Snoezelen

Many studies have shown that computers help calm autistic children and help them communicate,and that often autistic children take to computers more quickly than non-autistic people. However, evidence suggesting that computers help autistic children communicate without computers is less promising, and autistic children are not immune to the effects of overuse of computers. One can deduce from this that autistic children often communicate better through e-mail than normal speech, but in rare cases the reverse can be true also.

Some groups have proposed more precise scientific reasons for why this happens. One such group, the nonprofit Autism and Computing, claims that autism is monotropism and they argue that computers provide an easy way of joining attention tunnels (a.k.a. undivided attention) with minimal discomfort, circumventing some of the most disabling features of autistic spectrum disorders.