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The Asperger Syndrome hyper-focusing trait can be helpful in a classroom setting when educators choose to use this extreme attention span as a tool.

If normal classroom learning procedures are not getting through to an AS child, try working with the theme that they are already working with. As an example, a few words about their chosen object mentioned during a history lesson, can perhaps make the entire history lesson memorable.

the Asperger Syndrome hyper-focus ability is a learning style. AS children have the ability to hyper-focus their way into learning traditional subjects.

Now a small but growing number of researchers see hope in a tool called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which lets scientists spark activity in specific areas of the brain and watch what happens to patients' behavior. The technology may illuminate some of the biology behind the disease, and some specialists speculate it may one day offer a treatment.

John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Transcranial magnetic stimulation "is fantastic for identifying brain regions that are essential for specific mental functions. . . . I think if we can start to use it more systematically with autism, one could hope we'd understand a lot more about what's going on."

Researchers at the Boston hospital's Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation used rapid, repetitive stimulation to simulate what happens in the brain when people learn a new task. Then they gave a single pulse of stimulation and measured minute muscle twitches that told them how long people's brains maintained connections formed by the initial stimulation.In people with no evidence of autism, changes lasted about 30 minutes, on average. But in people on the autism spectrum, the initial stimulation caused brain changes that lasted much longer - on average an hour and a half.