A recent slashdot article suggests that the height of the ceiling alters how you think:
When people are in a room with a high ceiling, they activate the idea of freedom. In a low-ceilinged room, they activate more constrained, confined concepts.’ Either can be good. The concept of freedom promotes information processing that encourages greater variation in the kinds of thoughts one has, said Meyers-Levy, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota. The concept of confinement promotes more detail-oriented processing.
This only confirms what I’ve always thought myself.
Back in the house I used to live in we had a very high ceiling since there was no loft above the livingroom. We also had tall, standing windows with a mountain view. This certainly improved my reading of Peter Wessel Zapffe‘s On the tragic, which in many ways is very universal and timeless, although quite pessimistic.