Dr. Mariano Sigman, in a TED talk, detailed how semantic analysis of writings can (1) track an individual’s or a society’s ability to think about a concept and (2) predict with 100% accuracy who will develop psychosis.
In other words (pun intended), analysis of the concepts used in writings (including tweets, blog posts, etc), and the relationships of those concepts, over time can reveal the state of the mind of an individual or a society.
He suggests that between the lines is insight into your state of mind or feelings. This is consistent with the research of Dr. Hassan at Princeton University who showed that the reader actually mimics the brain patterns of the author given nothing more than writings (no audio or video needed). You can deduce the mental state of the writer, even if you do not know them, just because your brain (if you are paying attention), will mirror theirs as you read what they wrote.
While Dr. Hassan showed that a human reader can intrinsically know the mental state of the writer, Dr. Sigman showed that a semantic analysis algorithm can too. I find this very exciting because it means that if I could analyze your journal, I could tell you what stage you are spending most of your time in, and I could track your self-development. It suggests the real possibility of an app for self-development and life integration.
Here’s the idea… if you are inspired to create it, please do!
The self-development app could keep you mindful of your current state and offer up tasks, questions and readings as well as reminders to help you reach and spend more time in later stages, have more peace and joy in your life and design/develop your self and your life into something amazing.
The app would analyze your social media postings and any electronic journals you may keep like Evernote, etc as well what you write as you “check in” with the app each day/week or month.
The app would analyze various dimensions of the user’s posts and journals to include:
- Positive vs negative language
- Topics and their proximity to concepts that key to each stage
- Date and time because we want to track progress over time
- Emotions and their proximity to specific emotions such as joy, grief, anger, surprise, etc
It might be easier than I originally thought. You could create a table of every word in the English language in column one. Column two is the positive or negative value of the word. Columms three through x are the proximity of that word to stage-specific key words. You could pre-load the app with an appropriate language table and just reference that. All the semantic analysis is done before hand and analyzing a person’s writings becomes a table look up and formula. Based on the user’s current stage and emotions, you could offer up suggested tasks, questions, readings, etc.
Someone go make this! : )
