FACILITATED COMMUNICATION AS AN IDEOMOTOR RESPONSE

Forty college students were taught facilitated communication via a com mercially available training videotape. They were then asked to facili tate the communication of a confederate, who was described as developm entally disabled and unable to speak. All 40 participants produced res ponses that they attributed at least partially to the confederate, and most attributed all of the communication entirely to her Eighty-nine percent produced responses corresponding to information they had recei ved, most of which was unknown to the confederate. Responding was sign ificantly correlated with simple ideomotor responses with a pendulum a nd was not affected by information about the controversy surrounding f acilitated communication. These data support the hypothesis that facil itated communication is an instance of automatic writing, akin to that observed in hypnosis and with Ouija boards, and that the ability to p roduce automatic writing is more common than previously thought.