A year of ideas

The New York Times has just published its seventh annual list of the year's best ideas, which includes:

Alzheimer's telephone screening: a "telephone quiz" consisting of 50 questions, designed to measure the "cognitive vital signs", such as short-term memory loss, which can identify Alzheimer's Disease long before any visible symptoms;

The God Effect: the finding, made by Ara Norenzayan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, that thoughts of God make people act more altruistically; and, 

Neurorealism: coined by bioethicist Eric Racine, this term refers to the phenomenon by which even the most implausible psychological study can be made credible and believable by the addition of some neuroimaging data.