It’s a cold world out there, where creative free spirits are forced to subject their warm and fuzzy intuition to the hard logic of the bean counters instruments of measurement.

Sensory Logic, a research developer, offers clients that Next Big Step beyond focus groups — emotional metrics that combine the warmth of a lie detector with the certainty of the Apocolypse.

Actually, it’s not that bad. Subjects are hooked up to various feedback sensors — patches over the eyes and on the cheeks, and a band around the hand — and then exposed, over the course of a half hour or so, to various “stimuli”, i.e., designs. The resulting involuntary responses are tracked against conscious reactions, giving clients a way to record reaction to either entire displays or portions thereof.

You say potato, I say patato. Bottom line, how big’s the sample have to be before the results are whim or trend?