Paper submitted to "Literature and the Cognitive Sciences," Storrs, Connecticut, 6-9 April 2006.

A confluence of neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, and genetic evidence suggests that autism involves a skewed balance of neural connectivity in which local communication within neural assemblies are excessive whilst long-range information transfer between brain regions is impoverished. The resulting neurophysiological impairment in linking separate brain regions may explain autism's psychological impairment in linking separate perceptual and cognitive elements into coherent wholes – a property that has been labelled `weak central coherence.' Faced with the difficulty of constructing an internal narrative within which perceptual and cognitive events may be represented and thereby cognitively realised, people with autism develop a compensatory cognitive style that eschews narrative context and depends inordinately on low-level, primary representations. Useful in understanding this course of psychological development is the metaphor of film: autistic perception can be viewed not so much as a Cartesian theatre but rather as a Cartesian cinema, one with a narrow aperture that does not allow simultaneous viewing of the entire frame. The autistic tendency towards scripted and ritualised behaviours thus emerges as a way of re-running a limited repertoire of films in an attempt to maintain narrative tractability. `Theory of mind,' the cognitive ability to model and to respond to the beliefs and feelings of other people, is the main casualty of this approach since social interactions depend on emotional and cognitive contexts of oneself and others and are therefore nearly impossible to script. Unifying the psychology and neurobiology of autism with insights from narrative theory can deepen understanding not only of autism but also of normal psychological development – for we all are desperate to narrate what would otherwise be a perceptual chaos.