Meditation as Brain Damage?

I have accumulated enough hours meditating on a free app called Insight Timer to be considered an expert. But a sufficient number of those hours have been spent snoozing, so the adjective "expert" is unwarranted. I might use the term "avid fan" and have described the effect as "restoring my ability to be fully present by bringing balance to my capabilities." Part of this journey is to become meditatively silent, to embrace being "an ant on a log floating down the river." A recent article on brain damage intrigued me.

Apparently there is a syndrome called Auto-Activation Deficit (AAD). With AAD, a person is absolutely unresponsive to any interior motivation and, in fact, may be devoid of these motivations. The person is present with a "blank mental state." This nirvana sounding state is the result of brain damage to the basal ganglia - a region in the base of the brain which deals with motor activity. The unusual part of AAD is that when stimulated by another person, the "damaged" individual is responsive and appropriate in behavior.

The parallels to an experience of achieving some meditative state is intriguing. In meditation, I experience an awareness of self that differentiates the clamoring of my ego state from an observing self. As I situate within the observing self, I am not motivated internally but am responsive to others - such as a phone call or a knock on the door. AAD seems to indicate that part of meditations powerful effects occur within the basal ganglia, while I would have assumed much more of the impact was within the prefrontal cortex.