Today is “Alice in Wonderland Day”, and if you head over to Oxford, you will find all sorts of events and activities to celebrate the fantasy world created by Lewis Carroll. Now, before you go down a rabbit hole investigating all those things, let me explain why we should all be curiouser and curiouser about the story of Alice.
For a start, Alice was real, and Lewis Carroll was not. Alice was the daughter of Henry Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford. Working for Henry was a young mathematician, Charles Dodgson. On the 4th July 1862, he took Alice and her sisters for a boat trip on the River Thames, ending up at Godstow, just outside Oxford. There, he gave the children a picnic and entertained them with a story about Alice’s adventures, which he made up on the spot. Later, he wrote the story and had it published under his pen name of Lewis Carroll.
The curious thing about this incident is that this young mathematician, bound by numbers and rules, was able to step outside those constraints and be completely creative. Something removed his restrictive world.
There is one clear difference. His normal world was in the cloistered corridors of an Oxford college. True, Christ Church is a beautiful place, but it was created in the 16th Century and is so traditional that it was part of the film set for Harry Potter. Once the young Charles Dodgson left the confines of this academic world, he was freed to be creative.
Being out in the open air appeared to have given him the freedom to think beyond the walls of Oxford. Indeed, research about to be published from the University of Oxford itself shows the importance of space for our ability to think creatively. The study looked at how creative people were in environments such as coffee shops. It turned out that when the environment was less cramped and more open, people became more creative.
That should not be entirely surprising. A survey from almost 20 years ago found that the worst place to be creative, 30th in the table of 30 places, was “in the workplace”. Being out in nature was mid-table in this study, but there were other situations where people felt more open, such as travelling, that made people feel more open and triggered creativity.
Research from the University of California, San Diego has shown that space, and how we manage it, is an important aspect in how we think. Indeed, a study from the University of British Columbia found that ceiling height has a real impact on the way we think. When ceilings are high, we are more creative.
In psychology, there is the notion of “construal level theory”. This suggests that the greater the distance between us and objects, the more abstract they become. So, when a ceiling is only a foot or two above your head, you sense it as very real. But when you are in a room where you may have a ceiling ten feet above you, it becomes less of a real ceiling to you. It is further away and therefore more abstract. Architects call this the “Cathedral Effect”.
When we are forced to think more abstractly, because things are far away, we tend to become more creative. The open space that the nascent Lewis Carroll enjoyed simply allowed him to become an abstract thinker.
So, how can we become more creative and solve more problems? We do not all need cathedral ceilings, but we do need to pay attention to space. If your office is cramped, cluttered and full of reminders of routine work, it is unlikely to produce Wonderland-level thinking. Leave the office. Walk outside. Work somewhere more open. Choose a spacious coffee shop rather than a crowded corner table. And if none of that is possible, declutter your workspace. Sometimes, creating mental space starts with creating physical space.
