain

• Children with Autism Have Extra Synapses in Brain

4. The credibility of spelling is an area of controversy outlined in the Telepathy Tapes. I won’t go into depth on the topic here, but it is worth investigating. I find it to be a tricky topic to have a definitive view on - my sense is that there is (unfortunately) a lot of fraud that has historically been associated with spelling, but at the same time it strikes me as unlikely that everything the Telepathy Tapes reports is based on (incredibly wide scale) fraud. For more on the topic, I’d suggest listening to the later episodes of Season 1 where they explore the controversy in substantial depth.

5. You may be wondering why I believe this research has such high potential for meaningful breakthroughs. The implications are vast, but some of the areas I’m most excited about in terms of consciousness research driving progress include:

1. Dramatically improving the quality of lived experience for humanity (imagine everyone experiencing the peace associated with enlightened states)

2. Informing our development of and relationship with AI (is AI conscious, and if so, what does that mean?)

3. Accelerating our understanding of physics (I think it is very likely that breakthroughs in physics and consciousness will intersect - listen to Dwarkesh and Adam Brown discuss frontier physics or read Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time and it’s hard to not feel like modern physics rhymes with wisdom from ancient mystics, which makes me wonder if physics and consciousness are related in some way)