A recent survey on public neuroscience literacy (Herculano-Houzel, SFN 2000) indicated that the public does not master some basic principles such as modification of the brain during learning. Reading popular science magazines increases literacy among certain groups, but only for a few themes. One potential explanation for this differential effect is that coverage of different brain research areas in these magazines is uneven. To determine whether this is the case we surveyed the volume of publications over the last 15 years in journals registered in the PubMed catalog and in the brazilian popular magazine SuperInteressante, created in 1987. The distribution of articles for each of 16 themes in the SuperInteressante magazine seems to follow closely the total number of scientific publications on the brain from 1987 to 2000. In both cases, disease, principles of functional and structural organization, and the senses are the top three themes, while emotion, pain, lateralization, and intelligence appear among t...