Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

Yoga instructors will sometimes speak loosely of a wider and greater consciousness that exists beyond our own limited mental world – a consciousness that we all belong to.

I know its a stretch, but I wondered how Twitter and other social media might reflect a existing (and searchable) sort-of shared consciousness.  I had some fun exploring Twitter and how folks think (and tweet) about yoga … just a few glimpses using PeopleBrowsr and Trendistic and other tools.  I don’t think Patanjali would have been impressed by the shared sentiments that are tweeted and re-re-re-re-tweeted etc.

For the past 30 days there were 44,614 per day mentions of “yoga” on Blogger, 254/day on Facebook, 64/day on MySpace and 5,791/day on Twitter.

Here are the most common words that flank the word “yoga” in these various mentions:

15,602 love
15,383 make
14,148 music
11,125 hate
11,066 shopping
10,873 eating
10,579 class
10,446 books
9,643 good
9,449 #yoga

Natural language processing software can distinguish between positive and negative sounding sentiments and both TweetSentiments and Twitter TipTop suggest that there is a 2:1 positive bias for yoga tweets (check out the negative tweets here – they’re usually not really dissing yoga).

Lastly, for the past 6 months, the word yoga is mentioned pretty regularly, but with occasional spikes in popular stories involving yoga.  The spike in yoga tweets back in May was from a story of how yoga eases sleep problems in cancer survivors and around Oct 7th there was a story on yoga and Christianity which I recall zipped around a lot in the blogosphere/twitterverse.