Brain Injury Expands Consciousness

There was a very interesting article published in the dailymail.co.uk on June 1 2009:

Masterstroke: Man who couldn't even draw stickmen wakes from brain surgery... as a talented artist

For most, stroke and brain surgery can be devastating but for Alan Brown it sparked a previously unseen talent... as an artist.

When Alan, 49, emerged from a gruelling 16-hour operation following his stroke, he found he had become a reborn 'Michelangelo' and was able to paint and draw with incredible detail.

This is strong evidence that the brain does not produce consciousness but restricts it. I discussed this topic previously in the post Scientific Theories of Psychic Phenomena Part 3 The commonly held materialist view of the brain is that it produces consciousness. However the view that consciousness exists independently from physical matter and the brain filters or transmits consciousness has more empirical support.

Chris Carter explains this in his article:

Does Consciousness depend on the Brain?

The argument in its essence is that the transmission and production hypotheses are equally compatible with the facts materialism tries to explain - such as the effects of senility, drugs, and brain damage on consciousness - but that the hypothesis of transmission has the advantage of providing a framework for understanding other phenomena that must remain utterly inexplicable on the basis of the materialistic hypothesis. The materialists simply deny that these other phenomena even exist, as they rightly realize that the existence of these phenomena threatens their ideology with extinction.

It is extremely unlikely that a brain injury could cause the same changes in the brain that learning a skill would produce. If an injury to the brain can give a person a new talent, that suggests that the talent originally existed in the non-physical consciousness but the brain was restricting that talent from expressing itself in the physical organism. The stroke may have damaged the part of the brain that restricted the talent from emerging. This might then allow the patient to become more fully conscious of his innate abilities.