Good morning. Sadly, bad afternoon!

Good mornings, maybe. Bad afternoons, they drift into. The sun shining bright isn’t as good for us as it has been deemed to!

Danish researches were studying test results of over two million school kids over a four-year period. When they matched the scores to the time of the day the students took the test, they found something odd. Students scored higher in the mornings than in the afternoons.

A University of Chicago economist was studying classroom grades of two million Los Angeles students. He found their math scores higher when they had it in the morning and lower when they had it in the afternoon.

If you think school kids are weird, here’s something about us. Two Cornell University sociologists studied more than 500 million tweets that 2.4 million users in 84 countries posted over a 2-year period. The tweets in the mornings sounded very positive while they plummeted to negative by the afternoon.

Intrigued?

So were three U.S professors when they analysed around 26,000 earnings calls from 2,100 public companies over a six-year period. Calls in the morning were upbeat and positive. By afternoon, it grew negative!

Researchers at Duke Medical Centre reviewed 90,000 hospital surgeries and found out that the chance of something going wrong while someone is delivering anaesthesia was four times greater during afternoons than during the mornings.

If all of this sounds bizarre, it is. And there is an explanation too!

The human mind is happier and chirpier in the morning and becomes progressively negative and solemn come afternoon. ‘Afternoons are the Bermuda Triangles of our days’ says Daniel Pink, author of When: The Scientific Secrets Of Perfect Timing.

It’s now been scientifically proven that people are alert and happy in the mornings and they experience a sad slump in the afternoons. Good news is their moods improve again in the late evenings. It’s been this way since time immemorial.

On May 1, 1915, a luxury liner left New York and set off for England. The first world war had just begun and England was fighting Germany and ships were at risk.

When the luxury liner neared the shores of Ireland, the ship’s captain William Turner was told that German submarines were roaming the area. At around 1 p. m Turner made two decisions that people, to this day, have not been able to fathom why.

First, he set the ship’s speed to eighteen knots though he could have had it to its maximum speed of twenty-one knots.

Second, he executed a ‘four-point bearing’, a manoeuvre that took forty minutes though he could have ordered a simpler manoeuvre that would have taken only five minutes. Coz of this, the ship had to move in a straight line rather than go a zigzag course, which was the ideal way to dodge submarines and their torpedoes.

At 2.10 p. m a German torpedo struck the luxury liner. Eighteen minutes after being hit, the ship rolled on its side and sank. 1,200 people perished. Ironically, the liner sank close to the place Titanic had sunk three years ago!

Ever since, multiple enquiry commissions were set up to investigate the disaster. But why the captain did the things he did had remained a complete mystery. Journalists had studied news clippings. Investigators had gone through passenger diaries. Divers had probed the wreckage for clues. Yet, no one had the answer.

After all these years, behavioural scientists probably have. They perhaps have an explanation for one of the worst maritime disasters of the last century.

Captain Turner made some bad decisions. And they were bad coz he made them in the afternoon!