My research, teaching, and other creative work in science and the arts have explored how the human mind represents perceptual experience, and how it imposes narrative order on these perceptual representations. I approach this question within the framework of the sciences by studying the neurophysiology of attention in autism, and from the perspective of the arts by focusing on the process of symbolisation and narrative. My work isn't compartmentalised into a single field, but takes part in many domains related to human development: neurophysiology, bioinformatics, science studies, and cognitive literary studies.

NEUROPHYSIOLOGY
My scientific research applies functional magnetic resonance imaging and quantitative electroencephalography to explore the neurophysiology of attention in autism. Autism, defined behaviourally in terms of social and communicative deficits and stereotyped or repetitive activities, and described psychologically in terms of deficits in central coherence, executive function, or empathising, has always been a syndrome in search of a biological foundation. My past work has contributed to the basis for an emerging theory in which abnormally strong coupling within local neural networks occurs in combination with abnormally weak activity-dependent development of longer-range connections. The resulting weakened coordination of anatomically distributed neural processes has the potential to explain and to unify psychological descriptions of autism, and has received support from physiological studies both in people with autism and in animal models.

My particular focus on attention is motivated by autism's status as a developmental disorder — developmental not only in terms of nosology but also in terms of ætiology. Autism's complex abnormalities of social cognition may be most productively considered not as modular capacities disrupted by the functional equivalent of a lesion, but as emergent capacities disrupted by abnormal experience-dependent plasticity. Efforts to unravel autism therefore have much to teach us not only about how such emergent cognitive capacities go wrong during autistic development, but also about how they go right during normal development. In particular, my comparisons of children with autism and their clinically unaffected sibs have shown that autism may arise when a familial pattern of delayed and prolonged frontal lobe activation, which is common to children with autism and their sibs, is translated during brain development into a widespread pattern of impaired functional connectivity between brain regions, which is specific to autism. This finding relates to the familial abnormalities of attention and social cognition known as the Broader Autism Phenotype, and begins to show us how it is that some people within a family become autistic whilst others escape autism — a crucial question for the development of targeted interventions that may block this evolution from liability to disorder. In my view, the best possible outcome of such therapeutic efforts would be a world in which the unique perceptual and cognitive strengths that arise in people with autism and their family members are preserved, but combined with intact communicative abilities that will give these individuals a chance to interact with the surrounding social world and to share their unique gifts. My current work aims to refine these connectivity findings in autism and in sibs, and to correlate behavioural and neurophysiological measures across a wide range of task domains — perceptual, attentive, executive and social.

Selected publications:
Belmonte MK, Yurgelun-Todd DA. Functional anatomy of impaired selective attention and compensatory processing in autism. Cognitive Brain Research 17(3):651-664 (2003).
Belmonte MK, Carper RA. Monozygotic twins with Asperger syndrome: differences in behaviour reflect variations in brain structure and function. Brain and Cognition 61(1):110-121 (2006).
Belmonte MK, Gomot M, Baron-Cohen S. Visual attention in autism families: ‘unaffected’ sibs share atypical frontal activation. (submitted)

BIOINFORMATICS
Computationally, I have a particular interest in algorithms for statistical analysis of biophysical time series and sequences. I've developed software to measure spatiotopic modulations of EEG phase-locking (at UCSD), to conduct visual psychophysics and single-unit recordings (at NYU), to model human auditory perception (in Boston), to help assemble genome sequences (with the Broad Institute at MIT), and to analyse fMRI data nonparametrically (part of the widely distributed AFNI software package). This close connection between neuroscience and applied computer science is a link from which both fields can draw inspiration.

My most recent software project is a video game that embeds a battery of perceptual, attentional, executive, and social cognitive tasks, transparently collecting behavioural data and synchronising with physiological recording as the subject plays the game. This game-based presentation produces a more engaging and ecologically valid context than the bland repetition of most psychology experiments: psychophysical measures such as dot motion coherence and embedded figures are easily implemented as, for example, the movement of a star field on a view screen and the detection of an adversary in a cluttered environment. In addition, the strategic and adversarial nature of a video game carries natural opportunities to explore higher-level cognitive measures such as comprehension of game-related narratives and perception of a computer-generated adversary's emotional cues. This wide range of stimuli allows us to examine the covariance structure between low-level perceptual and high-level social cognitive tasks.

Selected publications:
Belmonte MK, Yurgelun-Todd DA. Permutation testing made practical for functional magnetic resonance imaging. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 20(3):243-248 (2001).
Schmidt GR, Belmonte MK. Scalable, content-based audio identification by multiple independent psychoacoustic matching. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 52(4):366-377 (2004).
Butler J, MacCallum I, Kleber M, Shlyakhter IA, Belmonte MK, Lander ES, Nusbaum C, Jaffe DB. ALLPATHS: de novo assembly of whole-genome shotgun microreads. Genome Research 18(5):810-820 (2008).

SCIENCE STUDIES
Ironically, we autism researchers have much in common with the people whom we seek to understand: disturbed by a chaos of observations and desperate to perceive the world as an ordered and predictable place, we (like all scientists) tailor hypotheses and experiments to fit our models at least as much as we revise the models to account for the experiments. Narrowly focused and often insensible to any phenomenon outside our theoretical aperture, we become experts in one exclusive way of perceiving the world, and we project all that we see into this paradigm. In my scientific work I try to address not only autism science itself but also the cultural mould within which scientific hypotheses are cast and scientific explanations constructed. The developmental syndrome of autism unfolds on so many levels, from the genetic and biochemical to the psychodynamic and behavioural, that cross-disciplinary integration and theoretical synthesis are crucial to its eventual understanding. In an environment where institutions and funding organisations too often reward narrowness of field, rigidity of hypotheses, and secrecy of resources and preliminary findings, there's a great need to get scientists talking and working with each other. Over the past few years I've been doing what I can to engineer this sort of crosstalk, in the form of collaborative papers, meetings and symposia. The most recent product of this effort is a consensus statement on data sharing in autism neuroimaging, from which several collaborations have emerged.

I intend to continue this collaborative focus, and also am interested in cooperating with social scientists to examine autism research ethnographically: as a behaviourally defined syndrome whose root neurobiological causes may be so various, autism can be an opportunity to examine how scientific theories are set up in opposition to each other, and how scientific ideologies can both facilitate and impede theoretical synthesis. In the case of a behaviourally defined condition such as autism, in which abnormal neurobiological development and abnormal psychological development are intertwined, how do psychological descriptions relate to neurobiological ones and what are the atomic terms; is the psychological idea of "weak central coherence," for instance, a solution or a question? Which competing theoretical frameworks are in fact experimentally differentiable, and which others may admit synthesis when translated into shared terms? Should we expect to see autism's social and communicative impairments directly reflected in well-delimited abnormalities of brain structure and function, and if so, are abnormalities in sensory perception or other non-social, non-diagnostic traits to be considered appropriate objects of investigation? How do computational obstacles to data sharing function rhetorically in scientists' thinking about data sharing; how much do scientists actually know about the computational challenges faced by computer programmers, when they're operating within universes of discourse so distinct from each other? How are people with autism spectrum conditions recruited into the diagnosis, in what ways does the autism community relate to scientific and medical authority, and what parallels exist between the autism community and other minorities marginalised by mainstream (or ‘neurotypical’) society? These are some of the social and historical questions that ground my scientific work.

Selected publications:
Belmonte MK, Mazziotta JC, Minshew NJ, Evans AC, Courchesne E, Dager SR, Bookheimer SY, Aylward EH, Amaral DG, Cantor RM, Chugani DC, Dale AM, Davatzikos C, Gerig G, Herbert MR, Lainhart JE, Murphy DG, Piven J, Reiss AL, Schultz RT, Zeffiro TA, Levi-Pearl S, Lajonchere C, Colamarino SA. Offering to share: how to put heads together in autism neuroimaging. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 38(1):2-13 (2008).

COGNITIVE LITERARY STUDIES
My literary interests relate my neurobiological work to the growing field of cognitive literary studies. I'm interested in how autism's abnormal neurophysiology affects the ability to construct narrative representations of perceptual experience, and how a great deal of the autistic syndrome, including withdrawal from social contact, impairment in pragmatic language use, and the substitution of repetitive for adaptive behaviours can be understood as compensatory or accommodative responses to this representational challenge. In this regard, much of autistic behaviour is most productively construed as the response of a rational human mind to an abnormal perceptual and cognitive environment. This recognition has profound implications for the relation of autistic cognitive development to normal cognitive development, and for the relation of people with autism to representations of autism in science and society. I've described people with autism as “human, but more so” since the extraordinary effort and deliberation with which they approach representational challenges can produce unusually deep insights, as exemplified in the developing genre of autistic memoir. The narrator who is more conscious of the effort of narration can, almost paradoxically, in the end achieve a more fundamental understanding of the characters and events surrounding him or her, precisely because (s)he is so impaired at automatic social perception and must concentrate harder to construct a theory of reality, to piece a story together from perceptual fragments.

When I'm teaching about autism, I ask people to imagine that their life is a film, being screened in some Cartesian theatre by a bad projectionist. Perhaps there is picture without sound, or sound without picture, or only a narrow aperture or range of frequencies. Lacking a normal capacity for rapid coordination and integration of perceptual and cognitive activities, people with autism are stuck in this piecemeal world. To be able to make sense of this Cartesian film, to have any chance of splicing its fragmentary and unrelated events and details into a coherent narrative, they need to be able to replay it and to study it. This is why people with autism hew to predictable objects and routines, and shun the unpredictability of people. Crucial to making sense of autism is the recognition that these behaviours that are the most obvious and the most diagnostic may be only secondary, psychological responses to more primary, neurobiological abnormalities — the reactions of a normal human mind to an abnormal perceptual and cognitive environment.

Through essays, fiction, and theatre, I've explored the nature of autistic narrative representation and the centrality of symbols, rituals and scripts in human behaviour in general. I've always regarded my studies of informatics and literature as two faces of the same coin: a fascination with how information can be conveyed within, or evoked by, textual symbols. This is why my work in computer science focused on formal languages, compilers, and automated translation, and also why my literary studies addressed signs and symbols in the Anglo-Saxon and modern periods. I was interested in the mechanics of the Anglo-Saxon language and its power to embody the tension between Germanic and Christian heroic ideals. I was also enthralled by the development of modernity in mathematics and in literature, as the responsibility for constructing meaning was taken away from God or Nature and handed to uncertain humans, and as representation therefore supplanted referent. My fiction and theatre explore characters who are driven by the human desperation for order and eternity in a world filled with chaos and mortality, people who must ultimately come to terms with their powerlessness to control or to know the world in which they're immersed, and even the people by whom they're surrounded. I view neuroscience and cognitive theory are an essential tool in the production and understanding of stories, and I'm active in this developing fusion of cognitive neuroscience and literary theory.

Selected publications:
Belmonte MK. The Yellow Raincoat. In: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Sherry Turkle, ed.), pp 70-75. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press (2007).
Belmonte MK. Human, but More So: What the Autistic Brain Tells Us about the Process of Narrative. In: Autism and Representation (Mark Osteen, ed.). Oxford: Routledge (2007).
Belmonte MK. Does the experimental scientist have a ‘theory of mind’? Review of General Psychology 12(2):192-204 (2008).
Belmonte MK. Neurobiology of Narrative. In: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences (P Hogan, ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2008).