The role of touch in facilitated communication.

Imagine that one day a nonverbal autistic child suddenly starts to type messages, such as "I am not retarded," using a computer keyboard while being touched by an assistant. Facilitated communication (FC) appears to create this miracle around the world. To understand how this works, experiments were conducted involving a "telepathy game" using a rod with an attached strain gauge. A force from the assistant, which controlled what was spelled through physical support, was measured. It was thus completely possible for any message to appear to be typed with FC regardless of the autistic child's actual knowledge or language ability.