Sunday, December 5, 2010

Neuroscience of Kitchen Cabinetry

No Kidding, it's fascinating - Here:

"You can tell a lot about a person from their kitchen," says Johnny Grey, an award-winning interior designer specializing in "happy kitchens," a design philosophy that focuses on bringing emotional, physical and psychological well-being into kitchen planning.


Mr. Grey ... takes an unusual approach to interior design. He and his team spend up to 80 hours with clients, understanding what makes them tick, often going round for dinner and even staying over at their home. His aim?
To create a domestic utopia tailored to their personality, using the principles of neuroscience, or the scientific study of the nervous system, to answer their emotional needs and subliminal desires, as well as building a seamlessly practical kitchen. It appears to work.
However, Mr. Grey does not have an EEG lab to record the brain waves of his clients, as depicted in the image above. Nor does he have access to an MRI scanner, to my knowledge. For Mr. Grey to actually use the principles of neuroscience to design customized kitchens for his clients, he would need a method that records brain activity, whether it's electrical (EEG) or hemodynamic (fMRI).

Credibility is a cherished currency in science, but its cues can be counterfeit. A novel series of experiments by Weisberg and her colleagues [2008] show that non-expert consumers of behavioral explanations assign greater standing to explanations that contain neuroscientific details, even if these details provide no additional explanatory value. Here, we discuss the part that this ‘placebic’ information might play in producing a potentially misleading sense of intellectual fluency and, consequently, an unreliable sense of understanding."

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