At WIRED SCIENCE, earlier this month, science journalist Jonah Lehrer explained “something important about how the human mind calculates value.”

There’s now suggestive evidence that our faith in the authentic — especially when the authenticity is supported by effective marketing campaigns — is a deep-seated human instinct, which emerges at an extremely early age. Consider a clever experiment led by the psychologists Bruce Hood and Paul Bloom. The scientists tested 43 children between the ages of three and six. The children were shown a “copying machine” [...] A ‘‘stretchy man’’ was then placed in the box and the illusion repeated. Interestingly, the young children actually preferred the “duplicate” toy and chose it 62 percent of the time. The kids didn’t worry about the “authenticity” of the stretchy man. But Hood and Bloom didn’t stop there. They also had many of the young kids bring in their “attachment objects,” such as their favorite blanket or stuffed animal. (I still remember losing Johnny, my stuffed penguin, at the tender age of five. Grief.) The scientists then offered to “copy” the object for the kids. Four of the children simply refused — they wouldn’t let their blankie anywhere near that nefarious device. But even those kids who allowed their attachment object to be “copied” almost always refused to see the objects as equivalent. The new duplicate was a bootleg blankie, an ersatz stuffed animal. Even though the children were assured that the objects were identical, they intuitively believed that the copy wasn’t the same. It lacked a history, a bond, a sentimental attachment. It was inauthentic.

The same principle, Lehrer suggests, applies to brands: “The best brands are blankies.”

Seventeenth in an occasional series.

Regency TR1 First Pocket Radio
by Mark Richards

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Moore’s law runs the computer industry and has begun to determine the pace of human life as well. As the pace quickens, we rush to embrace the future as much as we race to discard the past. The technology I’ve photographed shows just the beginning of the computer and Internet age. Generations of computer design and beauty have been lost, undocumented, and as time continues, many more generations of this hidden art will continue to be lost. I am trying to preserve and make known at least a small part of it.

In a world run by so many machines I want to show the art, history, and humanity in this technology. In the photographs, a visual parallel between the wires delivering energy to a mechanical memory and the neural pathways of human anatomy becomes apparent. The pieces of machines are re-framed as something more than cold technology; I hope I can provide emotion, unexpected beauty and history.

Sixteenth in an occasional series.

Ton Zwerver’s “Everyday Sculptures” only exist for a moment “as they are photographed and changed again and again. Everyday one or more sculptures are made out found objects that come across his path.”

Fifteenth in an occasional series.

The crafty blog Tigerlily Tinkering explains how to make a chuppah — the canopy under which a Jewish bride and groom stand (or, as in the photo above, sit) during their wedding ceremony — that displays significant objects between sheets of silk.

Fourteenth in an occasional series.

“The Curious World of Patent Models” is a traveling show organized by the Rothschild Patent Model Museum. On display at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena through Aug. 15, 2010.

Via Core 77.

Thirteenth in an occasional series.

Andrea Magnani and Giovanni Delvecchio of the Italian design collective Resign claim theirs is a methodology “for all the designers who believe in magic and symbolic value of things.”

Via Cool Hunting

Twelfth in an occasional series.

The Index — a storefront gallery in Brooklyn — is a collection of materials and objects whose purposes, characters, and origins are fascinating to curator Jonathan Roquemaure. As Cool Hunting recently explained:

While each object’s uncommon looks are compelling enough on first blush, the history behind their materials and past utility often requires a little digging. Reflecting Roquemaure’s own ingenuity in finding and learning, his catalog comprises a carefully considered index of objects—from an eerie surgical table to children’s fencing masks and rare Mexican pottery (recently acquired through an iPad swap) to an 18th century Japanese dye-shop ledger, and so much more.

Eleventh in an occasional series.

Here’s an everyday, apparently unexceptional object with a meaningful story; this advertisement was found in the current issue of Real Simple.

Speaking of memes, the curators of Significant Objects are both at ROFLCon today. No, we weren’t asked to present anything about our project; we’re there for kicks. We’re tweeting about ROFLCon here; and I’m also tweeting about it here.

PS: In 2008, I posted to Brainiac about my visit to the first ROFLCon.

Tenth in an occasional series.

In today’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, the psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer reviews Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (Houghton Mifflin), by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. His conclusion:

To those who need to understand hoarders, perhaps in their own family, “Stuff” offers perspective. For general readers, it is likely to provide useful stimulus for examining how we form and justify our own attachments to objects.

“Useful stimulus” — ho-hum. When our own Rob Walker wrote about the A&E reality show Hoarders in December 2009, he was much more direct, even confrontational:

The scariest reading of “Hoarders” is that these freakish piles of stuff it documents simply reflect what plenty of us consume as a matter of course; our ability to dispose of the evidence properly is what makes us normal. “The line between the people on our show, who have very severe cases of the disorder, and, you know, most of the population,” ["Hoarders" producer] Sharenow says, “is kind of thin.”

Ninth in an occasional series.