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
Upwardbound. 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 Bryan'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 Upwardbound. 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 idiom motor or idea
motor effect. The idiom motor 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
idiomoter effect is Ouija boards or
dicousing 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 assisted 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 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 four.
>> 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
>> B.
>> 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 skepticism 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 noneotional 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-concious 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 punked
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.