Then there’s the Moon’s gravitational pull, which creates the ocean tides that rise and fall every 12.4 hours. The first and most obvious is through the provision of moonlight, with a full Moon coming around every 29.5 days, and a new Moon following 14.8 days after that. When he did this, Wehr found that his patients fell into one of two categories: some people’s mood swings appeared to follow a 14.8-day cycle, others a 13.7-day cycle – although some of them occasionally switched between these cycles. “The only way to find anything is to look at each person individually over time, and then the patterns pop out.” “Because people differ in how they respond to these lunar cycles, even if you were to average together all the data I’ve collected, I’m not sure you would find anything,” says Wehr. This is precisely what Wehr did in his study of bipolar patients – in some cases, tracking the dates of their mood episodes for years. “The only way to approach this is systematically, would be to record the very same individual over time and continuously over different phases,” he adds. Even so, a follow-up study failed to replicate the findings.Ī key problem, says Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, a University of Oxford sleep researcher, is that neither study monitored individual patients’ sleep over an entire lunar month, or many months. Measurement of their brain activity, meanwhile, suggested that the amount of deep sleep they experienced dropped by 30%. ![]() For instance, a 2013 study conducted under the highly-controlled conditions of a sleep laboratory found that people took five minutes longer to fall asleep on average, and slept for 20 minutes less overall, around a full Moon, compared to during the rest of the month – even though they weren’t exposed to any moonlight. There is, however, some evidence that sleep varies across the lunar cycle. So too, is evidence that the lunar cycle increases violence among psychiatric patients or prison inmates – although one recent study suggested that outdoor criminal activity – incidents occurring on streets, or in natural settings like beaches – may be higher when there is more moonlight. The word lunacy derives from the Latin lunaticus, meaning “moonstruck”, and both the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder believed that madness and epilepsy were caused by the Moon. Pregnant women are also rumoured to be more likely to give birth on a full Moon, but any scientific evidence for this, gleaned by looking back over birth records during different lunar phases, is inconsistent. “It led me to wonder if there was some kind of external influence that was operating on these cycles - and the obvious thing to consider was whether there was some lunar influence.”įor centuries, people have believed that the Moon affects human behaviour. “The thing that struck me about these cycles was that they seemed uncannily precise in a way that one would not necessarily expect of a biological process,” says Wehr, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, US. Twelve years later, a renowned psychiatrist called Thomas Wehr published a paper describing 17 patients with rapid-cycling bipolar disorder – a form of the illness where people switch between depression and mania more quickly than usual – who, like Avery’s patient, showed an uncanny regularity in their episodes of illness.
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