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Decorating your home in all mid-century style might be a little too Mad Men for our contemporary lives. Adding a few mid-century modern touches—chairs, tables, light fixtures, textiles—can bring Mad Men (and now Pan Am) style into your décor without transporting your home back a few decades. We're happy to share some of our favorite ways to add mid-century modern touches to any décor.

Interior Style Along with mid-century modern furniture, mid century modern textiles are a chic way to add mid-century modern touches to a room, sofa, bed or table. Marimekko, the Finnish textile company, sells its mid-century patterned fabrics still today.

Rich blue hues mixed with organic accents like rope-sewn ottomans and a stately raw wood coffee table creates a distinct beach house feel in this living room design.

It’s often advised against picking the color palette first. However, you can pick a sample color palette to help you find the right accessories for the space. In short, this just means carrying around a few paint chips with you as you look at home accessories and decor for the master bedroom. Don’t throw any paint on the wall or make any concrete decisions about color until you’ve purchased everything necessary for the space.

Visual art contributes to our understanding of the visual brain because it explores and reveals the brain's perceptual capabilities. As Paul Klee once wrote, "Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes things visible." But visual art also obeys the laws of the visual brain, and thus reveals these laws to us. Of these laws, two stand supreme.

The first is the law of constancy. By this I mean that the function of the visual brain is to seek knowledge of the constant and essential properties of objects and surfaces, when the information reaching it changes from moment to moment. The distance, the viewing point, and the illumination conditions change continually, yet the brain is able to discard these changes in categorizing an object.

The second supreme law is that of abstraction. By abstraction I mean the process in which the particular is subordinated to the general, so that what is represented is applicable to many particulars. This second law is intimately linked to the first, because abstraction is a critical step in the efficient acquisition of knowledge; without it, the brain would be enslaved to the particular. The capacity to abstract is also probably imposed on the brain by the limitations of its memory system, because it does away with the need to recall every detail. Art, too, abstracts and thus externalizes the inner workings of the brain. Its primordial function is thus a reflection of the function of the brain.