The Brain Atlas

Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes De Fabrica Mundi
Translation: Atlas, or Description of the Universe. Duisburg, 1585-1595

What can the owner of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks; the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers and MLS’s Seattle Sounders FC teach the world of independent assurance?

Turns out – quite a bit and in a way that will surprise.

The owner of the said United States sport franchises is Paul Allen – also known as the co-founder of Microsoft; the 41st richest person in the world.

As interesting as it would be to turn Honestly Lay Bare into a biographical study of a 56 year old guy we have resisted the temptation.

What interest us is his philanthropy – and precisely the Allen Institute for Brian Science.

Allen founded the Institute in 2003 as a nonprofit corporation and medical research organization.

The first explicit goal of the Institute was to create an open-access, visual, searchable online map of genes expressed in the brain, as well as of brain circuitry and cell location.

Roughly one petabyte of data - equal to the memory necessary to hold the information held in about 50 Libraries of Congress - was produced as a result.

Utilizing the mouse model system (given its great similarity to human DNA), 20,000 genes in the adult mouse brain were mapped to a cellular level for the Allen Brain Atlas (http://www.brain-map.org/).

Did you miss the important piece of information?

Read the last three paragraphs again.

“An open-access, visual, searchable online map” … yes … the data generated from this massive effort is free and publicly available.

This freeware is available in a profession – and an area of study – that has until now tightly held its intellectual property so as to ensure a near monopoly on extracting value.

But no more.

Here is the first ever atlas of the brain and it is free to anyone – scientist or non scientist alike – that wants to use it.

A vital part of the project – taking up some one-third of the total budget – was developing software that allowed scientists to rapidly search and analyze the massive database.

Using these programs, all freely available on the brain map Web site, scientists can make a few mouse clicks to achieve what used to take months of experimentation.

More than 250 researchers use the Web site on a daily basis.

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The idea of an open source Atlas got Honestly Lay Bare thinking.

Why cannot the same cartographical effort be undertaken to map the neurons of business.

Allow yourself to imagine a world of assurance where there was some form of legislative imperative that all business had to declare their internal control deficiencies to a central repository (the brain – so to speak) and there was a consistency of presentation of the issues (the atlas – so to speak).

How would it benefit independent assurance?

Well for starters all the issues that are ever likely to confront a normal business (even one under great distress) would be mapped out for you.

To use an atlas analogy – all the prospecting is done.

What it would allow you to do is to focus not on the symptoms of a poor control environment but to unravel the mysteries of the causes of a poor control environment.

Secondly it would transform the role of independent assurance into one of a discoverer rather than that of a policeman (even if we have long since seeing ourselves as the latter).

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Imagine the day that an independent assurance report details not only the issues; not only the process improvement opportunities but where the deficiencies sit within the broader spectrum of the business world.

Therein you have independent assurance providing unarguable value and we will have conquered forever our own mountain of agnotology.