[0:00]
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   
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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   
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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   
[1:34]
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   
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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'   
[2:38]
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   
[3:08]
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   
[3:45]
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   
[4:18]
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   
[4:53]
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   
[5:24]
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   
[5:57]
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   
[6:27]
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   
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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   
[7:29]
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,   
[8:03]
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   
[8:41]
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   
[9:19]
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   
[9:51]
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   
[10:24]
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?   
[10:55]
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   
[11:27]
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   
[11:58]
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   
[12:33]
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   
[13:08]
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   
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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,   
[14:12]
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   
[14:42]
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   
[15:13]
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   
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like what we normally do on this channel, but  if you've got this far, thank you for watching.