What happens to brain during meditation? Meditation has many benefits.For example it helps to relax, reduce stress, etc. But how it is working? What exactly happens to our brains during meditation?
I'm not sure about what happens in the brain while someone is actually meditating (i.e., the state effect of meditation), but a meta-analysis from last year (Fox et al., 2014) looked carefully at what long term brain changes result from meditation. This is from the abstract:


  Anatomical likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis found eight brain regions consistently altered in meditators, including areas key to meta-awareness (frontopolar cortex/BA 10), exteroceptive and interoceptive body awareness (sensory cortices and insula), memory consolidation and reconsolidation (hippocampus), self and emotion regulation (anterior and mid cingulate; orbitofrontal cortex), and intra- and interhemispheric communication (superior longitudinal fasciculus; corpus callosum).


The paper is available online here: http://www.christofflab.ca/pdfs/Fox2014-MeditationMorphometry.pdf