The Journal asked Ms. Meyers-Levy how she did her study, and she explained that they used two similar rooms in a building the students use each day. Both rooms had 10-foot ceilings, so they had a contractor install a false ceiling in one of the rooms, bringing it down to a height of eight feet. I'm in a room with an eight-foot ceiling right now. How about you? Feels normal to me. You?
Back in the day, most of our ceilings were of the 10-foot variety because Willis Carrier hadn't yet come up with air conditioning. Before Willis, and during the warmer months, folks would be more comfortable in a room with a high ceiling because hot air rises. This is also the reason why Victorians slept in those beds that required a footstool to get up onto. The closer you are to the ceiling, the warmer you will be during the colder months of the year because, well, hot air rises. That also explains the canopy over the bed, and the curtains around it. Both keep the body heat (and the stench) in.
But back to Ms. Meyers-Levy and her students. She found that the ones in the room with the high ceiling saw relationships between different pieces of information and focused on the similarities between these things as opposed to their points of difference. And she found just the opposite in the room with the eight-foot ceiling. It turns out that the lower the ceiling, the more we tend to process information in a more detailed way. According to Ms. Meyers-Levy, we process more freely in a place where there are higher ceilings. We process in a more focused and detailed way in a room with lower ceilings. High ceilings let our imaginations soar. Low ceilings force us to get to work on those nitty-gritty details.
And that got me thinking about technicians who work in cramped boiler rooms, or worse, in crawl spaces or cramped attics. Do those techs think better because of what's looming over them? Does a low ceiling make them better troubleshooters? Or do they just want to solve the problem as quickly as possible and get the heck out of that horrible place? Questions, questions, questions.
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The Journal asked Ms. Meyers-Levy how she did her study, and she explained that they used two similar rooms in a building the students use each day. Both rooms had 10-foot ceilings, so they had a contractor install a false ceiling in one of the rooms, bringing it down to a height of eight feet. I'm in a room with an eight-foot ceiling right now. How about you? Feels normal to me. You?
And that got me thinking about technicians who work in cramped boiler rooms, or worse, in crawl spaces or cramped attics. Do those techs think better because of what's looming over them? Does a low ceiling make them better troubleshooters? Or do they just want to solve the problem as quickly as possible and get the heck out of that horrible place? Questions, questions, questions.