Suddenly realizing how he had echoed the very thought of my soul, I sat up in my chair and stared at him in blank amazement.
"What is this, Holmes?" I cried. "This is beyond anything which I could have imagined."
He laughed heartily at my perplexity. (Doyle, 1893)
Jill was a plump fair-haired 14-year-old girl with blue-grey eyes behind large blue-framed glasses. When her mother Pam brought her to DEAL Communication Centre Jill was diagnosed as autistic and intellectually impaired, attended aSpecial School , and lived at home with her parents.
Jill had various minor behavior problems (like pulling her jumper up in public to scratch her naked stomach) and some major behavior problems (including screaming loudly when frustrated in any way). She was reported to have "largely irrelevant speech", and a reading age of six. Her score on a Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test given when she was thirteen was appropriate for a child of five and a half.
Jillís speech was loud and fluent, but mainly consisted of echolalia and irrelevant, often confused repetitions. When she was stressed in any way, her speech became louder and more compulsive. I knew she wanted to tell me something, but it was hard to work out what. There was so much ërubbishí that if Jill did manage to get out what she meant, it was likely to be missed. It was as though she would try and say something, not get it out correctly, try again, fail, try again, fail, and repeat the sequence ad nauseam, becoming progressively louder and more frustrated.
Jill could read single words aloud, but when asked to read a passage only the occasional spoken word bore any relation to the words on the page. She could write only a few words that she had practiced for years, and even then her handwriting was immature and ill-formed. As a substitute for her inadequate handwriting I offered her a Communicator.
Jill lacked index finger isolation, and in order to point with her index finger sticking out she needed her hand moulded to hold her other fingers back. As well as helping Jill to hold her fingers back the hand holding also served to slow down her typing. Her partner needed to pull her hand back from the keyboard after each letter to prevent a recurrence of the perseverations, the unnecessary repetitions, and the inappropriate completions which plagued her speech.
With this restraint Jillís typing was fluent and she spelled I NEED TO USE A CANON [Communicator] - I CAN'T TALK RIGHT. Given our previous experiences this was not especially surprising. What was disconcerting was Jillís speech. If we asked her a question she would say the wrong answer while typing the correct one. While she was typing she would even say a wrong letter aloud when hitting the right one.
Her mother was understandably confused. Here was Jill speaking rubbish but apparently typing sense; failing at reading aloud, but apparently typing correct answers to a reading comprehension test while at the same time saying incorrect answers.
We lent Pam a Talking Teacher, an educational toy with spelling activities and voice output, to use with Jill, and she replicated the DEAL assessment at home. Jill practised spelling activities on the Talking Teacher every day, with her mother holding her hand to mould her fingers and to slow her down. At Jillís second appointment, one week after her first, I noted that "Jill didnít vocalize as much when using the Communicator this time, and all the letters she did say matched the letters she was typing." Despite the fluency of Jill's speech and the slowness of her typing she could communicate more effectively using the latter. Even though she might type only a few sentences at a session, at least they were sentences she wanted to say.
On Jillís third visit to DEAL her mother asked me to give her a second Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, using a different set of words. In the Peabody the examinee has to indicate which out of four line drawings shows the word said by the examiner. Jill did the test independently and obtained a score appropriate for an eleven year-old. Words correctly answered included "precipitation" and "archaeologist" (after the Indiana Jones movies, actually, everyone knows archaeologist).
As her performance was still affected by perseveration her score understated her actual word knowledge. Multiple choice tests are especially useful for assessing people who cannot speak or write, but they are unfortunately particularly vulnerable to the other problems that are often associated with hand function impairments, problems such as poor eye-hand co-ordination and perseveration. An examinee with perseveration may point repeatedly to the same location on the page. If picture 3 was the correct answer to two questions in a row, Jill would then point to picture three when I asked the next question, regardless of the answer. Without physically holding her back it was impossible to prevent this. Whenever it was obvious that Jill was perseverating I would allow a long break between questions to break the pattern, but that would only be after sheíd already lowered her score by making several mistakes.
Jill initially started using the Talking Teacher with her mother for structured activities, but by June she was using it for general conversation. Her parents bought her a Communicator. Gradually support was faded from her hand to her elbow or sleeve. At first, when hand support was withdrawn, Jill needed to grasp a pencil in the palm of her hand to help her keep her unwanted fingers back. By the end of the year, however, she was able to keep her fingers back without either being held or holding on to anything. By the start of 1988 she had become almost independent in her typing, only needing the person sitting beside her to put a hand on her leg for moral support.
Having an alternative means of getting her message across had taken the pressure off Jill's speech. Once she could type she spoke far less, but what she said was generally appropriate (unless she was tired or stressed, when her old speech patterns re-appeared).
Jillís typed language showed some signs of the word finding problems that plagued her speech, but to a much reduced extent. There was no written ëecholaliaí, and Jillís typed vocabulary was extensive and was used appropriately. The most significant problem she had was with perseveration or automatic completions. When perseverating Jill would get stuck and hit the same combination of letters repeatedly. Using a notepad computer with a liquid crystal display gave her the option of erasing her errors before printing, but sometimes she would type and retype the same error, erasing it each time.
Jill had a particular problem with some common words, a problem which had effects similar to Marcoís obsession with ëbreadí. Jill had no particular obsession with the words (most of which were structural, like ëbutí); rather, she appeared to have stored the motor patterns for typing certain common words so well that if she started typing any word starting with the same letters as these words she would automatically type her ëstandardí word unless she concentrated intently. For example, the most common word starting with an upper case ëií is the first person singular pronoun. Correspondingly, every time Jill typed 'I' she followed it with a space, and if she had in fact wanted to start a sentence with ëItí or type ëIrelandí, or ëIímí, she then had to erase the space. This difficulty was lessened when Jillís hand was held by a facilitator, because the facilitator slowed her down and broke the pattern by pulling her hand back from the keyboard. It continued to be a problem when Jill typed without facilitation, though she did monitor her output and erase mistakes.
Jill eventually became convinced that it was possible for her to succeed in a regular school. The principal and staff at her special school supported her and her mother in approaches to local secondary schools, and she was accepted for enrolment in Year 9 the next year. She did a lot of catch-up work with her mother, who had been a secondary teacher, over the summer vacation.
Some critics of facilitated communication training have suggested that the facilitator may in fact be the originator of the communication. One wrote
One explanation of this phenomenon is that with some clients any form of physical contact, such as a hand on the shoulder, can be used, even unconsciously, to provide cues to correct responding; a ëClever Hans Effectí...
The possibility of a facilitator exerting undue influence certainly cannot be discounted. Deliberate, conscious, assistance is probably rare, if only because it is likely to be obvious. The degree of movement and control needed to direct another personís finger to a given typewriter key, without any participation by that person, is considerable. For complete accuracy it would be necessary to grasp the personís hand. Subconscious cueing, however, would in its nature be more subtle, and hence more difficult to detect. It could only work with a co-operative subject - a person who was interested, for whatever reason, in taking cues, and who did voluntarily move a finger towards the communication display or keyboard.
Clever Hans was a horse whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, spent many years attempting to teach him arithmetic. Hans appeared to be an excellent pupil, and correctly answered his teacherís questions by tapping his hoof the requisite number of times. It eventually transpired that Hansí responses were being cued, unintentionally, by tiny postural cues given by his teacher:
"even a slight elevation of von Ostenís eyebrows, a subtle flaring of his nostrils, were sufficient to halt the counting."
Unfortunately the investigation into Clever Hans was concerned only with whether he could or could not do sums, and whether if he could not conscious or unconscious deception was involved. Equally important questions about the co-operative nature of the communication involved and the broader implications for inter-species communication were not even asked. Ever since Clever Hansí ëunmaskingí in 1904, his name has been synonymous with the production of desired behavior by unintentional cueing. My experience with Jill sheds light both on the facilitation process (and how it may be abused) and on the risk of applying to people analogies derived from animals.
Near the end of Jillís first year at her new school her integration teacher, Alice, who had always provided excellent support for Jill, her mother, her teachers, and her aides, rang DEAL about an unusual problem the aides were having.
At that stage Jill was generally typing with physical contact from her aides, the level of physical contact varying from a touch on the knee to actual hand support. Jill had just completed the final year nine examination, and Alice had two problems. The first problem was that none of Jill's integration aides wanted to work with her next year - not because she was behaving badly, but because they believed that Jill was telepathic and that she was intruding into their private lives. Earlier in the year one aide with whom Jill had developed a very close relationship had felt that Jill was telepathic. The aide had been worried about the effect this was having on her, and she had left halfway through the year. Alice had discouraged discussion of the incident, but most of the other aides had since had similar experiences.
The second problem was that there was now considerable skepticism about Jill's exam results, because the aides were saying that the results were not hers - she had picked up the answers from their thoughts. They said that if they deliberately tried to turn themselves off, Jill gave no answers, and they had therefore decided that they were transmitting the answers to Jill.
An appointment was made for Jill to come to DEAL with her mother one Friday afternoon after school. I started the session by making it clear that I had heard from Alice about the problems Jill had been having at school. I suggested a few possible explanations and asked Jill if she had anything to say. She picked up my hand, showing that she wanted full hand support. We had previously worked through hand support to light shoulder contact or independent typing, but I had not partnered her for six months, and the last time she had come to DEAL with her aides she had not been at all co-operative.
Pam interrupted. She said that she had experienced telepathy herself. She knew she could make Jill type things. She would be helping Jill type (and Pam did not hold Jill's hand, she put a hand on Jill's knee, a touch on her shoulder, or a hand on her waist) and then what would come out would be something Pam was thinking of and that Jill did not know about. Pam could not think of any explanation for this that did not include telepathy.
First, I asked Pam to make me type something in the same way that she thought she made Jill type. Pam wrote down a message without showing me and put her hand on my leg. I tried the mindreader trick of circling the keyboard limply with my hand and dropping it whenever I felt an increase in pressure, but it did not work. I did not get Pamís message; when I dropped my hand on a letter Pam was surprised, not approving, and if she was giving signals I did not register them.
Second, I asked Pam to show me how it worked with Jill. Pam thought of a message, one that she said Jill would not know, put her hand on Jill's leg, and looked over at Jill's typing as it appeared on the display of the laptop computer Jill was using. Yes, Pam said, looking distinctly worried, Jill was typing what Pam was suggesting to her.
There was no reason to doubt it, because what I could see when I was watching the pair of them work was a great deal of hand movement on Pam's part, far more than when her hand had been on my leg. There was a clearly visible change of pressure across the fingers, and a visible change of pressure from back to front of the hand. I pointed this out to Pam, saying "There's your explanation. You mightn't be aware that you're doing it, but you're cueing her." Pam was theoretically aware that she might be cueing Jill, she just could not see how she was, and she really did not believe my explanation. She said "Well, yes, you say I move my fingers and my hand, but how on earth do I do it when I'm just touching her pigtail?" I imagined Pam did it the same way as when she had her hand on Jillís knee, so I asked her to let me run a third trial, in which Pam was to transmit a message I had chosen to Jill by holding on to her pigtail. Jill was quite co-operative through all this. The message, chosen with some care, was "Eventually I'll know."
There is a magicianís trick that works the same way. The quirky physicist Richard Feynman describes it in his wonderful book Surely Youíre Joking, Mr. Feynman. A carnival comes to town, and a respected citizen is asked to hide a five-dollar bill anywhere in the town he wants to. And then the mindreader gets to work.
He takes the hand of the banker and the judge, who had hidden the five-dollar bill, and starts to walk down the street. He gets to an intersection, turns the corner, walks down another street, then another, to the correct house. He goes with them, always holding their hands, into the house, up to the second floor, into the right room, walks up to a bureau, lets go of their hands, opens the correct drawer, and thereís the five-dollar bill. Very dramatic!
This isnít ouija-board influence, and the banker wasnít pushing an inert mass. The mindreader was reading bodies. As he explained,
...you hold on to their hands, loosely, and as you move, you jiggle a little bit. You come to an intersection, where you can go forward, to the left, or to the right. You jiggle a bit to the left, and if itís incorrect, you feel a certain amount of resistance, because they donít expect you to move that way. But when you move in the right direction, because they think you might be able to do it, they give way more easily, and thereís no resistance. So you seem always to be jiggling a little bit, testing out which seems to be the easiest way.
It was unlikely that the kind of pressure Pam had been using was accurate enough to direct Jill to a specific letter on the keyboard, particularly as all her cueing appeared to be subconscious, ruling out the use of a formal code such as Morse. Pam could cue Jill to a general area of the keyboard by giving rough signals - an up or a down or a left or a right - and she must have had some sort of acceptance signal: perhaps she relaxed when the expected letter typed was what she expected and tensed up when it was not.
For such a crude cueing system to work at all Jill had to be a very active participant, with a good knowledge of spelling.
My hypothesis was that Jill was doing two things; she was picking up Pamís unconscious signals, and she was checking on her guesses and extending them through the use of word prediction and message prediction strategies. One useful thing about the English language is that it is highly redundant. That means, among other things, that it is often easy to look at a few letters and guess what the rest of the word is, and to look at a few words and guess what the rest of the sentence is going to be. The partial sentence "Ca_ y__ gue___wha_ I_hav__wr___?" is easy to read even though it employs only 17 of the 34 symbols (including spaces) in the full sentence. That is what I thought Jill had been doing. Again, it must be stressed that to use such word prediction strategies as a component of a system for interpreting non-verbal signals requires a highly sophisticated knowledge of vocabulary and language structures on the part of the student.
The message "Eventually Iíll know" started with the letter most frequently used in English, but it had very low redundancy, it was not easy to predict, and it should show something about the strategies Jill and/or Pam used.
Jill started off extremely well. She got the first letter, which must always be the most difficult one, E, and continued V E N , without an error or a backspace. And then she guessed it was a whole word, and of course typed a space. Pam obviously gave some kind of a ënoí signal, and Jill erased the space. Then she actually got the T, which, again, was very impressive. But then she did another space, making EVENT; got Pam's subconscious ënoí signal, erased the space, and then went further back and erased the T. Still no ëyesí. After erasing the T she erased the N, so that she was back to EVE, and then she put an R and space to make EVER. She presumably got the ënoí signal again, so she erased the space and put Y and space to make EVERY. Her motherís response was still negative, and Jill got up and threw a tantrum. It was a very minor tantrum, for Jill, but if the session had been in the classroom, it would have stopped at that point.
What was really interesting in the exercise was how Jill had got the first E and the V. What Pam was doing - and again, I could see it when I looked very closely - was putting pressure on Jill's pigtail. Jill was obviously very good indeed at picking out signals. I had noticed that when she had picked up my hand earlier she had used a very light grasp. A firm grasp would have meant that the pressure would blank out any subtle unconscious signals. She had moved her hand around with very low muscle tone, and if I had any messages to give her, either consciously or unconsciously, she would have received them. All this was very interesting, even in the unlikely event that Jill had no spelling skills at all. Remember, Jill has autism. What are people with autism singularly bad at, and apparently very uninterested in doing? Picking up cues. Whether Jill was typing sentences, or whether everything she typed was cued, she was doing things that people with autism are not thought to be able to do.
Of course, finding out how Jill had worked her ëtelepathyí did not solve all the problems; in some ways it made them worse. At the beginning Pam had been very worried about the possibility of ESP. Once she was shown that she had in fact been cueing Jill she accepted it, and that brought her to the next worry; if she had been cueing, what did that say about Jill's output in general? She was very anxious about how much of it was Jill's and how much was hers.
We did a bit of good old-fashioned message-passing to reassure her. Pam picked up a list from the table - a sheet of work, consisting of thirty or forty different questions, which had been made up for another client - and said "Let me ask her something from that and you won't know what I've asked her; I'll just show her the written question and you won't know what it is." "No", I said "Let's do it a bit better than that; we'll do it double-blind and you won't know what it is either, because if you're cueing her... " At this time Pam was sitting on the other side of Jill, but she tended to get anxious and move in closer and closer until she put her hand on Jill's leg without realizing she was doing it. I shut my eyes, folded and refolded the paper, held it out to Jill and said "OK, now answer the question that's now at the head of the page." Which she did, correctly. When we tried it again with another question, a sentence completion, "Bunch of ____" however, she typed "PEOPLE" - a possible answer, but only just; "a bunch of people" is colloquial and unlikely. Still, Pam was starting to cheer up a bit.
Next I quizzed Jill about what she had been doing at school, what had they actually studied in History, what had they actually studied in Geography, etcetera, questions to which Jill and Pam knew the answers and I did not. What we got was more evidence of her communication problem and another demonstration of the difficulties of getting something unknown out of a person subject to automatic completions. Jill would type the first letter or couple of letters of an answer, Pam would say yes, that's correct, and then Jill would switch into her stereotypes, that is, common words starting with a particular letter or letters, that Jill seemed unable to prevent herself from typing once she had typed the first letter(s). Jill's stereotype words - VERY, FEEL, etcetera - are well known to her aides. One of her major problems in school was that if she started typing any word beginning with V she would type VERY. The word she wanted to spell now turned out to be VEGETATION which had not only the V but the E. This was fatal. Jill spent a long time typing VERYs and erasing them. A facilitator who does not know the answer cannot stop the rubbish. Jill did eventually answer the questions, about what they were studying in history and in geography, in detail (I wouldnít accept generalities, she had to give the details right down to the ecology of the seashore).
All this took about two hours. One interesting thing was that apart from a few excursions to the kitchen to get biscuits (quite understandable, since it was now after six oíclock and she hadnít had anything to eat since lunch) Jill was staying in the room. On previous sessions at DEAL she had left the room every five minutes. She had been at secondary school all year, of course. She had been staying in the classroom, and her behavior had changed very markedly for the better. Nonetheless, her persistence on this occasion was exceptional and was possibly due to a desire to get to the bottom of the problem. Jill certainly realized that she was in trouble; there were no aides prepared to work with her next year, and even her exam results were in doubt.
When Jill was questioned about why she had been playing games with her aides and mother she was not very forthcoming on the subject. However, she was at least now prepared to admit that it was not ESP, that she was picking up physical cues. I outlined a few scenarios that I thought were about right, and Jill sat there smiling at me. The explanation that she was happiest with (partly because it reflected the most credit on her) was the Sherlock Holmes model, where Holmes tells Watson what Watson's been thinking about, by putting together what Watson has looked at, where he has been, and what he has done previously; magician's cold readings are done along the same kind of lines. On some occasions, too, I suggested, it might not be Jill picking up cues from the person concerned, it would be Jill flying a kite. She knew a fair bit about her aides, and their families, and their social situation, through ordinary conversation, and it would be very easy to start typing out something just on spec. If she got a response - increased interest from the aide, say - she would keep on going on the same topic, and if she got no reaction the interpolation would be assumed to be one of her stereotyped phrases. At this point Jill actually managed to wink, which for her is really quite unusual.
If that exercise was a sample of how Jill had used "telepathy" at school with her aides she could not lose. If she was guessing well, she went on; if she seemed to be losing her facilitator she could return to regular work as though she had just lost track for a minute or throw a tantrum and stop. Because Jill had such a problem with automatic completions her aides were used to her typing something and then immediately erasing it. She often had several goes before she completed a perfectly ordinary sentence, so a false start wouldnít attract any attention. She didnít have to score every time - just one hit a week would be enough to get her the reputation of being telepathic.
The next step was to prevent a recurrence and to re-establish Jillís credibility by getting her typing without any physical contact. I had moved Pam well away from Jill in order to be sure that I was the only person she could see or touch when she answered questions about her school subjects. However, Pam was always edging back - it was not that she wanted to fake things, but she was really interested in what was coming up on the display - and when she moved nearer Jill would of course reach out for her. I asked Pam to go outside while I battled on with Jill.
I said to Jill "The way out of this is to type by yourself. You don't need support. You've got to type by yourself. And you are going to do it by yourself before you leave here today. I do not care how long it takes. I am going to sit here and you are going to type me a sentence about what you did in geography in first semester, without me touching you." She had told me the topic, seashore ecology, earlier. I said "Type me something - anything - that shows me you learned something in geography in first semester." She began by mucking around, typing garbage words and stereotypes. Each time I had to let her type a couple of words before I could see that they were not going to make a sentence, when I would erase them, and Jill would start over. This went on for half an hour or so. It was really difficult, because I did not have any obvious sanctions if Jill chose to give up. She seemed tired and depressed. At one stage she did get up and try and go to the room where her mother was, but only once. Given her readiness to leave the scene when placed under pressure on other occasions this was quite remarkable. On the other hand, she sat there screaming EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE in my ear for quite some time.
After half an hour we finally got to the point where if I counted "one - two - three" Jill would hit a letter on the "three" which would make sense. This would go on for five or six words, and then the rubbish would come out again and Jill would muck up. The rule I established was that if Jill did not hit a letter by the time I counted to three I would erase the last letter, regardless of whether it looked right or wrong. I did that a few times, and she did not come back on task so I erased the whole lot and told her to start over, which she did. We got almost complete sentences typed without physical contact five times. It was a very slow process and clearly not functional. Jill looked like death. She seemed to be trying, but she certainly was not getting anywhere very much, and the stereotyped words kept coming. And then at last I thought of the technique I'd used with Marco. When people perseverate on one letter, and keep hitting it again and again rather than moving on to the next one, the therapists teach them that after they hit the letter they have to pull their hand back and tap the table in front of them. Sometimes we put a red dot there, for a target. It is a standard occupational therapy technique, and it has been used for over fifty years. "OK, this is what you do," I told Jill, holding her hand to start her off, to show her the movement pattern, while we typed THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG a few times. "Now you try. Tell us what the problem is - tell us why you're mucking up like this - tell me why I'm getting all this crap."
We had been an hour at that stage fighting our way through what must have been no more than a dozen words. Suddenly, Jillís typing came together. And it was fast! I started off saying "Letter, table, letter, table", to give her the pattern. She very quickly got so fast that I could not fit the two words in before she hit the letter, so I would just say "table" after she hit the letter, and I would still keep getting out of the rhythm because she was too fast for me. And it was all there! And it was all making sense! We had broken out of the stereotypes. And Jill was beaming from ear to ear. "I can do it! I really can do it!" By this stage she may have been doubting herself. She typed that she couldn't stop herself typing stereotyped words; she would hit a letter, and then the other letters would come so quickly, automatically, they wouldn't stop. Even now, every now and again, if she lost her concentration, the obsession words would come in, but she would erase them by herself. It was wonderful. After she had typed a couple of paragraphs I said "YAAAY, you've got it, you've got it, it's wonderful!" and her mother could hear that we were both suddenly very cheerful and came in. I explained what had happened, and she could read the sentences that were on the display.
Of course Pam wanted to see Jill typing with no contact, so I said "OK Jill, type me a sensible sentence about a specific assignment you did in geography in first semester." and she did. It was about the roots of plants on sand dunes. It was not quite as fluent as her earlier sentences, and I had to halt her twice when she went off into stereotyped words, but, as Pam said, "Now I've come in the stress level has gone up." I pointed out that we were now three and three-quarter hours into the session, Jill had not had any dinner, it was a quarter to eight in the evening, and I thought that had something to do with it too. But Jill's typing was still functional. It was still independent. If the aides limited themselves to restraining her every fourth word or so to stop an obsession word coming through, that would be enough, and they would not be making her type the right answer. Jill was still beaming.
If Pam and Jill practised a lot over the summer vacation - no hands-on, or hands-on only when it was necessary for speed or in a difficult public situation - my hope was that Jill would get better at overcoming the stereotyped words herself. She probably would not have to go on tapping the table - after people have been doing that for a while they just pull their hand(s) back a little way before they go to the next letter, and that is usually enough. It is programming this micro-second break into the routine that is helped by the table-tapping.
Why had Jill pretended to be telepathic? I think that once she realized that she could play people for suckers she quite enjoyed it; many children would, and a person who had had no power over others for most of her life might obtain additional satisfaction from successful manipulation. She had been devalued all her life because of her disabilities, and was now being given special status as someone who had uncanny powers. What student, furthermore, would pass up the opportunity to have someone telling them the right answers? This meant, of course, that her exam results were suspect. How long Jill had been picking up cues from her communication partners, and how much of her communication had been cued, was a question it was impossible to answer.
The content of her early typing appears unlikely to have come from her partners - her style was consistent, regardless of whether she was partnered by her mother or me, she made spelling mistakes and her sentences were shorter and simpler than ours. Certainly Jill had never typed my thoughts, if only because I had mainly partnered her in the early days when she needed to be slowed down, and hence had been pulling her back quite firmly, making it much harder to pick up any cues. Also, I suspect, Jill probably didnít have good enough spelling skills herself initially to use the sophisticated prediction techniques that sheíd shown when trying to get ëeventuallyí. Her typing without any physical contact confirmed that she did have good literacy skills and that she had absorbed something from her high school lessons, so it was quite possible that a lot of Jillís work was in fact her own. The problem was, which bits?
Why did Jillís mother move her hand on Jillís leg or when holding her pigtail? The answer to that probably relates as much to the slowness of non-speech communication as to the nature of the relationship between Jill and Pam. Communication through spelling and typing is slow. People generally speak at a rate of 150-200 words a minute. A one-finger typist may not produce more than twenty words a minute, significantly slower than handwriting, much less speech.
Jill was using typing to replace both speech and handwriting. Once she went to secondary school she had a significant amount of homework to do. Both this and her everyday conversation required Pamís involvement. Many individuals find it stressful to sit back and watch a person do something slowly that they could do much more quickly themselves. Pam had this experience every day with Jillís homework. At the same time, she was having to devote a significant part of her evening and weekends to facilitating Jill.
One integration teacher described her own experience of facilitation as being similar to being a passenger in a car with a novice driver. The passenger moves her/his body as if s/he is driving, pressing the floor at the lights and moving into the turns. If Pam experienced facilitation in this way, when Jill was answering questions to which she knew the answer e.g. "What is the capital of Japan? ", her own subconscious movement may well have provided cues, as she both wanted Jill to get the answer right and to speed up her typing. Once Jill registered how her mother moved she may then have had a choice of starting any answer herself or waiting for her mother to cue it for her. After Jill had developed this technique with her mother it must have been very tempting to use it at school.
Because everyone was conscious of the difficulties in integrating someone with autism into the regular classroom, all energies had been focussed on enabling Jill to control her behavior, so she wouldnít cause a disturbance. Her aides were instructed to make any minor accommodation necessary for Jill to remain calm. If holding her hand was what it took, well, that was what they did. And this may have been how it started. At first Jill may have genuinely wanted her hand held for emotional support, even though she was well past the stage of needing that kind of physical support when she was typing. Once she started to relax she obviously realized that hand-holding had other possibilities.
Itís important to reiterate that not everyone who has their hand held is picking up cues. To do what Jill was doing actually requires more skills than most beginning typists have. By no means all facilitators give cues, and not all students have any interest in seeking them. Another of DEAL's clients was Peter, a boy who had Down syndrome. Peter attended the same secondary school as Jill, and for a while they shared aides, including a couple who said Jill was ëtelepathicí. At no stage did any of the aides feel that Peter was ëtelepathicí, or that he was picking up cues. Peterís movements were always so forceful and his determination to do his own thing so great that I doubt if even deliberate cueing would work. Certainly I had precious little success in trying to prevent him typing anything he had set his mind on. Jillís search for cues had two rewards for her. Firstly, she liked being a drama queen and center of attention - she enjoyed the notoriety of being ëtelepathicí. Secondly, she wanted to get things right, and she didnít mind sacrificing her individuality to do so.
Following on this incident, and aware that there had been some discussion of telepathy and cueing by other academics and facilitators, I asked Anne if she was telepathic. She said ëNo.í, and went on to illustrate how such mistakes may arise.
Iím not telepathic but I can pick up vibes. I notice where people look and how they respond when I start to spell something. I can spell what they want me to, if I want to and they are not good facilitators. I can pick up how people feel by their hand contact and hand movements, but I canít pick up what they are thinking about without other cues. If I know what has formed their opinions I can sometimes get the subject. Only some people give cues, not every facilitator does. I have met two that I could fool into thinking I was mind reading.
The existence of unconscious cues may also cast some light on one form of experiment devised to test communication occurring through facilitation. Several studies have recorded that when different questions are set to facilitators and students, the students occasionally respond with answers appropriate to the facilitatorís questions.(Hudson et al, 1993). While it is clear that any such answer comes from the facilitator, Jillís story shows that simply to state that baldly does not necessarily end the story. To date, the presumption of the test-givers has been that any evidence of cueing indicates that the test-takers are empty vessels merely being ëfilledí by their partners, in the way that Clever Hans presumably was. This explanation always was questionable; after all, taking cues (or stealing the exam paper) doesnít necessarily mean you donít have any skills.
Jillís story and Anneís comment indicate that experienced communication aid users can sometimes tell what answers their partners expect them to give. During a test which deliberately sets out to make communication difficult and sets up maximum interference, it is possible that the student, able to tell that the facilitator expects a different answer to the one the student thinks is right, lacks sufficient confidence to choose their own answer. There are a number of common undergraduate psychology experiments which demonstrate this phenomenon, and there the subjects are college students with a dozen years of schooling and test-taking experience behind them, not people with severe disabilities just learning to communicate. In both the psychology experiments and the facilitation tests a minority of responses involve a straight swap in which the student gives the other partyís answer. In the case of facilitated communication the student has both to accept the facilitator's influence and to have the skills necessary to pick up the cues given by the facilitator for the swap to be possible.
When issues of telepathy or cueing come up it is important not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Pamís first reaction when Jillís ëtelepathyí was shown to be the outcome of her ability to pick up cues was to assume that everything Jill had ever typed resulted from cueing. This was not, of course, so. In order to pick up cues, Jill needed excellent literacy skills and considerable experience with facilitation. Showing that a person is able to pick up cues does not mean that they have no communication skills or that all their communication is tainted.
Jill practised the table-tapping technique with her mother over the summer vacation, and gradually became more confident in typing without physical contact. Halfway through next year Alice reported that she was typing with no physical contact or table-tapping unless she was stressed, and was able to use ten fingers when she was copy-typing. No further stories of telepathy emerged and her next set of exam results, which were still satisfactory, were accepted as her own. After another year, she chose to leave school and concentrate on acquiring the skills necessary to live independently in the community.
Jillís speech continued to improve and when I last heard of her she was working in a regular job part-time, travelling by public transport, and using a mobile phone. She now uses typing like the rest of us, for correspondence and other writing tasks.