ABOUT

Professor Matthew Belmonte

National Brain Research Centre, Manesar, India

My research centres on connecting abnormal deficits and abnormal superiorities in a range of cognitive capacities in autism, from lower-level perceptual and attentional skills to higher-level social cognitive skills. I approach this problem from the perspective of neurophysiology.

My previous work has provided physiological evidence to support the idea that people with autism do not rapidly and flexibly enhance relevant stimuli at early stages of sensory processing, and must instead resort to amplifying everything (hyper-arousal) and then suppressing irrelevant stimuli at a later, computationally less efficient stage. In simple terms, either everything is turned on or everything is shut off.

My current work aims to extend these findings, and also to examine the neurophysiological bases of cognitive similarities between people with autism spectrum conditions and their first-degree relatives. Many pseudo-autistic traits, in small doses, can confer cognitive advantages: for example, highly focussed attention and a preoccupation with detail may lead a person to excel at engineering, computer programming, or textual analysis.

I came to the study of autism late, after studying computer science and English literature as an undergraduate. My postgraduate work took place in San Diego and Boston, USA, with some time off in New York working as a computer programmer and a writer. Both my brother and my niece are autistic.