Meditation is used to gain insight into the nature of reality; this is essentially what meditation is being used for in Buddhist practices. The mechanism by which this works isn’t very clear, but it seems to be something like “gather a bunch of evidence about the world and wait for it to mound up so high that it collapses whatever categories you had before so you find new ones”.
Related, I think meditation generalizes as a form of neural annealing, which is basically applying the annealing analogy to a process that can happen in the brain where the brain can reconfigure itself into a better state by cycling through a high energy state before returning to a lower energy state (or something like that). Lots of details not worked out here, but the link is the most up to date thing I have on this to share.
Two ideas to share here.
Meditation is used to gain insight into the nature of reality; this is essentially what meditation is being used for in Buddhist practices. The mechanism by which this works isn’t very clear, but it seems to be something like “gather a bunch of evidence about the world and wait for it to mound up so high that it collapses whatever categories you had before so you find new ones”.
Related, I think meditation generalizes as a form of neural annealing, which is basically applying the annealing analogy to a process that can happen in the brain where the brain can reconfigure itself into a better state by cycling through a high energy state before returning to a lower energy state (or something like that). Lots of details not worked out here, but the link is the most up to date thing I have on this to share.