CJ Eller

There's a great passage from Maria Popova's Figuring about Emily Dickinson's prolific output and relating it to the place where she wrote them — her bedroom. Popova sets the scene, standing in Dickinson's bedroom in her historic home in Amherst, Massachussetts:

I am struck by the contrast between the bellowing darkness of her poems and the fount of sunlight flooding in through the two fully windowed walls. I am struck, too, by the scale of it: Her mahogany sleigh bed is practically child-sized, her cherrywood writing desk almost a miniature at seventeen and a half inches square. I am reminded of recent findings in embodied cognition — the study of how external physical parameters influence our interior states — indicating that large open spaces and rooms with high ceilings enhance creativity, and I find myself wondering whether there might be an embodied-cognition analogue to Kierkegaard's assertion that “the more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.” Deliberate constraints, after all, are a mighty catalyst of creative breakthrough

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Seventeen inches square. More than seventeen hundred poems

Amazing. It brings to mind something I hadn't heard of much before but now want to learn more about — embodied cognition. How does it relate to our own day-to-day analog/digital lives?