Comment by danabramov

You can get into a meditative zone when you're manipulating equations using techniques you've internalized.

In research you're doing a lot more of things like reading papers, putting your thoughts into words, trying to understand something the author of the paper barely understands, feeling lost and unsure where to look next. All of that can feel good too (or it cannot depending on the person) but it's a different feeling than playing a logic game.

As one example, Euclidia is a fun meditative game. But compare the difference in feeling between doing an exercise from Euclid and trying to prove the parallel postulate. It took centuries to realize you couldn't prove it, and then there was a lot of hard work trying to figure out what geometry was like if you get rid of it.