Moving Up the Adult Developmental Scale
The Impact of Altered States of Consciousness
Notes by Natalie Ola
3 min read · 12.7.2025
Adult Developmental Stages
There are actually ways to move yourself up the adult developmental scale.
The more altered states of consciousness you experience, or personal tragedy, those are the two that it seems that you can move up the scale.
And altered states could be psychedelics, could be through martial art flow experience.
In fact, if you look into the research, what it seems like is most people start off their first experience is with a psychedelic and then it’s through flow hobbies; they take up skiing or music or something along those lines.
Meditation Impact on the Brain
Daniel Goleman, Richard Davidson, Altered States.
Compassion meditation has a real impact on the brain.
Strong heightened activity in TPJ, decreased activity in the amygdala. Long-term benefits in decrease of pain, anxiety, insomnia, stress levels.
Also massive performance benefits.
Increases our ability to pay attention, increases our quality of life. Now mind you, these benefits are very very different from the spiritual benefits of meditation that have long been classified.
What used to be a spiritual practice is, in fact, a health and performance practice.
Altered States Lead to Altered Traits
Harvard neuroscientist and researcher, Sarah Lazar, Ph D.
Meditation actually produces neuroplasticity; there's an increase in brain matter volume.
50-year old meditators seem to have the grey matter volume of 25 year olds, which suggests and we now know that it’s true, meditation slows down aging.
3-month meditation seems to strengthen the hippocampus, which is critical for learning and memory.
All these points mean that altered states are leading to altered traits.
So the practice of an hour-long daily meditation over long periods of time produces permanent changes in how we view the world.
Mindfulness Practice
Mindfulness based stress reduction research shows that 30 hours of meditation spread out over 8 weeks—the amygdala becomes less reactive so the brain’ danger detector becomes less reactive; so emotionally we are going to experience this as less fear, less anxiety.
30 hours is also enough to kick start small molecular improvements that slow down aging.
Compassion, Love, & Kindness Meditations
Some of the craziest research comes out of compassion meditation, love and kindness meditations, which finds that 7 hours—that is incredibly fast—7 hours of compassion meditation increases empathy and our positive feelings towards others,
and that these traits persist outside of the meditation meaning that altered states lead to altered traits.
Cognitive Improvements
We are also seeing very quick cognitive improvements; 2 weeks of mindfulness meditation produces less mind wandering, better focus, better working memory and enough, by the way, to produce a significant improvement in the GRE exams.
Emotional Regulation
To summarize the studies done so far, we see massive increases overtime in emotional regulation—not surprising.
We see decreases in a stress response—and this includes the body secreting less cortisol.
It’s often mislabeled as a stress hormone and it’s really energy.
We get cortisol when we deal with challenging situations, which is obviously every stressful situation, which is how it got sort of misnomered.
Things Become Less Addictive
The most interesting finding is that the portion of the brain called the nucleus accumbens shrinks and becomes less active.
So this is really interesting.
The nucleus accumbens is thick with dopamine receptors; it gets really active in flow.
And shrinking it down doesn’t seem like a good thing, but do you remember how the TPJ does both kinds of in-body perspective—where is my body right now, my consciousness, and also cognitive perspective, psychological perspective.
So the nucleus accumbens is responsible for all our pleasure chemicals and our reward chemicals but it’s also where all that stickiness is.
So when Buddha and everybody else who taught that long meditation makes you want less—
it squelches attachment and desire—
what that actually means is that long meditation shrinks the nucleus accumbens, and you become less attached to things—things become less addictive, less sticky.
This is known as Buddhist non-attachment.
Assessing Different Meditation Systems
It’s starting to get discrete; we can measure different meditation systems against different meditation systems.
So we now know, e.g., that love and kindness and compassion meditation seems to work better as a treatment for PTSD than other forms.
Creativity is helped by an open-senses meditation.
They tested it against a focus meditation, which is great for convergent thinking, logical, linear—can be creative by the way—but it’s logical, linear decision making while divergent and lateral thinking, creating far-flung ideas, seems to be helped by open-senses meditation.
Reference:
Steven Kotler. Session 5 Hacking the Ecstatic. Mapping Cloud Nine: Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience. Audiobook. 1.10.2022.
