The moon is centric to many myths and
has an important place in a wide variety of cultures. The Greeks for
example, worshipped Selene, the titaness of the moon. She was believed
to have control over such things as, the night, tides, sight, magic,
child birth and lunacy. Many of these things still are believed to be
affected by the moon. But there is only one of these things that the
moon has a proven affect on and that is the tides. A tide is
defined as the rise and fall in sea level in relation to the land. So
next time you are at the beach and tide comes in soaking you and your
beach towel you can blame the gravitational attraction of the sun and
moon to the Earth. The moon tries to bring everything on the Earth
closer to it. The Earth is able to resist but the water is always
moving so Earth has more difficulty holding onto it. As the moon
revolves around the Earth and the two of them revolve around the sun,
their combined gravitational forces pull the water on Earth in the
direction of the moon creating a high tide. On the other side of the
Earth the center of the Earth is being pulled towards the moon which
also results in a high tide.
So what’s the point? You have undoubtedly
heard someone say the phrase, must be a full moon… or you at least read it in the title 🙂 The question is on the validity of this statement… does the moon have an affect on us?
Some
have theorized that since our bodies are made up of 75 percent water
than maybe there are tides occurring in our body on different
levels at each phase of the moon. There is no evidence of this but
the possibility is not completely ruled out. It’s possible there is
some small affect on us but it’s not enough to cause all the things
that we blame on the moon.
There are a variety of studies that
show there is no evidence of the full moon directly affecting humans.
One such study was on epilepsy. While some patients swore they were
affected by the full moon, there was no found connection between the
two. Emergency medical and psychiatric visits do not have a higher
frequency when the moon is full nor do you have better or worse
surgery outcomes. There is evidence that shows that pet emergency
services increase on the full moon but the correlation is probably
consequential. It is more likely that people take their pets out on
full moons more often due to the increased visibility or some other
force is at work. There’s conflicting evidence that animal attacks
increase on the full moon but it’s generally expected that there is no direct relationship. Studies on menstruation did show that
forty percent of women started menstruation two weeks of the full
moon but… that doesn’t really prove anything.
There is something to be said for sleep
deprivation. Since the full moon is when the moon is at it’s
brightest, the increased illumination may cause a disruption in one’s
sleep cycle. But that would only be a problem if you slept outside or
with your window wide open. It’s definitely a thing of the past if it
was ever a problem at all.
The truth is during the new moon has
the same effect on the tides as the full moon yet no one makes a fuss
about it. So why the full moon? Well it’s probably something that’s
self-fulfilling. We expect things to be more hectic during a full
moon so we attribute undesirable events to it even if those events
occurred multiple times before when the moon was not full. Another
reason just be the visibility of the moon. In despair, you may look
up to the sky, notice the moon and think… figures. That
visibility also makes it a target; humans want a reason for
everything that happens. A full moon is as good as any.