The Atlantic: How Many of Your Memories Are Fake?

These are the kinds of specific details that writers of memoir, history, and journalism yearn for when combing through memories to tell true stories. But such work has always come with the caveat that human memory is fallible. Now, scientists have an idea of just how unreliable it actually can be. New research released this week has found that even people with phenomenal memory are susceptible to having “false memories,” suggesting that “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune,” according to the authors of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). [...]

In another office nearby on campus, you can find Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who has spent decades researching how memories can become contaminated with people remembering—sometimes quite vividly and confidently—events that never happened. Loftus has found that memories can be planted in someone’s mind if they are exposed to misinformation after an event, or if they are asked suggestive questions about the past. One famous case was that of Gary Ramona, who sued his daughter’s therapist for allegedly planting false memories in her mind that Gary had raped her. [...]

The mind and its memory do not just record and retrieve information and experiences, but also infer, fill in gaps, and construct, wrote Bryan Boyd wrote in On the Origin of Stories. “Episodic memory’s failure to provide exact replicas of experiences appears to not be a limitation of memory but an adaptive design.”

Narrative, as Siegel explains, shapes meaning and order out of an existence that is otherwise just angst and chaos. This is one takeaway that nonfiction enthusiasts might consider when thinking about the intersections between stories and memory. There is harmony in both.

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Vox: Yes, humans and Neanderthals had sex. And they gave us an STD

New evidence suggests Neanderthals or Denisovans (another extinct near-human species) may be to blame for introducing a variant of this disease — specifically a cancer-causing strain called HPV 16 — to humans.

Recent evidence in genetics have found that humans had sex with Neanderthals and Denisovans many times in our history. “In those times, there was no safe sex, everything was transmitted,” Ville Pimenoff, a genetics researcher at the Catalan Institute of Oncoloy in Spain says. [...]

But it does tell us a lot more about human history, and can give us insight on how exposure to disease has shaped human evolution. STDs have been around since the dawn of humanity. Herpes may have first infected our ancestors more than a million years ago. Syphilis has been around since at least the Middle Ages. It’s possible STDs are what encouraged humans to stick to monogamous pairings. [...]

Pimenoff’s study also raises questions about what happened to the Neanderthals. If we contracted HPV from them, what did they get from us? It’s possible that humans spread diseases that brought about their extinction. In April, researchers at Cambridge and Oxford Brookes universities published a paper that suggested Neanderthals may have been particularly susceptible to germs that cause stomach ulcers and herpes.

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Quartz: Being moral means you can never do enough to help others

“I didn’t do enough,” he says. Is he right? Could morality really require that this hero do more? According to consequentialism, it’s true: he didn’t do enough. Consequentialism is the moral theory that we are obligated to do whatever would have the best consequences. If that entails great sacrifice, then great sacrifice is what consequentialism demands we undertake. Since Schindler could have done more, he should have. [...]

As attractive as this objection might seem, it’s harder to explain than it appears. To justify a less demanding normative theory, these objectors need to explain why it is sometimes permissible not to do the best thing. Philosophers have tried to meet this challenge in three ways. One is to set a ceiling on just how much morality can ask of us. Another is to allow us to give greater weight to our own wellbeing and projects. And a third is to argue that each of us need only do our fair share. With consequentialism, the bad news for those hoping to do less is that none of these approaches will do. [...]

This approach can satisfy proponents of the demandingness objection only if they are persuaded that their worry that consequentialism demands too much, full stop, was actually a worry that it demands they do more than their fair share. These are not the same worries and, even if they were, there is a more serious flaw with this approach. Consequentialism addresses individuals: it speaks to you as a single person, not to us as a group. Its demands follow from its imperative that you identify which action available to you will have the best outcome, and do it, regardless of the sacrifice. That others similarly situated and equally obligated are not fulfilling their obligation simply has no bearing on the criterion you’re supposed to use to evaluate whether an action available to you is right: whether your action will produce the best consequences.

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The New York Times: How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? It Paid Its People More

That set in motion the biggest test imaginable of a basic argument that has consumed ivory-tower economists, union-hall organizers and corporate executives for years on end: What if paying workers more, training them better and offering better opportunities for advancement can actually make a company more profitable, rather than less?

It is an idea that flies in the face of the prevailing ethos on Wall Street and in many executive suites the last few decades. But there is sound economic theory behind the idea. “Efficiency wages” is the term that economists — who excel at giving complex names to obvious ideas — use for the notion that employers who pay workers more than the going rate will get more loyal, harder-working, more productive employees in return.

Walmart’s experiment holds some surprising lessons for the American economy as a whole. Productivity gains have been slow for years; could fatter paychecks reverse that? Demand for goods and services has remained stubbornly low ever since the 2008 economic crisis. If companies paid people more, would it bring out more shoppers — benefiting workers and shareholders alike? [...]

The idea is that, sometimes, it is in an employer’s best interest to pay more than necessary to get a worker into a job. The 18th-century economic thinker Adam Smith described the need to pay a goldsmith particularly well to dissuade him from stealing from you. More recently, economists (including Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, who worked on these topics as an academic economist in the 1980s) have found evidence that people are more productive when they are paid above the market rate.

An employee making more than the market rate, after all, is likely to work harder and show greater loyalty. Workers who see opportunities to get promoted have an incentive not to mess up, compared with people who feel they are in a dead-end job. A person has more incentive to work hard, even when the boss isn’t watching, when the job pays better than what you could make down the street.

Economists have found evidence of this in practice in many real-world settings. Higher pay at New Jersey police departments, for example, led to better rates of clearing cases. At the San Francisco airport, higher pay led to shorter lines for passengers. Among British home care providers, higher pay meant less oversight was needed.

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CityLab: The Extraordinary Lives of Istanbul's Street Cats

“There’s a mystery, an unpredictability about both cats and Istanbul,” says Ceyda Torun, the Istanbul-born director of a new documentary film “Kedi,” which tells the stories of seven of the city’s many street cats and the people who love them. Named after the Turkish word for “cat,” the movie shows how deeply intertwined Istanbul’s felines are with the lives of the city’s residents — a relationship Torun says her research indicates goes back thousands of years.

A zoologist at Istanbul University showed Torun a 3,500-year-old cat skeleton uncovered during construction of the Marmaray underwater rail system. “It was dug up right on the coast of the Bosphorus Strait and has a healed bone on its leg,” Torun says. “The zoologist’s professional opinion was that the bone could only have healed in the way that it did if it was wrapped up by a human.” [...]

People in Istanbul have long cared for the city’s non-human residents: In the Ottoman era, many houses were constructed with cat doors, and many mosques with built-in birdhouses, says Torun. “Many people told me, if you’re a true Muslim, you’re a lover of all animals,” she adds, explaining that the texts of Islam, Turkey’s majority faith, include stories about the Prophet Muhammad’s particular love for cats. But as Istanbul has grown from village to town to crowded megalopolis, that duty has come to seem more and more imperative.

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