Three articles for this month. The first is a new form of psychiatry that may come to eventually replace the traditional psychoanalysis. The second is really a business school paper than a science article, but I found it interesting nonetheless. The last one is an amusing insight into the paradox of why whales even exist.

The first one is from The Economist and covers is new form of psychiatric treatment now called Cognitive-bias modification (CBM). The article explains that the conventional form of treatment now recognized is psychoanalysis which everyone associates with lying down on a couch and talking out your problems to a sympathetic therapist. Psychoanalysis seems to be a reasonably effective remedy for a variety of common ailments but takes too long and is therefore too expensive. CBM on the other hand seems to work after just a few 15-minute sessions and you even need a therapist for it. A specialized computer program simply takes the place of the therapist.

CBM is based on the theory that psychological problems are caused by unconscious biases in thinking. So someone who has a fear of spiders for example might spend a lot his or her time and attention on thinking about spiders and perhaps imagining spider-shapes in everything they see. CBM attempts to correct for this by forcing the patient to not focus obsessively on the threatening images. The software could for example show the patient a spider image and a non-spider neutral image at the same time but give the patient a task to do that requires looking intently at the neutral image. After a while, the patient’s unconscious tendency to focus only on the threatening image is reduced and this seems to carry over into the real world.

As it turns out, the spider example isn’t very good because CBM doesn’t seem to work on arachnophobia, presumably because it an evolved response rather than an acquired one. But CBM does seem effective on a wife variety of other problems, including some instances of alcohol addiction in which the patient has a bias towards something rather than a bias against something. In particular, some preliminary trials indicate that a combination of CBM and traditional psychoanalysis works better than psychoanalysis alone but it’s still very much a new and untested treatment.

Next is the paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research about the practice of adult adoption in Japan. The authors were apparently surprised to note that family-owned and run companies played a more important role in postwar Japan than expected. This is unusual because it is well-known that the nepotism inherent in family firms tend to make them uncompetitive. Instead, the authors find that family firms in Japan are fairly competitive and that such firms controlled by heirs may actually perform better than professionally-run companies.

This discrepancy is explained by the practice of adult adoption in Japan. Successful but not blood-related managers in companies are commonly adopted by the family that owns the company. The new son legally takes on the family name, swears loyalty to the ancestors of his adopted family and is in turn granted control of the firm. Adult adoption is apparently the dominant form of adoption in Japan, but virtually unheard of in the rest of the world.

This practice cleverly allows the companies to retain their identities as family-owned and run firms but still enables them to seek out and recruit the most talented managers while virtually guaranteeing their loyalty to the company. I can’t imagine this practice being able to work outside of Japan, but it does strike me as an unintuitive but elegant solution to an important business problem.

Finally the Loom blog on Discover has an interesting insight about whales. It argues that technically whales shouldn’t exist simply because they are so large. Large size means lots of cells, and lots of cells mean a lot of cell division to get that way. Each cell division however brings with it the risk that something could go wrong, resulting in a mutated cell. Mutated cells might lead to cancer and hence death. Therefore, the whale is an organism that is hugely at risk from cancer and therefore should not have evolved into its current form at all.

We actually know very little about cancer in whales, so two researchers Aleah Caulin of the University of Pennsylvania and Carlo Maley of the University of California, simply used cancer rates in humans and extrapolated from that to fit the body mass of whales. They calculated that about half of all blue whales should have cancer by the age of 50 and all of them should have cancer by the age of 80. Since whales can live for well over a century and some have been known to live for over 200 years, clearly they’re not getting cancer at anything close to human rates, which in turn suggests that something else is going on.

At the moment, scientists don’t know why is it about whales that make them less prone to developing cancer but it’s clear that this is a promising avenue for future research. Various ideas suggested include a souped-up immune system, that their lower metabolic rate relative to their weight somehow helps prevent cancer or that they develop hypertumors, cancers that parasitize on other cancers. Whatever the final findings might be, they are sure to be of help in our own war against the disease and I find it very amusing that it came from an insight that whales shouldn’t exist.