Since he developed a particular technique for imaging the brain, much of Daniel's scientific work concerns the evolution brain-physiology or comparative neuro-anatomy. His imaging technique captures the functional organization of the adult human brain in vertical columns. While each column performs specific functions, it can through connectivity enlist other columns. Now, though particular lateralization-patterns and column-spacing define the human brain, its evolutionary significance lies in plasticity and connectivity, i.e., beyond the brute physical structure itself.
Daniel divided the evolution of the brain into three steps. "Early" organisms had "programmed" brains which are isolated from the environment and work without sensory feedback, allowing for very fast reactions. In the course of evolution, the brain developed to allow for sensory input to override control programs. The central programs have finally(?) become "buried" under the new sensory control systems to the extent that synaptic pathways can be forged or created by the environment. This increased complexity, openness, or plasticity of the brain comes at the price of greater vulnerability: the rigid "electronic" synapses of the control programs worked faster than the chemical synapses of sensory control.
It is striking testimony to the plasticity of the human brain that one can remove in children under 11 half of the brain, including the so-called "speech center," and watch them recover almost all of their mental ability, including speech: Their brains simply reorganize themselves, and some parts of the brain take on functions which were previously performed by physiologically and locationally distinct areas. Certain illnesses (like schizophrenia or autism), however, may also be testimony to the peculiar vulnerability of the human brain, and Daniel's research may shed some light on those.
Throughout all of this, Daniel cautions, we should remain cognizant of the limits of science. He has encountered those in the course of his own biography (which included close encounters with Steiner's anthroposophy and Creation Science) and by pursuing his interests in the history of Eastern and Western religion. In particular, Daniel argues against a naturalism according to which all sensible questions about human nature are scientific questions and all intelligible answers will be scientific. Science, according to Daniel, asks only and exactly those questions that it can answer, and though he himself is engaged in a scientific program of "reductionism" (looking at the brain as the seat of mental activity), he appreciates the narrow constraints of this reductionism and encourages speculation on those questions which science cannot and will not answer.
Alfred Nordmann
| Membership Directory | General Information | Topics and Issues | Calendar |
This page last updated August 31, 1999. It is maintained by the Philosophy Department. © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina. Credits.