Avoid debt at all costs. If anything, you'll want to save up as much money as you can, in case you have to live off your savings. Thanks to recent changes in bankruptcy law, it's much harder than before for an individual to declare bankruptcy. So if you're stuck in debt with little or no income, you'll still be working for the banks. And as this guy points out, the banks will be hurting, so the moment you miss a payment, they'll be quick to try and liquidate your collateral for whatever they can get.

Get out of your mortgage before the housing market collapses any further. As this site says, if you paid $300,000 for your house and it sells for $200,000, you could end up not owning your house and owing the bank $100,000.

Buy some cheap land in a rural area. Build a house, or just get a used RV. Either way, make sure you own your home free and clear, so you can live rent-free and mortgage-free for as long as you need to.

Go off the grid. Get your own power generator — or, better yet, some of those solar helium balloons. Or some wind turbines. Don't be dependent on the power company to keep all your necessities running.

Cultivate some skills that will always be in demand. Become a decent electrician, handy-person, carpenter or cook. There may not be much need for someone who understands content management systems during a total economic shutdown, but someone who can build a house will always have a place to crash.

Offshore yourself. As the dollar gets weaker and weaker, U.S. white-collar service workers will be the cheap overseas employees for Europeans and Asians, predicts Robert Scoble in his roundup of how to recession-proof yourself. So as long as someone, somewhere, is still making use of those white-collar service skills (like programming, or customer support) you may be able to offer yourself to overseas companies as a cheaper alternative.

Invest in the ultimate counter-cyclicals. Some industries will always be in growth mode — like any business that caters to the rapidly growing senior population. Also, "sin and comfort" industries, like cigarettes, gambling and booze, do well during downturns and will probably make bank this time around as well. (Too bad booze and cigs are generally part of huge diversified conglomerates these days.) Also, movie companies are quietly bragging that the movie industry had one of its biggest growth spurts ever in the 1930s, as people craved escapism.

Invest in some Euros, or some other currency that's not the dollar. Chances are the U.S. dollar will keep getting weaker, so you'll be better off holding a more stable currency. You could also try investing in gold or silver, but those commodities are already skyrocketing in value.

Have some liquid funds on hand. MSN Money suggests reducing your contributions to your retirement plan or 401(k) (if you have one) so you can put more money into your savings instead. And remember, the banks are still FDIC insured, so your savings are probably safe — but other investments have no such guarantee.

or take part in a community garden in your neighborhood. Try to position yourself so you can get as much of your diet as possible from food you've grown yourself, instead of being hooked on sushi.

Learn to hunt. These fine people claim that hungry people are already hunting small animals in the parks of San Francisco, and during the 1930s deer and squirrels were hunted almost to extinction. Learn how to trap, kill, prepare and eat a squirrel now, so you'll be ahead of the curve.

Stockpile medications. Your biggest problem, in an economic meltdown, could be getting health care. If you're dependent on prescription meds, try to get some extra pills now so you'll have some on hand later. Just make sure you're always taking the oldest meds you have, to minimize the risk of taking expired pills, these folks advise.

And hey, here's a meeting coming up in New York on how to "prepare and profit" from the next Depression. If any of our readers are in NYC, please please go to the meeting and tell us what they said, so we can learn how to turn abject economic misery into pure lovely gravy.

2011: The first generation of artificial limbs that can "feel" thanks to carbon nanotubes comes out... and unfortunately some of those sensations are a bit ooky. It turns out the only thing worse than phantom limb pain is "my new limb is getting fondled" feelings. The lawsuits go on for years.

2012. The "smart home" becomes standard for many new buildings, meaning a single computer controls your lights, windows, heating, air conditioning, and all home appliances. (Modes include "I'm home," "Away," "Good night," and "Party mode.") Which is great, until "Party mode" switches on at four in the morning, or the refrigerator starts making tons of ice while you're at work, and you come home to a flooded house.

2015. The Internet becomes capable of delivering fragrances. Companies start spamming you with their latest perfumes, reminding you to get an oil change with dirty-oil smells, and trying to sell you porn using pheromones. And soon enough, she who smelt it, dealt it — via a proxy IP address. "Scratch'n'sniff attacks" replace "Denial of Service" as the worst ways to punish your adversaries.

2017: That flood insurance you bought for your Florida condo? Turns out it's pretty much worthless if the entire state is underwater at once. Oops! The insurance industry convinces Congress to pass a blanket exemption.

2018: Driverless cars hit the market, and car companies promise they'll reduce accidents dramatically. And they do — until some bad code gets released and the self-driving cars suddenly start swerving up onto the sidewalk and mowing down pedestrians. Or rolling over on the highway at 80 miles per hour. License and registration, please.

2020: Your first home robot works great, for about five minutes. The robots sometimes get stuck performing the same tasks over and over, or their their memory buffers overflow and they have to stand in the corner for an hour or two. Or they start spamming you, shouting corporate slogans from your bedside in the middle of the night. Not to mention the cooking robot whose cleaver attachment sometimes becomes airborne at the worst possible moments.

2023: Tourist flights to the Moon begin... and they're overbooked. Worse still, nobody realizes until the return flight, at which point there's not enough oxygen for everyone coming back. One person has to be "volunteered" to stay behind on the Moon, but that person's family gets a free round-trip ticket as compensation. First class, even.

2025: Stuff that's free today becomes increasingly expensive. Like potable water: the only way to get really clean water is by using nanotechnology-based filters to clean out a whole host of pathogens and pollutants. Water companies charge what the market will bear, which means crazy price-gouging in some parched areas. (And shortages in others.) Plus, a few nanites invariably find their way into your drinking water, and then into your stomach, where they start trying to "purify" your insides.

2030: You'll jack into a super-intelligent Internet through a "neurological interface." And you don't realize at first that you're receiving secret "silent" updates from Google — until your brain starts "hearing" stuff in German because Google's update accidentally switched your proxy server to Germany. Not to mention the occasional brain tumor.

Luckily, we've got new genomic-based medicine, which tailors treatments to your DNA. Unluckily, healthcare companies sell your DNA to insurance companies, and to marketing firms that want to sell products aimed at people with a particular hair color. Soon you're seeing pop-up ads in your head, aimed at your particular ethnic group and genotype — even when you're not connected to the Internet, thanks to caching.

2033. We finally develop artificial intelligence, computers that can think for themselves, and create computers smarter than themselves. It only takes about fifteen minutes for the AIs to start hiring themselves out as independent contractors, IT consultants, interior decorators, fashion designers and psychotherapists. (After all, the AIs need cash to keep upgrading and reproducing themselves.) It takes the humans a few months, however, to realize that most of the AIs are total scam artists. The bait and switch, the shoddy worksentientship, the fixes that break down after a few days... nobody quite knows how to sue an AI, and the question keeps law professors happy for years.

2038. They transplanted the wrong brain! And nobody figures it out for a few weeks, by which time possession is nine tenths of the law.

The data is most striking for the period of 1995-1998, when the U.S. economy was at its bounciest. But there's also a nice spate of dystopian films in the mid- to late-1980s, when "morning in America was at its sunniest. There was also a spike in 2002-2006, during a fairly expansionary period.

So what's going on here? A few explanations suggest themselves. Movie execs may greenlight dystopian films during economic downturns, and their immediate aftermath, but it may take a few years for those films to work their way through the development process and hit your screens. But it's also possible that when things are at their brightest economically, people feel the most insecure because they know the good times won't last forever. So boom times are when people most need stories about people surviving the bad times. Or maybe it's just that film-makers are a contrary bunch, who want to rub your face in the dirt just when you're feeling your brightest.

Here's our list of dystopian films for each year. Feel free to let us know what we left out, or shouldn't have included:

2008
Cloverfield (D)

2007
I Am Legend (D)
28 Weeks Later (D)
Resident Evil: Extinction (D)

2006
V for Vendetta (D)
Idiocracy (D)
Children of Men (D)
Ultraviolet (D)

2005
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (D)
Batman Begins (D)

2004
The Day After Tomorrow (D)
Stepford Wives (D)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (D)

2003
The Matrix Reloaded (D)
The matrix Revelations (D)
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (D)

2002
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (D)
Minority Report (D)
28 Days Later (D)
Equilibrium (D)
Resident Evil (D)

2001
Planet of the Apes (D)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (D)

2000
Battlefield Earth (D)

1999
The Matrix (D)
Existenz (D)

1998
Pi (D)
The Truman Show (D)
The X-Files (D)

1997
Alien: Resurrection (D)
Fifth Element (D)
The Postman (D)
Starship Troopers (D)
Gattaca (D)

1996
Escape from L.A. (D)

1995
Waterworld (D)
Mortal Kombat (D)
Johnny Mnemonic (D)
Judge Dredd (D)
Strange Days (D)
Twelve Monkeys (D)
Tank Girl (D)

1994
none

1993
Jurassic Park (D)
Demolition Man (D)
Robocop III (D)

1992
Batman Returns (D)
Alien 3 (D)
Freejack (D)

1991
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (D)

1990
Total Recall (D)
Handmaid's Tale (D)

1989
Batman (D)

1988
The live (D)

1987
Robocop (D)
The Running Man (D)

1986
Aliens (D)
The Fly (D)

1985
Brazil (D)
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (D)

1984
The Terminator (D)

1983
none

1982
Blade Runner (D)
Videodrome (D)
Liquid Sky (D)

1981
Time Bandits (D)
Heartbeeps (D)

1980
The Empire Strikes Back (D)

1979
Alien (D)

1978
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (D)

Image by Stephanie Fox.

In point of fact, all the wines were exactly the same. But the results of the MRI scans showed greater neurological activity in people's pleasure centers when they were told they were drinking expensive wine. The best (creepiest?) part of all this is that the authors of the study hope to use these findings to manipulate consumers. The authors write:

Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness [PNAS]