Why is Everyone Leaving the Paul Allen Brain Project? Answer: Paul Allen's Sister, Jody Patton

I have been able to confirm the reason why so many people are leaving the Paul Allen Brain Project in droves. Apparently, Paul Allen's sister, Jody Patton, who manages the Paul Allen Brain Project, is an "arrogant", "overbearing", and "incompetent" "dictator" who micro-manages in excess, and whose winning personality poisoned the work atmosphere and smothered creativity, motivation, and initiative. Patton says her management style is "tough but fair", but I say, face reality, Jody Patton got the top management position because her brother is the billonaire Paul Allen, not because she was qualified. Evidently, she is not qualified to manage a project of this size and complexity. The proof is in the pudding; If Jody Patton could manage a project properly, then why is everyone bailing out of the Paul Allen Brain Project? She took a noble initiative to map gene expression throughout the brain and suffocated the life out of it by her incompetence.

So it would appear that my Paul Allen Brain Project Hypothesis is probably wrong, that there is no-one intentionally trying to sabotage the project, but that the Paul Allen Brain Project fiasco was due to Jody Patton's incompetence as a project manager.

Well one good thing to come out of this is that now I know to steer clear of this walking disaster. Paul Allen made a commendable step to advance neuroscience by mapping gene expression throughout the brain, but his big mistake was in handing over the project to his incompetent sister. It is unfortunate that Paul Allen did not possess the objectivity to see the mismatch between his sister and the Allen Brain Project, but then again, Paul Allen's biography reads like a story of failure after failure, and the Allen Brain Project is just another failure to add to the huge list of his. When is he ever going to learn? The Allen Brain Project could have been a blazing success if he didn't appoint his sister to lead the project. If he was more involved with the project, he would have been aware of the problems involved with having her manage and would be in a position to replace her. If Jody Patton had been replaced early on in the Allen Brain Project, when it became evident that she was incompetent, then I have no doubts that the Allen Brain Project would be very successful today. Instead, we have mostly everyone who once supported the project has abandoned it, due largely to Jody Patton's incompetence. It's high time she took responsibility for the projects short-comings. By making this post about it, I am assured that many out there who are interested in what's going on in neuroscience will know the truth.

It has been said that Paul Allen is the accidental zillionaire. Many cried foul at this characterization of him, but after his many mishaps and mistakes, and now the Paul Allen Brain Atlas fiasco which will set back big time neuroscience for at least a decade, I am beginning to think that a better characterization of him would be "the Idiot" (which, as it happens, in his town of Seattle, he actually is known by the name, the "village idiot").

Am I being too hard on Paul Allen and his incredibly incompetent sister, Jody Patton? Nah, I don't think so!

Neural Science: A Century of Progress and the Mysteries that Remain

Thomas D. Albright, Thomas M. Jessell, Eric R. Kandel, and Michael I. Posner

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The goal of neural science is to understand the biological mechanisms that account for mental activity. Neural science seeks to understand how the neural circuits that are assembled during development permit individuals to perceive the world around them, how they recall that perception from memory, and, once recalled, how they can act on the memory of that perception. Neural science also seeks to understand the biological underpinnings of our emotional life, how emotions color our thinking and how the regulation of emotion, thought, and action goes awry in diseases such as depression, mania, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease. These are enormously complex problems, more complex than any we have confronted previously in other areas of biology.

Historically, neural scientists have taken one of two approaches to these complex problems: reductionist or holistic. Reductionist, or bottom–up, approaches attempt to analyze the nervous system in terms of its elementary components, by examining one molecule, one cell, or one circuit at a time. These approaches have converged on the signaling properties of nerve cells and used the nerve cell as a vantage point for examining how neurons communicate with one another, and for determining how their patterns of interconnections are assembled during development and how they are modified by experience. Holistic, or top–down approaches, focus on mental functions in alert behaving human beings and in intact experimentally accessible animals and attempt to relate these behaviors to the higher-order features of large systems of neurons. Both approaches have limitations but both have had important successes.

The holistic approach had its first success in the middle of the nineteenth century with the analysis of the behavioral consequences following selective lesions of the brain. Using this approach, clinical neurologists, led by the pioneering efforts of Paul Pierre Broca, discovered that different regions of the cerebral cortex of the human brain are not functionally equivalent ([271 and 266]). Lesions to different brain regions produce defects in distinctively different aspects of cognitive function. Some lesions interfere with comprehension of language, other with the expression of language; still other lesions interfere with the perception of visual motion or of shape, with the storage of long-term memories, or with voluntary action. In the largest sense, these studies revealed that all mental processes, no matter how complex, derive from the brain and that the key to understanding any given mental process resides in understanding how coordinated signaling in interconnected brain regions gives rise to behavior. Thus, one consequence of this top–down analysis has been initial demystification of aspects of mental function: of language perception, action, learning, and memory ( [164]).

A second consequence of the top–down approach came at the beginning of the twentieth century with the work of the Gestalt psychologists, the forerunners of cognitive psychologists. They made us realize that percepts, such as those which arise from viewing a visual scene, cannot simply be dissected into a set of independent sensory elements such as size, color, brightness, movement, and shape. Rather, the Gestaltists found that the whole of perception is more than the sum of its parts examined in isolation. How one perceives an aspect of an image, its shape or color, for example, is in part determined by the context in which that image is perceived. Thus, the Gestaltists made us appreciate that to understand perception we needed not only to understand the physical properties of the elements that are perceived, but more importantly, to understand how the brain reconstructs the external world in order to create a coherent and consistent internal representation of that world.

With the advent of brain imaging, the holistic methods available to the nineteenth century clinical neurologist, based mostly on the detailed study of neurological patients with defined brain lesions, were enhanced dramatically by the ability to examine cognitive functions in intact behaving normal human subjects ([243]). By combining modern cognitive psychology with high-resolution brain imaging, we are now entering an era when it may be possible to address directly the higher-order functions of the brain in normal subjects and to study in detail the nature of internal representations.

The success of the reductionist approach became fully evident only in the twentieth century with the analysis of the signaling systems of the brain. Through this approach, we have learned the molecular mechanisms through which individual nerve cells generate their characteristic long-range signals as all-or-none action potentials and how nerve cells communicate through specific connections by means of synaptic transmission. From these cellular studies, we have learned of the remarkable conservation of both the long-range and the synaptic signaling properties of neurons in various parts of the vertebrate brain, indeed in the nervous systems of all animals. What distinguishes one brain region from another and the brain of one species from the next, is not so much the signaling molecules of their constituent nerve cells, but the number of nerve cells and the way they are interconnected. We have also learned from studies of single cells how sensory stimuli are sorted out and transformed at various relays and how these relays contribute to perception. Much as predicted by the Gestalt psychologists, these cellular studies have shown us that the brain does not simply replicate the reality of the outside world, but begins at the very first stages of sensory transduction to abstract and restructure external reality.

In this review we outline the accomplishments and limitations of these two approaches in attempts to delineate the problems that still confront neural science. We first consider the major scientific insights that have helped delineate signaling in nerve cells and that have placed that signaling in the broader context of modern cell and molecular biology. We then go on to consider how nerve cells acquire their identity, how they send axons to specific targets, and how they form precise patterns of connectivity. We also examine the extension of reductionist approaches to the visual system in an attempt to understand how the neural circuitry of visual processing can account for elementary aspects of visual perception. Finally, we turn from reductionist to holistic approaches to mental function. In the process, we confront some of the enormous problems in the biology of mental functioning that remain elusive, problems in the biology of mental functioning that have remained completely mysterious. How does signaling activity in different regions of the visual system permit us to perceive discrete objects in the visual world? How do we recognize a face? How do we become aware of that perception? How do we reconstruct that face at will, in our imagination, at a later time and in the absence of ongoing visual input? What are the biological underpinnings of our acts of will?

As the discussions below attempt to make clear, the issue is no longer whether further progress can be made in understanding cognition in the twenty-first century. We clearly will be able to do so. Rather, the issue is whether we can succeed in developing new strategies for combining reductionist and holistic approaches in order to provide a meaningful bridge between molecular mechanism and mental processes: a true molecular biology of cognition. If this approach is successful in the twenty-first century, we may have a new, unified, and intellectually satisfying view of mental processes.

A Critique of Numenta and Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) Modeling of Neocortex

Few have heard of Numenta, a small company located in Menlo Park, CA, that was founded in March 2005 by Jeff Hawking (inventor of the Palm Pilot and author of the book, "On Intelligence") and Dileep George (in addition to being a co-founder of Numenta, he is also the principal architect), that is devoted to modeling neocortex through Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). The concept of HTM is discussed in Hawking's book, "On Intelligence", but even more informative is a recently released white paper entitled "Hierarchical Temporal Memory: Concepts, Theory, and Terminology" from the Numenta website that describes more details about HTM. Here is an excerpt:

Hierarchical Temporal Memories (HTMs) are unlike traditional programmable computers. With traditional computers, a programmer creates specific programs to solve specific problems. For example, one program may be used to recognize speech and another completely different program may be used to model weather. HTM, on the other hand, is best thought of as a memory system. HTMs are not programmed and do not execute different algorithms for different problems. Instead, HTMs “learn” how to solve problems. HTMs are trained by exposing them to sensory data and the capability of the HTM is determined largely by what it has been exposed to. HTMs are organized as a tree-shaped hierarchy of nodes, where each node implements a common learning and memory function. HTMs store information throughout the hierarchy in a way that models the world. All objects in the world, be they cars, people, buildings, speech, or the flow of information across a computer network, have structure. This structure is hierarchical in both space and time. HTM memory is also hierarchical in both space and time, and therefore can efficiently capture and model the structure of the world. HTMs are similar to Bayesian Networks; however, they differ from most Bayesian Networks in the way that time, hierarchy, action, and attention are used. HTMs can be implemented with software on traditional computer hardware, but it is best to think of an HTM as a memory system.

Numenta is an example of a small, agile company densely-packed with talent and motivation. It's an excellent idea that they are proposing (i.e., extending Bayesian networks and Belief Propagation to model human neocortex) that is theoretically sound, biologically plausible, and that can be implemented in computer and related technologies. It is useful to compare the small, agile Numenta to the monolithic Allen Brain Project and the Blue Brain Project. My contention, born of experience, is that giant projects with too much money encourage laziness and dull thought. You see this at the Allen Brain Project and the Blue Brain Project. On the other hand, projects like Numenta, which are lean, mean, and hungry for results, are almost guaranteed to succeed. My prediction is that Numenta will be a big success.

My Paul Allen Brain Project Hypothesis

I wish I had some exciting neuroscience news to report but none at the moment catches my fancy. Lots of deadlines coming up, including the Society for Neuroscience abstract submission (May 15, which will probably get pushed back a few days). I couldn't help noticing that the Paul Allen Brain Institute has turned into a circus for Nature Neuroscience, which I regard as kind of funny because it suggests that the Paul Allen crew lacks content of their own to post on their site so they need to grab it from other sources. How lame is that? If I want Nature Neuroscience content, I'll visit the Nature Neuroscience website, and besides, we already have sites like neurotransmitter.net and HubMed that will show you publications from various journals. Three years ago the Paul Allen Brain Project kicked off with such noble ambitions, and now they're reduced to displaying Nature Neuroscience ads! What's up with that? Why don't they display their own content and data analysis that they generate with their own in situ data? The Allen Brain people have been working with their mouse gene expression data for three years, and have produced no published analyses of their data, nor have they provided any tools to let other people analyze and datamine their data. What is wrong with these people? What the hell have they been doing for three long years? How can they have so little to show for it? And they had $100 million dollars to boot!

Am I being too critical of the Allen Brain people? No. Their buffoonery fiasco is going to make it that much harder to undertake any large-scale neuroscience in the years to come. They had the opportunity, and more importantly, the responsibility, to get this job done right, and they completely bungled it up. They do not have my sympathy, only my severe disappointment and disgust.

At this time, I would like to formally state my Paul Allen Brain Project Hypothesis, which is that someone in their organization must be intentionally trying to sabotage the Paul Allen Brain Project because no organization can be this inept unintentionally.

In my opinion, it's just another nail in the coffin of the Allen Brain Project,... and life goes on.

Time to meet those deadlines.