For the past five years the New York Times Magazine has produced an issue focused the past years "most noteworthy ideas." I look forward to this issue each year. It never ceases to amaze me how many of these ideas are directly related to the brain. I highly recommend visiting the New York Times Magazine website and searching out this year's most noteworthy brainy ideas. Here are four of them with a short excerpt from the magazine's full description.

1. The False Memory Diet: It is possible to convince people that they don't like certain fattening foods -- by giving them false memories of experiences in which those foods made them sick.

2. The Hypomanic American: This year two professors of psychiatry each published books attributing American exceptionalism to...American DNA. They argue that the US is full of energetic risk-takers because it is full of immigrants who as a group may carry a genetic marker that expresses itslef as restless curiosity, exuberance and competitive self-promotion-- a combination known as hypomania.

3. Microblindness: People are distracted by naked supermodels; it doesn't take three PhD's to figure that out. But what psychology professors at Yale and Vanderbilt Universities have discovered is that erotic -- and violent -- are so distracting that they make people temporarily blind. The effect lasts for less than a half a second and is known by the name "attentional rubbernecking."

4. Monkey Pay-Per-View: It turns out that with remarkable consistency, monkeys are willing to forgo a little juice -- to pay extra, in effect -- to look at pictures of more important monkeys or to check out the "attractive back end" of a female monkey. This study shows that social information is wired into their brains: the neural circuits that assign value (in the currency of juice) have access to the database of social interaction.

Four more tomorrow.