2006 Volume 30 Issue 2 Pages 68-73
Sustainable lighting, considered in the broader context of sustainable design, suggests a return to more natural interior environments with their greater sensory stimulation and experiential richness. Research over the last 50 years has been claimed to provide little evidence of the interaction between the visual, thermal, acoustic, tactile and olfactory senses which might be expected to be essential to sensory richness. A critical evaluation of such research, in the context of understanding gained from recent research in cognitive science and neuroscience, reveals serious flaws in this research into sensory interaction. The nature of these flaws is discussed with examples. Insight gained from studies of visual perception suggests significant changes need to be made to experimental procedures to avoid the problem of “inattentional blindness” and to overcome the lack of reality in the rooms and equipment used in laboratory-based studies. In particular, it is argued that the lack of a sense of “place” and of a realistic activity means that the experimental setting will fail to trigger any significant activity in the neural pathway in the visual cortex which has been found to enable interaction with non-visual sensory modalities.
