Hyderabad: Consider the hour of the day when you are posting something on social media. Scientists say our mode of thinking changes with the time of day. Night owls are more emotional than morning persons when they post messages on their Twitter handle.
According to a study done on 800 million tweets using artificial intelligence, posts made in the morning were found to be more logical and analytical with the words being more pronounced with the use of nouns, articles, prepositions. This changed dramatically towards the evening. At end of the day, the messages were emotional and existential. Psycologists said that people think better after sleep and this reflected in their tweets.
Dr Diana Monteiro. psychologist, said, “Good rest in the night makes a big difference on how you feel. You are more congnitive or thinking-oriented after sleeping and resting. Reasoning works much better. When you are tired and exhausted, you do not want to think anymore.”
Dr Monterio said, “We are more depressed and irritable. People fight at night when they are tired. The next morning people feel much better. Being physically exhausted also creates mental exhaustion.”
The study, published in the Plos One journal, tried to determine if thinking modes changed collectively. University of Bristol researchers Fabon Dzogang, Stafford Lightman, Nello Cristianini tracked 73 different psychometric quantities and analysed seven billion words from anonymised UK Twitter content sampled over the course of four years across 54 of UK’s largest cities.
At 5-6 am, analytical thinking was seen to peak while at 3 pm to 4 pm language of existential concerns was at its peak. While the study was done on the English population, researchers expect similar output for diverse languages and people like India. Asked if the results would be the same when Indian Twitter users are studied, Mr Stafford in an email told this newspaper: “In essence I am sure there would be a similar output — but of course language is critical. Our study was in a country where the predominant first language is English.” Mr Cristianini noted that the language can only be answered by further experiments and couldn’t speculate on the results.
