Chris, research on development along multiple lines of intelligence was done by dozens of trained scientists according to the highest standards. Their findings are based on observations of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of individuals among all cultures and are published in major peer-reviewed journals.
Deep patterns of the stages of development are found to be universally valid for every human, from hunter-gatherer societies all the way to most developed cities.
Please, read the most clear and concise paper by Cook-Greuter on the topic to understand what stages I am referring to here
www.integralchurch.se/media/9levelsofincreasingembrace.pdf
You'll be able to easily relate different yeas of your own life to some of the stages.
These stages are very-very hard to see with introspective awareness because they usually operate at deep sub-conscious levels. That's why all major contemplative traditions have missed them and only observations over large samples of individuals were able to reveal them.
Jake, please, note the very big difference between (1) having a thought (2) identifying with a thought and (3) operating with a thought.
Having a thought means there is a thought in your conscious awareness. You are aware of a shirt. But what is a shirt? It is a thought, a concept projected in your awareness from a multiplicity of sub-conscious minds.
Identifying with a thought means you believe you are that thought you are having. I am my shirt, I am the person who wears such and such shirts and changes them once per day. It is very possible and much desirable to disidentify with as much of the conscious thoughts as possible. Such disidentification naturally leads to the greatly reduced number of conscious thoughts, because you break a positive feedback loop that creates them. The Buddha described this feedback loop as dependent origination.
Operating without a thought on the other hand is impossible. You see a shirt and have some feelings towards it (pleasant or unpleasant or neutral), and it is a thought composed of a great number of smaller concepts, including your personal history, society you are embedded in, color preferences etc. All these operate on a deep sub-conscious levels and very rarely if ever reach conscious awareness.
What I particularly like about systematic noting methods of contemplative development is that we are able to deconstruct such high-level thoughts as a shirt and directly see how they are created form many-many lower-level concepts and processes, including that which control attention, have aversion to the idea of having a self and filter sensory input.
Such discernment still won't reveal hidden structures (stages of development) in full detail (because they are so deep in the unconscious), but they help us immensely to understand the limitations of our current ways of meaning-making and grow into/invent new ones, more inclusive, more complex, with more perspectives.