I'm getting increasingly concerned that mainstream journalism and traditional publishing are punking
me. And not in a cute, funny way like Spaghetti Trees on April Fool's Day, in a mean way. I have
recently read several interviews with Woody Brown, who is a non-verbal autistic man who
has published the book Upward bound. And I read those interviews thinking, it is near
April Fool's Day. How sure am I that this isn't just some elaborate cruel joke against a disabled
man perpetrated by these news outlets? I don't think it's an elaborate and cruel joke perpetrated
against a disabled man by news outlets because the news outlets in question were the New York Times,
the Guardian and the Daily Mail. And I don't know if you're familiar with British newspapers,
but the Guardian and the Daily Mail are always on opposite sides of any ideological debate. So,
it seems unlikely that they'd both be in on it. But, it's genuinely unsettling to feel like
I'm in some kind of weird social experiment where they're trying to see if we'll believe
journalists or the evidence of our lying eyes. Although I did have to work a little bit harder
to get the evidence for my lying eyes. So Woody Brown is a 28-year-old man who was diagnosed with
severe autism as a toddler. To quote from the New York Times article, "Whenever Woody spoke,
it sounded like shrieks and gibberish." And doctors concluded he couldn't process language
and said it was pointless to explain things to him or talk to him in complex sentences. I assume that
the understanding of autism has come somewhat further in the 20 years since Woody Brown was
diagnosed because I don't know a large number of non-verbal autistic people, but many of them are
perfectly capable of understanding language even if they don't speak. And it does seem in fact that
Woody can process language to some degree. To what degree is the question in play here? because he
can speak at least a little bit but mostly when he speaks it's quotes from TV shows which I believe
is called scripting but I am not autistic and I'm not particularly familiar with the term so if I'm
wrong do let me know to go back to the New York Times article Mary came to realize that her son
understood more than he appeared to he would become hysterical if they deviated from their
daily routine but if she explained why they had to stop at Target before getting lunch at
McDonald's he would calmly follow her into the store which does seem to back up Mary Brown's
claim that even though Woody can't speak, even though he's non-verbal, at least at this stage,
he can understand language. So, here's our last New York Times quote for a bit. And
this is where it starts to get interesting. At 5, Woody learned to communicate by pointing at
letters to spell out words using a laminated card. He began responding to Mary's questions,
first with single word answers and later with short sentences. That's how mom figured out
that I was listening to everything. Woody told me when we met on a recent morning at his parents'
home in Monrovia, California, where he lives. To express this, Woody tapped letters on a board with
his right index finger, while Mary, who was seated next to him on the couch, followed his fingertaps
and repeated the words aloud. Let us put to one side for now the spelling and reading abilities of
5-year-olds. Because spoken language is something that humans are wired for, but reading and writing
are not. They are skills that you have to learn and they're they can be quite challenging. Anyway,
the articles followed the same general pattern. Woody was diagnosed with autism. He couldn't
speak or communicate and so everyone assumed that he couldn't understand either, but his
mother believed in him and they found a way that he could communicate. And it turns out that he's a
great communicator and a great writer. Woody has in fact achieved two degrees, an English degree
from UCLA and a master's in creative writing from Columbia University. He has also, as I
mentioned at the beginning, written a novel called Upward bound. And all of these were with the help
of his mother Mary. And this is the part where things start to get very uncomfortable because
any form of communication where a facilitator has to interpret the results of said communication is
subject to wishful thinking and also to bias. And specifically in the case of someone typing on a
board, if a facilitator has to hold the board, then the facilitator is almost certainly going
to be subject to what's called the ideomotor or ideomotor effect. The ideomotor effect is
unconscious involuntary muscle movements which are triggered without you knowing about them or
thinking that you're doing them. The most obvious example of the ideomoter effect is Ouija boards
or dowsing rods. the person makes a very tiny involuntary unconscious muscular contraction and
because there is a lever because you're holding a long stick it goes much more significantly in one
direction or the other but you don't realize that you have made this tiny unconscious movement and
so you think that an external force is guiding you so for this reason neither rapid prompting method
which is holding up the board and the person types on it or spelling to communicate which is
a similar thing they're not recommended by ASHA which is the American Speech Language Hearing
Association or by the National Council on Severe Autism or by various other bodies. Actually,
they they consider the rapid prompting method and spelling to communicate new methods of facilitated
communication, which they don't believe has any scientific validity. When studies were
done on facilitated communication in the '90s, they basically concluded that with facilitated
communication, you might be able to get communication, but it's almost certainly not what
the disabled person might actually be trying to say. It's important to mention at this point that
there are lots and lots of forms of augmentative and assistive communication, AAC, which do have an
evidence base behind them and which can be used to help non-verbal people communicate. This is just
not one of them. This paragraph touches on some of the potential harms of the method, but we're going
to come back to that later because just because something doesn't have an evidence base behind
it right now doesn't mean it's entirely without validity. And we're going to we're going to bend
over backwards to be fair here. So, I found some clips of Woody and his mother using the method
which I have just described, and you can watch them and judge for yourself. This clip is from
CBS 3 years ago, and you can see the letters that he's typing right here. Z, A, or S, A, or S, C,
or V, N. I'm not sure what word that would make. But, you know what, this is such a short clip,
and there are no words associated, we can't really say what's going on with it. Let's try
a different one. Here, we cannot see the keys, but Woody's mother spells out the word intelligence.
to presume I N T E L L I G E N C E to presume intelligence I N in people like me yes first
the number of taps don't correspond to the number of letters that she's saying and second he's down
on the bottom of the board for most of this I and T are both up at the top His fingers shouldn't be
down there if he's typing the word intelligence. But you know what this was 3 years ago, and we
can't actually see the letters he's typing while she is telling us what he says. So, let's go to
this clip from the Ron Charles's Substack, which has him answering a question in real time while we
can see the keyboard. Again, the idea is that he taps out words on this board and his mother reads
them aloud. And in the comment section of the CBS video from 3 years ago, there is someone who is
claiming to be Mary Brown. And she says in that comment that she writes or types exactly what he
points to when she is writing for him. So I feel it's reasonably safe to assume that she should
then say exactly what he's pointing to, or at least roughly what he's pointing to, given that
if you're doing something quickly, there's more likely to be typos. Because there are more likely
to be typos, I have given you my best estimates of the keys pressed. But when it's right in the
middle of one or two or three, I have given you all of the possible options. Here are the notes
that I took of this 1 minute and 17 second clip from when he starts tapping on the board to when
the board is taken away. And while the original clip is framed like this, I am going to zoom in
on the board and his typing so that we can see more clearly what he's actually pointing at. The
short version is that the keys he taps bear almost no resemblance to what his mother says that he is
saying. But again, you should judge for yourself. So, here again are my best estimates just in case
this gets copyright dinged and I have to take down the sections where I'm using someone else's
footage. And here is the question. Ron asks, "How did you decide to let your characters be funny,
even ridiculous, without turning them into objects of pity?" Woody taps the board eight
times in the following locations, and his mother says, "May." He taps the board twice in what could
be the space and I positions. And she says I say for these. I guess that works. Three taps,
one of which could be I. And for the rest of the clip, I'm just going to put the letters tapped on
the screen and the word at the bottom. 10 taps for don't. Eight taps for have. Five taps for
pity. Seven taps for for. 10 taps for disabled. Disabled. 18 taps for people. people. 11 taps for
including including. Nine taps for myself. Myself. Twice for I. 12 taps for respect.
Respect. Eight taps for them.
Seven taps for and six taps for they seven taps for happen. Five taps for two. Five taps
for be. Nine taps for funny. And at the end, you can also see that he keeps trying to press
the board even though she is taking it away. Also, if you watch the clip in its entirety,
you can see that the board moves around quite a lot. She's not holding it still,
which considering that quite a lot of the time he's also not looking at the board would make it
very difficult to find one's letter of choice. I hope that the quality of the clip is good enough
that you can see the letters that he's pointing at here. And I don't know if you are seeing what
I am seeing, but reading the communication method described in the newspaper articles
made me a little bit uneasy. And then I went and watched some clips of it in action and now
I'm very uneasy to put it mildly. The evidence of my eyes does not lead me to the conclusion
that Woody Brown is communicating via a letter board. It leads me to the conclusion that he is
randomly tapping the board and that his mother is extemporizing whether consciously or not.
I further conclude that if people see this and think to themselves, "Wow, maybe this could be
a method that I could use to communicate with my non-verbal child," they are going to waste
their time and their money and their energy and their hope on something which does not seem to
actually produce results. I am not convinced that this is Woody Brown's authentic communication,
and I don't think that's a good thing. There's not a great deal of scepticism shown in any of the
three articles. There's a little bit, but the most is probably shown in the New York Times article,
and I have some quotes from there. Mary says she isn't surprised some people question Woody's
abilities. It took her years to recognize what he was capable of, but she bristles at critics
who say the way they communicate is harmful or manipulative. How on earth am I harming him?
She said, I had to pause for a long time after I read that when I was writing this video because I
wasn't sure that I could make a non-emotional argument as to the harms involved. Bluntly,
I did not think I could express my creeping horror at the situation in a way that would
actually be helpful. I have therefore decided to give that part of the argument a swerve. You can
feel free to make one in the comments if you would like to. I will merely state that truth is good
and falsehood is not good even if that falsehood is unconsciously done. Luckily, I do not have to
make the argument for the objective harms of facilitated communication or rapid prompting
or spelling to communicate because several other people have done it before me. Before I read you
the quote though, here we must note again that spelling to communicate and the rapid prompting
method are both considered to be basically just reskinned versions of facilitated communication.
And having watched the clips of Woody and his mother engaging in the rapid prompting method,
I hope you can understand why. Studies dating back to the 1990s have repeatedly demonstrated
that the products of facilitated communication reflect the often non-conscious control of the
facilitator and do not represent authentic communication by the disabled person. Since
the entire point of these methods is to hear the voice of the disabled person,
to allow them to communicate their thoughts and feelings and wants and needs and desires,
that should be sufficient. But there's more. At times, false statements generated by facilitated
communication practitioners have resulted in devastating outcomes, including false accusations
of abuse against parents and others. Let us create for ourselves a hypothetical situation which is
not this one but does involve a mother and her son who are using facilitated communication or rapid
prompting or spelling to communicate or one of these similar methods. We will stipulate for the
purposes of this hypothetical that the mother in the situation truly deeply believes that her son
is communicating via tapping on the keyboard. In this hypothetical, if both parents are caring for
the child and a disagreement arises about some aspect of his care, do you think they will use
that method to ask the child what he thinks? Do you think that the child's wishes will reflect
those of the mother or those of the father? Or a third and different option, would the wishes
expressed really be the child's wishes at all? What if the facilitator parent develops a dislike
of one of the child's other carers? What if via the letterboard the child accuses that carer of
abuse? I don't necessarily think that Woody Brown is taking any direct physical harm from his mother
using this method. But if the point of the method is to allow him to communicate with the world,
I do not believe that that's actually what is happening. If he has thoughts which he could
or would communicate given an actual method of augmentative or assistive communication that
actually works, you are robbing him of that chance. And given that what seems to happen
is that he taps on the letterboard pretty much at random while not really looking at it and you tell
us what you think that he's saying, it feels more like you are just talking to your own unconscious
echo rather than telling us what he thinks. And I believe that truth is preferable to untruth,
even if untruth gets you a book deal and coverage by CBS and the New York Times and the Guardian
and the Daily Mail. And this is why I feel like I'm being Punk'd by news outlets because were we
supposed not to notice that Woody isn't looking at the keyboard? Were we supposed not to notice
that he taps the board far more than his mother spells words and not in the locations where the
letters are for the words which are supposedly being spelled? Are we supposed not to notice that
he would have continued tapping the board even after the sentence was supposedly finished and
his mother was taking it away? This is one of those circumstances where you don't want to be
right. I would love to be wrong. Being wrong would be great in this situation because being wrong in
this situation means that Woody Brown really is a brilliant novelist who can in fact type unassisted
on a keyboard by himself with no input from anyone else. And the fact that he only communicates via
his mother and a letterboard where the words spoken bear no resemblance or little to no
resemblance to the things actually being pointed at is just because I don't understand how it
works. But on the balance of probabilities, I do not think that is the most likely explanation for
the facts in front of us. I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. And I'm amazed and confused and
concerned that none of these journalistic outlets seem to be as skeptical as I am. And apparently
neither is traditional publishing, though, all things considered, I suppose I shouldn't be so
surprised about the latter. I don't really know how to end this video. This is not even slightly
like what we normally do on this channel, but if you've got this far, thank you for watching.