A scientific paper to be published finds that the height of a ceiling can affect how a person thinks a feels.
“When a person is in a space with a 10-foot ceiling, they will tend to think more freely, more abstractly,” said Meyers-Levy. “They might process more abstract connections between objects in a room, whereas a person in a room with an 8-foot ceiling will be more likely to focus on specifics.”
The research demonstrates that variations in ceiling height can evoke concepts that, in turn, affect how consumers process information. The authors theorized that when reasonably salient, a higher versus a lower ceiling can stimulate the concepts of freedom versus confinement, respectively. This causes people to engage in either more free-form, abstract thinking or more detail-specific thought. Thus, depending on what the task at hand requires, the consequences of the ceiling could be positive or negative.
So does this mean that you do your best thinking at the mall or in airports which tends to have sweeping open spaces and not while sitting on the toilet as has been the prevailing thought for some [think of the number of times you have seen Rodin’s The Thinker humorously hunkered down on the head]?
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ideas, cognition, architecture