Diane Hennacy Powell 2 Interview

Summary
– Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell discusses her 13-year research into telepathic abilities in non-speaking autistic children
– The “Telepathy Tapes” podcast based on her work has become one of the world’s most popular podcasts
– Evidence suggests some non-speaking autistic children demonstrate 97-100% accuracy in telepathic communication tests
– Powell proposes these children maintain access to a shared consciousness field that most people lose as they develop verbal language
– Children report accessing a non-physical space called “the hill” where they communicate telepathically with each other
– Powell is conducting further scientific research to document these abilities, potentially leading to a paradigm shift in our understanding of consciousness

Key Takeaways
1. Rigorous testing shows some non-speaking autistic children demonstrate telepathic abilities with 97-100% accuracy under controlled conditions.
2. These abilities may represent access to a field of shared consciousness that most people lose when developing verbal language.
3. The increasing prevalence of neurodiversity may be serving as a catalyst for a paradigm shift in our understanding of consciousness.
4. Many autistic children report a non-physical space called “the hill” where they communicate telepathically during sleep or meditation.
5. These children often express perspectives aligned with non-dual spiritual traditions despite having no formal exposure to such concepts.

Full interview, edited for readability

Introduction to The Telepathy Tapes

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people, as most of you probably know, or about spiritually oriented topics. We’ve done well over 700 of them now. My guest today is Diane Hennacy Powell. Diane was on the show about five years ago, and if you liked the interview we’re about to have, you might want to watch that one too, because we covered a lot of interesting points, and we probably will not cover all the same points today.

Diane was trained at Johns Hopkins as a psychiatrist, therapist, neuroscientist, and public speaker. She develops mostly multidisciplinary theories towards understanding psychological anomalies, such as savant skills and verified accounts of space-time navigation. Her current research focuses on controlled testing of autistic savants and children reported to be telepathic and/or precognitive by their caregivers, which is one of the main reasons we’re having this interview today. Diane has been the chief scientist in the Telepathy Tapes project. Just in case there may be one or two people who have been living under a rock and haven’t heard of the telepathy tapes, would you like to tell us what it’s about?

Diane: Sure. It’s basically been created by Ky Dickens, and it’s based on my work that I’ve been engaged in for the last 13 years, testing autistic children for their purported psychic abilities. The most common ability that gets reported to me is that they’re telepathic. And that’s predominantly what I’ve been studying. That’s why it’s called the Telepathy Tapes.

Rick: I heard Ky interviewed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and she mentioned that she got the idea to do this because she happened to have seen an interview of yours, and she was fishing around for something to do her next project on. This really caught her interest, and it’s really taken off. At times in recent months, it’s been the most popular podcast in the world, with hundreds of millions of people downloading and listening to it. Why do you feel it’s suddenly become such a hot topic, that so many people are interested in it?

Diane: First of all, I think that it’s actually something that many people have already known for a long time is real, and they’ve just been waiting for some really compelling evidence to come out. I also think that podcasts are a very powerful tool now for getting information out there.

Data from surveys have shown that if you were to poll Americans, between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans already believe in these kinds of abilities. It’s just that they experience them to a much lesser degree.

The Science Behind Telepathic Communication

Rick: Do you feel that autistic children with these telepathic gifts are some sort of avant-garde, harbingers of where humanity may be heading in some respect? Not to say that humanity is going to become autistic, but that such abilities might become more commonplace among non-autistic people?

Diane: I think that they could certainly become more commonplace, but I’m not sure whether or not it’s an evolution of the human species the way that some people think of it. I think that our ancestors probably had a lot of these abilities, and that they’ve really been buried predominantly for sociocultural reasons. So, I can see them coming back because they really have great utility. If we reconcile both these intuitive gifts with analytical gifts, then we can really just make so much more progress than if we dismiss them and don’t give them any kind of credibility.

Rick: I think that point came up in the Joe Rogan interview with Ky, that one of them suggested that maybe Neanderthals who didn’t have language of any sort might have been telepathic, and that the telepathic skills atrophied when verbal language got developed.

Diane: Yes, that’s something that I thought for quite a while, that the development of language actually plays a role in the disappearance of these abilities. I think what’s happening with these non-speaking autistic individuals is that they regress and lose their ability to express language, usually between the ages of one and a half and two and a half. They do so at a time when they haven’t really had much opportunity to develop it. I think they stay in a state that is really the state that we’re all born in, which is one in which we experience shared consciousness.

Telepathy in Babies and Early Development

Rick: So do you think little babies, pre-verbal babies are telepathic?

Diane: I do. That’s my suspicion. The reason for that suspicion is many fold. First of all, we know from research that’s been done using brain imaging on babies and mothers that there’s a synchronization of some of the brainwave patterns. If a mother is depressed, you’ll see certain signatures in the mother, and the babies also show those same signatures of depression. An infant spends a lot of time in REM sleep, probably only awake for maybe eight hours a day. They’re sleeping a tremendous amount of the time. Yet, you look at how rapidly they start picking up language and start being able to make sense of these sounds that they’re hearing and ascribe meaning to them. It really makes one wonder whether telepathy and that shared consciousness is part of how they are able to pair meaning to the sounds that they’re hearing.

Rick: So let me see if I can understand that. The baby hears the parents talking, or maybe they’re talking to the baby, and the sounds are just blah, blah, blah, but you’re suggesting that the baby is simultaneously, in addition to hearing the sounds with their ears, picking up on the thought of the parent that is associated with the sounds, and that way they begin to correlate them.

Diane: Exactly. The thought is really in a sort of a proto-language form. It’s not necessarily the thought paired with some sense. We tend to think of thoughts as either mental imagery, or thoughts as a voice inside of our head, and oftentimes it’s our own internal voice. What I’m talking about is thought that even predates that, that’s more at the root of that.

Because we use language so much, we tend to think that if you don’t have language, you don’t have a means of communication. But I think that language is really a relative latecomer in the whole scheme of things.

Evidence for Telepathic Abilities

Rick: What are some of the things described in the podcast, the Telepathy Tapes, for which you feel there is really good scientific evidence? You observed the stuff and you’re able to record it in a way that you could maybe publish findings about it.

Diane: I think what there’s the most evidence for is the telepathy itself. There’s absolutely no evidence at all that there’s any kind of conscious cuing or scam going on. None of these parents contacted me because they were trying to become famous. In fact, 99% of the people who contact me are not interested in that at all, and they wouldn’t even want to be part of the documentary.

Even if they’re using the letter board as their form of communication, what you see is that the child is pointing to all of the letters that are exactly, or numbers, that are exactly what the target stimulus was that you gave to the person that they’re telepathic with. There’s 97 to 100% accuracy with these children.

I’ve tested many children under as rigorous circumstances as I could. The most rigorous experiments that I had were with the girl named Haley, where I put a visual barrier between her and two different therapists that she was telepathic with. Neither of them were—there was no touch involved, there was no visual cuing, and there was no auditory cuing. Haley could type independently into a talking device, which is like an iPad.

That’s really the most convincing evidence. I think that anybody who sees that would say that they think that there’s information being transmitted. There’s no question. The issue is, what’s the mechanism for that?

The Hill: A Psychic Communication Space

Then there are other things in the podcast such as telepathy among the children. Several of them report that they go to the hill, and that’s a place where they can download information and they can access one another. That’s a little harder to prove, and that’s something that I’m wanting to do experiments on. We have the anecdotal accounts, but I really want to see if I can prove that the children are telepathic with one another by controlled experiments.

Rick: Just to clarify for the audience, the hill is like this kind of psychic internet space where these kids, without any technologies involved, they might be lying on their bed in their bedroom with pillows over their head to shut out other stimuli, can communicate with each other across continents. They can convey information which maybe the mothers can verify or something that they haven’t—they couldn’t talk on the phone or anything because they can’t talk. But the information, very specific information is conveyed which the mothers can confirm, and the kids do this all the time. Is that an adequate explanation of what the hill is?

Diane: Yeah, it’s a non-physical place.

Rick: It’s like a psychic field of some kind.

Diane: Yeah, and they generally go there during their sleeping. It’s not someplace they go to while they’re awake.

Rick: Is it like lucid dreaming, where they’re very in control of what they’re experiencing during the sleep? And then they can remember it when they wake up?

Diane: Yeah, it’s very much like lucid dreaming. In fact, people who are lucid dreamers can sometimes connect with them on the hill, even though they’re not autistic.

Precognition and Other Phenomena

Diane: Another thing that we have anecdotes about is the precognition. So, we have, for example, a girl on the podcast who had a dream that her father slipped on ice, and they live in Arizona where there’s no ice. And it happened three weeks later when he was on a business trip, he slipped on the ice, and she also knew that he’d end up in the hospital with a broken hip as a result, which was the case. So that’s a really fascinating anecdote, and I’ve heard many like that over the years, but once again to say that you have evidence for precognition is a little more challenging.

Scientific Skepticism and Paradigm Shifts

Rick: Based upon the things which you have seen and have recorded and have probably written about, and which are obvious to you are not faked or contrived in any way, there is such a hurdle in terms of getting the scientific community to look at this stuff, much less accept it. You’ve heard of the Galileo Commission—you’ve probably actually given one of their webinars or something—where they’re so named because Galileo’s contemporaries in the Catholic Church refused to look through his telescope to see that Jupiter had moons because for some reason Jupiter having moons conflicted with church doctrine, and so they said it couldn’t be so and we’re not even going to bother to look.

These days I’m sure you have encountered a great many scientists who don’t want to bother to look at your research, or Dean Radin’s research and so on because they feel like they’re too busy, it’s not worth their time, it must be faked in some way, it couldn’t be true. Do you find that frustrating and what do you do to try to break through that crust?

Diane: It has been frustrating, I would say. But I really do think that we’re on the precipice of a change. I really do. Many of us thought that would be the case ten years ago, though. There was an article that I read by Chris Carter in which he talked about people who are famous skeptics who actually admitted that there is more evidence for telepathy than there is for a lot of things in science. So, they’ll admit it, but they still don’t want to give it their stamp of approval.

I think one of the reasons why I say that I think this is on the verge of changing is not only the response to the telepathy tapes, but I learned about a week ago that Elon Musk patented the term telepathy.

For some people it really creates cognitive dissonance, and I think a lot of that cognitive dissonance is because they just don’t see how it’s possible, and they themselves have never experienced it. But one of my theories about why a lot of these diehard materialist scientists don’t experience it is because they are so left hemisphere oriented.

Consciousness, Brain Function, and Telepathy

Rick: The people we’re talking about, I think, for the most part, believe that the brain somehow creates consciousness. The idea that consciousness is some kind of field, like the electromagnetic field, runs counter to the notion that the brain creates consciousness. But that’s what you need to sort of accept, I guess, to understand how telepathy could be a thing. Right? That there’s some kind of field that interconnects us all through which we can communicate.

Diane: Yeah, well there is a field that interconnects us all. I think that the majority of the evidence suggests that. In my book, The ESP Enigma, I talk about the science, the modern physics basically, which isn’t so modern. I mean, a lot of it’s 100 years old, but I talk about some of the things that are accepted science that really make it so that you would expect some of these phenomena. For example, you have physicists like John Wheeler who talks about the fact that consciousness has this effect whenever we measure something, we alter it. It’s more appropriate to think that we’re kind of co-creating reality rather than that we’re just witnessing it.

Rick: Max Planck and all these guys were saying that you can’t get behind consciousness. Consciousness is the fundamental and everything else arises from there and so on. But it just, like you say, that was over 100 years ago, but it just hasn’t totally trickled into the mainstream.

Brain as a Filter Rather Than Creator

Diane: One of the things that we know about individuals with autism is that a lot of them have fewer GABA interneurons. So, it’s like they have fewer—they don’t have as much of the braking system. What also goes along with that is the fact that many of them have seizure disorders.

Rick: They have seizures?

Diane: Yeah, they have seizures because seizures are like a runaway brain activity.

Rick: It’s interesting though that we can lose certain brain functions and gain new abilities thereby, which lend support to what we’re saying here with these kids, which what is ordinarily considered a disability gives them extraordinary abilities. Both of which situations lend support to the idea that the brain is a filter among other things, and that it kind of shuts us down from certain capabilities, rather than in addition to it giving us certain capabilities.

Non-Duality and Autism

Rick: Do you think that the non-speaking autistic children in the telepathy tapes are naturally experiencing non-duality, in the spiritual sense? Do you think that their biology didn’t set up the normal boundaries and filters to the world that neurotypical people have?

Diane: Yeah, I do. I would say that they are. And that’s what they say.

Rick: Really? So, you mean they say things which are reminiscent of Ramana Maharshi or the Upanishads or things like that?

Diane: Yeah, they will say things that are very consistent with this idea of the unity of consciousness.

Rick: And then, what does that mean for all people on the autistic spectrum and those with ADHD? There are 250 million such people in the world. Is there a spiritual implication to this? Are they all tuned into some non-dual state that spiritual seekers would aspire to?

Diane: I wouldn’t say they’re all tuned in. That’s too absolute of a word. But what I would say is that people, for example, with ADHD who have concentration issues, that’s what it is, it’s an inability to control your concentration, that’s linked with reduced frontal lobe activity and the frontal lobes are a major inhibitor and therefore a major filter system. So, I do think that a number of people who have ADHD also have potentially greater access to some of this non-local information.

What does this say about people that are also on the spectrum that are speaking? I’d say that a number of individuals who have neurodiversity also have these kinds of experiences. A lot of the people who have had contact experiences with non-human intelligence or with UAPs, a high percentage of them report that they have some neurodiversity.

I think that if you’re looking at it from a spiritual standpoint, we’ve been so locked into a very kind of rigid thinking style, that defines what is and isn’t possible that it would require a huge number of individuals who have a very different thinking style, cognitive style to be on the planet in order to usher in a new paradigm.

Rising Neurodiversity and Its Implications

Rick: So, do you think that in light of what you just said, that there are more autistic people coming in these days?

Diane: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s definitely not that we’re diagnosing them more. There’s a little bit of that, but the reality is that all childhood developmental issues, and psychiatric issues have increased. They’ve all skyrocketed during the course of my 40-year career.

The number of children whose brains are wired differently now is much higher and probably is a result of how much we’ve introduced into the food and the water, and the air that we consume, that has not been tested to see what effect it might have on brain development. That’s some of it, but there’s also been societal things. For example, now it’s the norm rather than the exception for both parents to be working. And so, you have a lot of children that are getting babysat by devices.

If you’re introducing a child to these kind of electronic devices that give them a very barrage of stimuli, very rapid pace that’s very different from going back 40 years ago when people were watching Mr. Rogers, which was very slow paced. It’s going to have an impact on how the brain develops, because if your brain is developing at the time that you’re getting exposed to all of the stimuli, your brain is at a time when it’s very plastic, it gets molded around that.

Rick: You just juxtaposed two ideas here. One is that perhaps environmental pollutants, and maybe you didn’t mention vaccines, but some people accuse those, or just all the hyper-stimuli of video games, and cell phones and TV and all that stuff are creating a higher incidence of autism. But the idea you juxtapose that with is that this higher incidence of autism, is perhaps helping to shift the paradigm, which is a good thing.

Diane: I’m not labeling this good or bad, because it’s a mixed bag. But that is what happens when things evolve. You go through these transitional periods where it’s more of a mixed bag, but in the future, it may be that some of the bugs have worked out of this so that it’s all a good thing.

The Importance of Empathy

Diane: There are critical stages of development that if you miss out on something, you can’t acquire it later on. And one of those is actually empathy.

Rick: Interesting. Really, what’s the time window at which empathy is acquired?

Diane: It’s within the first eight years. I remember when this study came out decades ago, when they discovered that people who are these hardened criminals in the prisons, when they did brain imaging on them, they saw that there was an area of their brain where there was missing some brain tissue, and they hypothesized that that area was involved in empathy. You have to experience empathy in order to become empathic.

It doesn’t have to be that your parents were necessarily empathic towards you. It could be that you had a grandmother who was empathic, or you had some other individual in your life, a teacher that you were close to, but somebody. So, it’s not that it has to all come from the parents, but it has to come from somewhere.

Empathy is one of the most important things to have as part of our heritage. When I feel that somebody is being empathic with me, it’s not the words that give me that sense. It’s the human element—the look in the eyes, the tone of voice, there’s just a certain vibe to it. You feel this sense of something that’s very akin to love.

Future Research Directions

Rick: What would you like to say by way of conclusion, in terms of what you plan to do, what you hope to have happen in the next few years with your life, with your research, with the Telepathy Tapes, with everything you’re doing? What would you like to achieve and what would you like to see in society as a result of your efforts?

Diane: I’m really looking forward to doing more research with these kids and really finding out more about what their experience is like. I really want to basically understand as much as possible how it is that they think that they receive this information.

Some of them have given answers to scientific questions. For example, there’s this functional medicine doctor that I know who wanted to know what this autistic boy thought could be the cause of autism and a way of treating it. The boy said to him that he thought that he should give thiosulfate. Thiosulfate is something that can bind cyanide. This functional medicine doctor then went and tested all of these autistic kids that he treats, and he found that all of them have cyanide.

A lot of these children have what’s called a gut dysbiosis. Instead of having the rich diversity of organisms in their bacteria predominantly in their gut that people traditionally had, they have a narrower number of species and then they may have overgrowth of some species. There’s a bacterium that as a byproduct creates cyanide. The bacteria in our gut provide a lot of the chemicals, including the neurotransmitters that the brain runs on.

He started giving this thiosulfate to these children and started seeing issues resolve or improve significantly. I’m really interested in seeing what do these kids know, what can they help society with, in terms of advances of knowledge.

I’d really like to see them have this method of communication that they have found so helpful, get accepted and instead of being labeled as pseudoscience or debunked, see it offered to them because it’s been a real lifesaver for so many of them.

I also want to get definitive research that is undeniable, that telepathy is real. That’s one of the reasons why I’m going to be doing simultaneous recordings of the QEEGs of the telepathic pair to see if there’s a synchronization between their brains.

Rick: Thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one.