Is there a relationship between autism and psychic experience?
A connection between autism and telepathy has been reported by the families of some nonverbal autistic people. As a late diagnosed autistic this interests me because intuition has been a guiding force in my life.
Like all many areas of parapsychology, more research is needed, but I think it’s a topic worth discussing.
In this episode I talk about my own person experience, what other people have to say, the idea of psychic ability as a spectrum trait and a bit about parapsychology (from what I have learned at the Rhine Institute).
This is my first time talking about this topic, I’m going to be talking about it more in the next couple of podcasts!
Resources for this episode include:
-
- Autism and the God Connection by William Stillman
- The Telepathy Tapes Podcast (https://thetelepathytapes.com/)
- The Rhine Institute (https://www.rhineonline.org/what-is-parapsychology)
- Dr. Diane Hennacy/Powell (https://drdianehennacy.com/telepathy/)
- Psychology Today article on the Telepathy Tapes by Jeff Tarant PhD (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/choosing-your-meditation-style/202503/science-skepticism-and-the-telepathy-tapes
- Dr. Hennacy/Powell's Response to Jonathan Jarry (https://thetelepathytapes.com/dr-powell-defense)
- Sharing Our Autism Story (https://www.autisticpov.com/e/sharing-our-autistic-story-ep-6/)
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Visit my blog at Writing On The Spectrum (https://barbaragraver.substack.com/)
Full transcript follows. If you need closed captioning, please listen via the podbean app or at http://autisticpov.com (https://www.autisticpov.com/).
EPISODE 10 TRANSCRIPT
If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can see the full transcript for this episode at https://www.autisticpov.com/
Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graver and I started this podcast to share a bit of my journey as a late diagnosed autistic. everybody this is barbara graver thank you for joining me today on autistic pov today we're going to be talking about autism and psychic experience as most of you
0:30
know i tried to write an autism memoir and i talk about this in an episode i'll link to it telling our autism story but i tried to write this memoir And I realized that I kind of couldn't stay in the autism lane. I was talking about autism, but I was talking a lot about the paranormal,
0:51
my psychic experience, past spiritual experience, metaphysical topics, all this stuff that to my mind then, didn't have anything to do with autism. And I thought, I can't do this. This is supposed to be an autism memoir. And nobody's going to want to read all this if they're looking for autism memoir.
1:13
So I set it on the side, but it kind of kept pulling at me. So Not long ago, actually a few weeks ago, I decided, you know what, I'm just going to write it. I'm just going to do it. I mean, it's actually written. I thought I'm just going to edit it and finish it and do it.
1:32
And after I made that decision, I thought maybe I should do a little research on this topic, this topic. Is there any connection between autism and psychic ability? And I had never really thought that there was. To me, the metaphysical, actually parapsychological is the correct term, was always a special interest. It was just a special interest.
1:56
It didn't really have anything to do with being autistic. And maybe it doesn't. I don't know that for sure. But I do know that when I started to research, I found a book. by this guy named William Stillman. It's called Autism and the God Connection. And this was an interesting book to me.
2:14
There's some pros and cons on it, which I'll talk about in another episode, but it was a really interesting book to me because it addressed this idea that there's a relationship between telepathy and autism. And in particular, William Stillman, who is on the spectrum and does have psychic ability, I think has worked as a medium.
2:36
But William Stillman worked primarily with nonverbal autistic children and teenagers, maybe adults, but nonverbal autistic people and their mothers. And a lot of these moms were saying, my kid could read my mind. And of course, everyone's like, That's ridiculous. People are even saying really mean things, like horrible, cruel things.
3:02
And that's like part of the culture of just dismissing what is essentially at its core the inner experience of the autistic, which we'll talk about more. But William Stillman didn't dismiss it. He wrote a book about it, and it's a really interesting book, and he's an interesting guy, and he shares a lot of anecdotes about
3:23
And he mentions in the book this podcast called The Telepathy Tapes, which I listen to. And that also is about telepathy and nonverbal autistic people. And it's really compelling. It's super compelling. And it is based on and around the work of this, actually, she's a medical doctor, neuroscientist, Diane Hennessy.
3:46
And she got interested in autism and telepathy and decided to research it. And she said that she knew when she made that decision that it was the end of her scientific reputation, she knew it. And so it was. They even found a way to take her medical license away from her for a while.
4:05
And it's interesting because this is the culture. And it's almost like there's a double prejudice when you talk about this issue. There's the prejudice of dismissing the inner the inner reality, the lived experience of autistic people was just systemic. And then in the scientific community, there was the prejudice against parapsychology, also systemic.
4:31
And it's really, really interesting because I've studied parapsychology. I took courses at the Rhine Institute, which is... was started by J.B. Rhine, who did the original experiments in ESP. But I took courses there. I think I'm going to take some more, actually. And it's interesting because that prejudice towards parapsychology is so ingrained in the scientific community,
4:55
like even Rupert Sheldrake, who's that. I think Cambridge-educated biophysicists, he would submit papers when he was doing his research on morphic fields. He would submit statistically valid, well-designed scientific studies and write a paper on it and submit it to these academic journals. And they would send it back without even reading it.
5:17
They would say, we know this can't be true, so we're not even going to read your paper. Like that's the scientific community at its worst. And parapsychology brings that out. It just brings it out so much. And it's kind of interesting because on Diane Hennessey's website, she actually quotes from this paper.
5:38
And just give me a minute here and I will find it. So this paper was written by molecular biologist Jonathan Jerry in critiquing Diane Hennessey's work with autism and telepathy and what is interesting. interesting about it for the purpose of our discussion, is that he begins by talking about parapsychology. And he says, and this is a quote,
6:03
parapsychology is a grab bag of powers and experiences like telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition that involves some weird transfer of energy or information that currently exist outside of our scientific understanding, if they exist at all. And this is like kind of an interesting way to characterize parapsychology because it's not a grab bag of powers and experiences.
6:29
It's an actual science. And I'll just quote from the Ryan Institute's website on parapsychology. Like, what is parapsychology? Parapsychology is the scientific study of interactions between living organisms and their external environment that seem to transcend the known physical laws of nature. Parapsychology is a component of the broader study of consciousness and the mind.
