I still remember my first fountain pen. It was a beautiful thing, green and blue, nice to touch, that would caress the paper when you wrote. To this day, holding a fountain pen in my hand puts me in writing mood, in thinking mood. It opens my mind, as Paul Erdös would say.

I became conscious of this not long ago when, as I was reading Daniel Kahneman's wonderful Thinking, Fast and Slow, I understood for the first time how prevalent this effect is, and how important it probably is in my life.

It is called priming, it happens in ways we do not imagine, and most of the time we are not aware of it. Here's an example, in Kahneman's words:

In an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at New York University—most aged eighteen to twenty-two—to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (for example, "finds he it yellow instantly"). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. When they had completed that task, the young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. That short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others.

It works in two directions: what you perceive influences how you act, and what you do changes how you see and feel. Both happen in ways that are not obvious, unconscious, repeatable and —once you've figured them out— predictable.

And, as I am the kind of animal to which the above happens, I have a strong interest in learning how my environment might be shaping my actions. My hypothesis is that my working environment impacts in the quality of my work and my well-being in non-obvious ways, and that I can improve both by changing my surroundings.