Meditation Causes Neurodivergence

and what that might mean for neurodivergent folk

During my child’s brief brush with school at age five, I was reminded how much a school-based education is a lesson in compliance. Shoes on. Shoes off. Stand in line. For our son—who has not so much a preference as a deep-seated need for autonomy—this made being in a mainstream classroom an absolute impossibility.

Compliance is not a stated aim of the education system here in the UK; it’s a by-product of doing it the way we do it. Even if you’re lucky enough to find a teacher with an open mind, there’s still a playground full of peers to contend with. Lip service gets paid to setting up the environment for a diversity of learners, but what this often means in practice is a shelf of fidget toys or an occasional assembly on ‘autism acceptance’. When this doesn’t help, it’s those unable to fit in who come to be seen as the problem. Underlying all this is an assumption that neurotypical is best. Nobody says this but as a neurodivergent person, or a parent to one, you clearly feel it with every ‘strategy’ and ‘intervention’ put in place.

I speak to a good friend, a secondary school teacher, about this. Her joking-not-joking solution is a ‘wealth tax’. Highly aware of the range of needs and gifts present in the neurodiverse classes she teaches, she is customarily the only adult in a room of up to thirty young people, with no access to a breakout room, a curriculum to get through and exams looming. As such, her ability to provide an individualised education is limited. It’s not always a lack of desire or knowledge that’s the problem. Sometimes it’s just a lack of resources. (And sometimes it’s a lack of freedom to do what you know needs to be done for the people in your care.) 

Meditation Changes the Brain

The term ‘neurodivergence’ was originally coined by activist Kassiane Asasumasu to encompass the experiences of all those who diverge from culturally accepted standards of neurocognitive functioning. Though it has come to stand as a respectful identity label for people with congenital brain differences such as those seen in autism, ADHD, and dyslexia, for example, she always meant the definition to be inclusive not only of such lifelong differences, but also of those acquired along the way—through everything from brain injury to dementia—and, finally, to differences caused by intentional and habitual action. Long term meditation would fall into this third category.

We’ve all heard stories about how the brains of violinists and taxi drivers grow and change through repeated practice, in ways necessary to their craft. In Asasumasu’s terms, this is a form of neurodivergence; what we habitually do shapes the physical structure of our brains and this, in turn, shapes who we are in the world. When it comes to meditation, such brain changes aren’t about the quality of our arpeggios or knowledge of London street names. Beyond the development of any particular skill, they get to the heart of human flourishing.

I’ve been reading a book by Dan Siegel and Richard Davidson called The Science of Meditation (2017). Both long-term meditators themselves, and good friends, Dan and Richie (as they call themselves throughout the book) have been involved in the neuroscientific study of meditation since the 1970s, when it was still seen as a weird, even career-ending, specialism. This book outlines the development of a ‘big idea’ they glimpsed during meditation retreats in the seventies—that meditation causes brain changes that lead to ‘altered traits’. Ancient religious texts lay out these human possibilities and the methods for attaining them, but it’s only recently that neuroscientists have had the technology to study the structural brain changes behind them. According to current research, these trait changes show up in four main areas: increased ability to recover after a stressful event, increased attention, greater compassion, and a loosening of the strictures of a fixed sense of self. Dan and Richie’s ‘big idea’ is now borne out by thousands of research studies. Long-term meditators do, indeed, create changes in their brains that have positive real-world effects, not only during meditation but in daily life.

Meditation and Autism

I can’t help wondering what happens when the long-term meditator is also congenitally neurodivergent (autistic, say). The autistic brain and nervous system are differently wired. If meditation causes changes in the brain and nervous system, does being autistic help with this or hinder? Do I need to meditate in the same way as a nonautistic person, or in a different way? And if I meditate consistently, can I expect to experiences the trait changes described in ancient texts, or might I experience changes of a different kind?

The only research I was able to find on ‘meditation and autism’ either framed autism as a series of deficits that meditation might mitigate, or looked at meditation as a treatment for things like anxiety and depression which often co-occur with autistic experience but are not core features of it. Siegel and Davidson are also silent on this issue. Maybe I’m missing something, but as far as I can see there’s not a single research study that distinguishes between autistic and nonautistic participants when looking at the effects of long term meditation.

In the absence of external evidence, I have no choice but to fall back on my own experience. After nearly twenty years of not-very-consistent meditation I’m still often tense and distracted when I sit. In daily life, I’m not always the most easeful or equanimous person. But then, who knows how much more irritable and anxious I would have been without meditation.

When it comes to our own lives, there is no active control with which to compare ourselves. I’ll never know, really, what effect meditation has had on my life. Still—imperfectly, intermittently—something keeps me doing it. Something keeps bringing me back.

Flourishing Not Compliance

Insisting on compliance can cause harm to those who naturally diverge from cultural norms—I saw this in my son’s brief school experience. This is not inevitable. Ancient texts and modern neuroscience tell us that fulfilling our highest human potential by means of a consistent meditation practice has nothing to do with becoming more ‘normal’. For congenitally neurodivergent folks like me and my son, this is good news. While much research and clinical practice still focuses on changing the autistic person to make them less divergent, the example of long-term meditators shows us that—autistic or not—fulfilling our highest human potentials is a process of becoming more divergent.

In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter philosopher-psychologist Alison Gopnik argues that, instead of cutting our children into shape, carpenter-style, we can, like a gardener, provide an environment that supports each one to flourish in his or her, or their, own way. What if we took this seriously? What if we based our education system not on conformity but on supporting diverse, unique instances of human flourishing? What if, as adults, we supported ourselves the same way? If that was the goal, our schools and other systems would look quite different. And so, I imagine, would the people they produced.