The Emerging Nervous System

The standard medical framework for neurodiversity is deficit-based: ADHD is a disorder of attention regulation, autism is a disorder of social communication, high sensitivity is either a temperament variant or an anxiety-adjacent condition. In each case, the neurological difference is defined by its distance from a norm — and the norm is the neurotypical nervous system operating within the environments that the majority currently inhabit.

This framework is useful for certain purposes. It directs resources toward people who are struggling. It provides a shared language for researchers and clinicians. It legitimises support that people genuinely need. But it has a structural limitation that becomes important as neurodivergent rates rise: it cannot ask the question of whether the norm itself is the problem. If recorded rates have risen steeply over a single generation (autism from about 1 in 150 US children to 1 in 31; parent-reported ADHD diagnosis from about 6% to 11%), the deficit framework asks what is wrong with an increasing number of people. The evolutionary framework asks whether the environment has changed in ways that make a previously functional wiring pattern appear pathological — or whether something in the collective human nervous system is actually shifting.

These are not the same question, and they point toward radically different responses. The deficit framework seeks to bring divergent nervous systems into compliance with the existing environment through medication, therapy and behavioural intervention. The evolutionary framework seeks to understand what the divergent nervous system is actually doing — what its capabilities and requirements are — and asks how the environment might need to change to meet it, rather than only how the nervous system can be modified to meet the environment.

The rise in recorded diagnoses is real and documented. Parent-reported ADHD diagnosis among US children rose from about 6% in 1997 to about 10% in 2016 (Xu et al., 2018) and to about 11% in 2022 (Danielson et al., 2024). Autism prevalence among 8-year-olds in CDC surveillance rose from about 1 in 150 in 2000 to about 1 in 36 in 2020 (Maenner et al., 2023) and 1 in 31 in 2022. Diagnoses of anxiety disorders in children and adolescents have also risen.

The mainstream explanation — broader diagnostic criteria, reduced stigma, greater clinical awareness and better services — accounts for much of the increase. A Danish study estimated that about 60% of the rise in autism diagnoses was attributable to changes in reporting practices (Hansen et al., 2015), and UK data show much of the rise reflects more diagnoses among people who were previously missed (Russell et al., 2022). For ADHD, a meta-regression of studies using standardised criteria found no clear increase in prevalence over three decades (Polanczyk et al., 2014). Diagnoses in adults have risen steeply from a low base, as would be expected when previously unrecognised adults are identified. A real increase in underlying occurrence, driven for example by environmental factors, cannot be ruled out, but it has not been demonstrated.

What the data show most clearly is that diagnosis rates respond strongly to awareness, criteria and services. Whether anything beyond that is changing in the underlying population is an open question.

If even part of the evolutionary or consciousness-shift interpretation is correct — if neurodivergent nervous systems represent adaptation rather than only dysfunction — the implications are significant for how we understand education, work, medicine, spirituality and human potential.

The educational system becomes a mismatch problem. A school system built around long periods of seated, teacher-led instruction, with standardised content at standardised rates, suits some children much better than others (this is a matter of individual differences in attention, sensory sensitivity and support needs, not of fixed “learning styles,” which research has not supported; Pashler et al., 2008). Rising rates of attention problems, anxiety and school refusal in children may partly be signals that some children need different conditions, though they also have other causes.

The psychiatric medication question shifts. Medicating ADHD and autism to produce compliance with a neurotypically-designed environment is not obviously wrong — it reduces real suffering in real people navigating a real environment. But it is worth asking whether the primary goal of treatment should be environmental compliance or genuine flourishing. These are sometimes the same; they are not always the same. A child who can sit still and pass standardised tests but has lost access to their natural curiosity and intensity has gained something and lost something. What is the real goal?

The spiritual implications are significant. A nervous system with higher sensitivity, weaker ego boundaries, stronger access to non-ordinary states and reduced capacity for comfortable neurotypical social compliance might be more naturally oriented toward the kinds of experience that contemplative traditions value — a speculative idea. People differ in how easily they enter absorbed states and how strongly they feel others’ distress, and these differences are not defects. The claim that they represent what “the next stage of human development requires” is a belief rather than a finding.