Comment by brnaftr361 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brnaftr361 | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting. I used to work in schools and the teachers swore the swelling of the full moon was a harbinger of bad behavior. It was a predominately female cohort. I wonder if it was the onset of menses sensitizing them to aggravations or if it was students misbehaving, or a combination of the two.

Anyways, astrology has been kicking around for a while. Of course I wouldn't say it's the whole truth, but I expect there's something to it. Radioactive hotspots being occluded. No doubt we have a biological equivalent of bit flips. Sprinkle in some butterfly effect, viola.

I do believe there were studies indicating disparate behaviors from winter-born people and their summer counterparts. Seasonality and the way that people interact with their environment in one vs another, the sensitivity to initial conditions, epigenetics...

There may be more to it than meets the eye, and our ancestors just came up with an overfit model that combines an elaborate multivariate system which has been perverted.

> I wonder if it was the onset of menses sensitizing them to aggravations

Sorry, are you implying that women menstruate on a full moon? I'm not sure what "onset of menses" is implying otherwise.

Just to head it off in case GP or anyone else wonders - menstrual cycles don't actually synchronize. When people see them sync it's probably just the birthday paradox

The article states that some women synchronize with moon cycles and even professes skeptical speculation that premodern women may have been explicitly attuned. Just putting two and two together. I know I'd be irritable if I had to deal with that kind of pain and the various other symptoms with it - certainly not trying to point blame, after all most of the "trouble" was always trivial. And it may not be my cohort directly, but various other people. It's not hard to imagine knock on effects. Though I wouldn't discount that causality may lie elsewhere if not outright bias.

More curtly, yes, I'm not implying but outright stating on the basis of the article.

The article is referencing a paper that says that sometimes women's cycles synced with lunar luminosity. They were looking at women whose cycles weren't 28 days over decades. I have my doubts.

Nurses have something similar also. At the hospital my wife works at, they say full moons are always when the patients are the craziest. Lots of nurses also call out when its a full moon at the hospital she is at.

Almost like reporting bias is a thing. Nah must be the moon.

My late mom was a labor and delivery nurse and worked nights. She’d always talk about how many babies are born on a full moon, or say thing like “ugh it’s gonna be such a busy shift it’s a full moon.” I believe it. I usually feel a bit “manic” and have more trouble sleeping during full moons

Maybe it's harder to sleep when there's moonlight coming through your windows?

Studies haven't found a link between births and the moon phase.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15902138/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/758594/

this is a fun paper

Rotton, J., & Kelly, I. W. (1985). Much ado about the full moon: A meta-analysis of lunar-lunacy research. Psychological Bulletin, 97(2), 286–306. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.97.2.286

Although this meta-analysis uncovered a few statistically significant relations between phases of the moon and behavior, it cannot be concluded that people behave any more (or less) strangely during one phase of the moon than another.

Unfortunately, the lunar hypothesis is so general that it can handle any result. It is not enough to show that lunacy is more likely to occur during full phases of the moon than other phases, as folklore and superstition suggest.

Adopting a more limited but common view of lunar influences, one must conclude that evidence for the lunar hypothesis fails to pass three crucial tests. The first and most important is replicability. For every study that has recorded more lunacy when the moon is full, another has recorded less. A second test, which should be regarded as a substitute for replicability, is statistical significance. Even when a large number of results are combined, one cannot reject the null hypothesis of no relation between phases of the moon and behavior at conventional levels of significance. A third and closely related test is predictability. Given the task of predicting people's behavior, knowingthe moon's phase reduces our uncertainty by less than 1%.

Taking a cue from this review's title, some may conclude that all we have written is "much ado about nothing." Because the topic borders on the paranormal, it is easy to dismiss lunar-lunacy research as ridiculous (Levy, 1975) and unworthy of serious consideration. However, psychologists need to take the topic seriously because, if for no other reason, so many people believe that their behavior is influenced by the moon. For example, Angus (1973) found that 74% of the nurses working in one psychiatric setting believed that the moon affects mental illness.

It's honestly derogatory. I would posit this type of research is strongly motivated by the wont of certain individuals to dispel outright any conception of superstition. A la hard-line atheists. They're not intent on observation and development of understanding but rather destruction.

Again, I would push that ancestral explanations tend to hold a kernel of truth and with it value. However, they're very much Fisher Price building blocks, moreover they're nth-hand and have been prostituted into industries and perverted in the process. Sensitivities have declined, people are reactive, and have in many parts of the world grown averse to such enchantment, so motive for a Hawthorne Effect exists, examining behavioral spectra as it relates to seasons and planetary shifts and tides/moon/solar cycles is I'm sure increasingly noisy as to have abated it's appearance almost entirely. Lest we forget our past was exclusively environmentally determined. Sedentary cultivars of humans have only existed for what is essentially the blink of an eye on the evolutionary timescale. And we have only had the probe of formal psychology for an equivalent of a microsecond and it proves unwieldy even now.

And we wouldn't be special in such a lunar/solar/seasonal regime.

What I would say is that it shouldn't be discounted out of hand, and that is all.

When my kids were born, there were no beds in the infant ward or ER, because they were swamped with kids being born. We had premies so we stayed longer, and the next few days there were almost none.

They were born on a full moon. The ER nurses swore this was common.

Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy

I have also run into this, but it was a nigerian male. I've heard of similar beliefs among men (and women) in certain parts of east asia, and I'm just a dilettante with little cross-cultural insight. Given how widespread the lunar calendar was before the globalized economy across entire cultures (and indeed remains so strong today), and combined with my anecdotal observations proving counter-evidence, I'd be very skeptical about any claims that suggest a dominating force of gender or phenotypic sex.

Unfortunately I can't even access the article to see what the research actually says.

The "star signs" thing probably has a kernel of truth to it. Someone born in winter will have a different early life to someone born in summer. In a modern context this carries through to schooling: they'll either be older or younger than their year-group peers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goNYdaOMm6Y

What you're saying does seem to have some research backing it up. There are better links for this subject but I just don't have them on-hand.

There's a natural control group: population of Southern Hemisphere versus Northern Hemisphere.

Anecdotally (living in the Southern Hemisphere) I have yet to hear a starsign beleiver here suggest we behave like our 180° different sign.

True, but the world population isn't distributed symmetrically: there aren't many living at high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere. See graph "population by latitude" here: https://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-la...

There are quite a few people living North of 45°N, but hardly any South of 45°S.

That seems more of a function of the effect of school-year cutoff timing(eg you must be 5 by Oct 1 to attend kindergarten, or whatever) more so than when someone is actually born.

We still have a common word for this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lunatic

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