The Brain Stem and Consciousness

We understand so little about consciousness, and i think one of the few things that we do understand is how to turn it on and turn it off. It does seem like that human beings throughout time, have been sort of illustrating the brain stem as sort of a goddess, as this creator or god type, archetype. And people could say, how would they know about this? You could make the obvious answer that they probably somebody's head probably got cracked open, or they probably were able to ook inside people's heads. But then you could also make the case for, again, going back to psychodelic states, that you maybe had visions, or you maybe saw this stuff internally