Some recent advances on understanding how meditation trains the mind
I read a very interesting post recently in X.com, where they compare training the mind via meditation to training your brain's vascular system. The explanation uses the theory of vasocomputation, proposed by Michael Johnson. This part really resonated with me, since I believe it explains very nicely the focus of meditation:
"this is why a lot of meditation instructions attempt to point away from words and concepts using nonsensical koans or instructions like "do nothing", it's an attempt to get across the concept of mental relaxation using words, which are the very things we need to be letting go of."
This follows up another recent post where the author compares the bit rate of our conscious mind to the humongous amount of information in bits per second that our body receives through our sensory system. It is quite astounding that our brain can only process a very small fraction of it. I guess we would be going insane if we had to keep up with all that information overload! Just one more example of the benefits of meditation to keep a healthy mind.