Brain Surgery To Remove Amygdala Leads To Woman’s ‘Hyper Empathy’

From here:

The new case comes in contrast to previous observations of people who endured damage to the amygdala and suffered emotional deficits. In a 2001 study involving 22 people who had parts of their temporal lobe removed, researchers found that people with more extensive damage to the amygdala performed worse in learning emotional facial expressions.

This is very interesting! It suggests to me that empathy is not created by the amygdala even though a dysfunctional amygdala can impair ones empathy. That is consistent with my view that the brain doesn't create consciousness, it merely modulates it.

The God helmet

Just watched this video about mystical experiences and the God helmet.  The speaker implicitly supposes, but doesn't argue, that the God helmet produces such experiences.

But such a conclusion is simply not warranted.  The fact that "the God helmet" triggers such experiences does not entail that the brain is the origin of such experiences. For example, one could be blind due to damage to the brain rather than the eyes. One could thereby restore vision if that part of the brain were altered to make it fully functional again. It wouldn't thereby entail the things we see are not out there.
The brain might prohibit such mystical experiences in its normal functional state. Altering a certain area might allow us glimpses of a reality normally inaccessible to us as the brain filters out such experiences.

See other essays by me on this topic in my other blog: e.g

Neither Modern Materialism nor Science as currently conceived can explain Consciousness