A classic anecdote, particularly among such people as police and paramedics, is that (for example) the real nutters come out when there's a full moon. They don't usually go so far as to say that with every full moon comes a night with nothing but nutters, but do seem to suggest that there is a significant trend. If you want a good selection of anecdotes on this score, head over to the Yahoo! Answers page, "Full moon - does it bother you?" (be prepared for some industrial-strength ignorance).
The full moon has also been popularly associated with all sorts of things, like rises in suicide rates, crime rates, accident & emergency admission rates, alcoholism, natural disasters and many many more. Here's the important factoid for you to remember: there is no evidence to support these hypotheses. And yes, studies have been done.
What this is is a classic example of confirmation bias - one only notices the events which confirm the hypothesis that one has (consciously or otherwise) adopted. I won't spend a lot of time debunking all of this - it's a "Blink" post after all - so I'll just point you at a very useful SkepDic entry: "Full moon and lunar effects". There's a substantial reading list at the foot of that article if you want to look further into this subject.
2 comments:
Playing devils advocate as I so often do - Almost all of the human body is water. every cell, every organ is full of it. The moon effects larger bodies of water (ie. the tide) its not outside the realm of possibility that the phase of hte moon could have some minor yet important effect on the emotional state of the average human.
I am willing to dismiss the above as bollocks given how many holes there are in the idea however I firmly believe there are some consciously unnoticed environmental effects that lead to higher than usual levels of insanity. This can be subconsciously detected by something at the back of the mind that has noticed a pattern.
Most policemen, paramedics, etc eventually develop this instinct. they can step out of their homes and just sense that its going to be a busy shift.
I'm not denying that there may be some instinct developed by such professionals indicating a bad shift - just that it has anything whatsoever to do with the moon.
And yes, the water in the body issue has been raised before, along with various other crackpot "scientific" hypotheses to account for this effect. The point here is that the effect itself has been shown to be illusory, so any debate over the mechanism is redundant.
Also, noticing a pattern doesn't mean that there is a pattern to be noticed - our brains are so overwhelmingly geared toward pattern recognition that we inevitably see them where none exist.
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