Comment by pedalpete

Neurons definitely re-wire, or just wire/connect. Meditation, creates an understanding of how we can "control" or monitor our thoughts. Reading creates understanding.

Yes, if you lift the weight, muscle will grow. If you look at or think about the weight, studies suggest, muscles will also grow.

But I'm cautious to not conflate "we see electrical activity" to "we have re-wired the brain".

Meditation changes the electrical activity, but we don't put an electrical signal into the brain and end up with meditation. We can kinda force the brain into a meditative state with magnetic stimulation, but we're talking about some really powerful stuff, and I think some would argue that we aren't actually creating a meditative state if we were to do this. Note: I haven't looked into this too deeply.

The way I look at it, we are just really clever apes. We keep thinking we understand how the brain/body/consciousness works, but every time we discover another layer of science and understanding, we look back at our previous understanding and think how naive we were. I think this is the same.

We used to literally think we understood how the body worked by "balancing the 4 humours". We understood how blood delivered oxygen to muscles and nutrients and we thought "oh, I get it, it's a big pump, and we pump this blood stuff around and that's how it works". Then we discovered electricty, slapped our collective foreheads and went "OH!! Of course, it's electric! electricity contracts the pump, oh, and look at these thing in the brain! They're electric too!! I get it".

Soon, we'll go through this whole process again and realize that the electrical activity wasn't wrong, but was naive, and I suspect the process will repeat again, and again.