THE FULL MOON EFFECT

Why does it seem as all hell breaks loose on or around the Full Moon?  The term Lunatic is derived from the word Lunar (Moon).

Anyone who does not believe that the full moon effects behaviour really needs to go for a ride along with EMS.

So is there any scientific evidence to support this phenomenon?  Or is it just coincidence?

Across the centuries, many people have uttered the phrase “There must be a full moon out there” in an attempt to explain weird happenings at night.  The Greek philosopher Aristotle suggested that the brain was the “moistest” organ in the body and thereby most susceptible to the pernicious influences of the moon, which triggers the tides. Other theories suggest that hormonal reactions to increased positive ions in the air cause hyperactivity, depression, violent behavior, road rage, higher occurrences of migraines and even asthma.

Belief in the “lunar lunacy effect,” or “The Full Moon Effect” persisted in Europe through the Middle Ages, when humans were even reputed to transform into werewolves during a full moon.

Today many people think the mystical powers of the full moon induce erratic behaviors, psychiatric hospital admissions, suicides, homicides, emergency room calls, traffic accidents, fights at professional hockey games, dog bites and all manner of strange events.   In 2007 several police departments in the U.K. even added officers on full-moon nights in an effort to cope with presumed higher crime rates.

Are These Theories All Wet?
Following Aristotle, some contemporary authors, such as Miami psychiatrist Arnold Lieber, have conjectured that the full moon’s ­supposed effects on behavior arise from its influence on water. The human body, after all, is about 80 percent water, so perhaps the moon works its mischievous magic by somehow disrupting the alignment of water molecules in the nervous system.

There are at least three reasons why this theory does not seem to be accurate.  First, the gravitational effects of the moon are far too minuscule to generate any meaningful effects on brain activity, let alone behavior. As the late astronomer George Abell of the University of California, Los Angeles, noted, a mosquito sitting on our arm exerts a more powerful gravitational pull on us than the moon does.   Second, the moon’s gravitational force affects only open bodies of water, such as oceans and lakes, but not contained sources of water, such as the human brain. T hird, the gravitational effect of the moon is just as potent during new moons—when the moon is invisible to us—as it is during full moons.

Florida International University psychologist James Rotton, Colorado State University astronomer Roger Culver and University of Saskatchewan psychologist Ivan W. Kelly have searched far and wide for any consistent behavioral effects of the full moon.  In all cases, they have come up empty-handed.  By combining the results of multiple studies and treating them as though they were one huge study—a statistical procedure called  meta-analysis—they have found that full moons are entirely unrelated to a host of events, including crimes, suicides, psychiatric problems and crisis center calls.  In their 1985 review of 37 studies entitled “Much Ado about the Full Moon,” which appeared in one of psychology’s premier journals, Psychological Bulletin, Rotton and Kelly humorously bid adieu to the full-moon effect and concluded that further research on it was unnecessary.

Persistent critics have disagreed with this conclusion, pointing to a few positive findings that emerge in scattered studies. Still, even the handful of research claims that seem to support full-moon effects have collapsed on closer investigation.  In one study published in 1982 an author team reported that traffic accidents were more frequent on full-moon nights than on other nights.  Yet a fatal flaw marred these findings: in the period under consideration, full moons were more common on weekends, when more people drive. When the authors reanalyzed their data to eliminate this confounding factor, the lunar effect vanished.

Where Belief Begins
So if The Full Moon Effect is merely an astronomical and psychological urban legend, why is it so widespread?  Media coverage almost surely plays a role.  Scores of Hollywood horror movies portray full-moon nights as peak times of spooky occurrences such as stabbings, shootings and psychotic behaviors.

Perhaps more important, research demonstrates that many people fall prey to a phenomenon that University of Wisconsin–Madison psychologists Loren and Jean Chapman termed “illusory correlation”—the perception of an association that does not in fact exist. For example, many people who have joint pain insist that their pain increases during rainy weather, although research shows this is not accurate.  Much like the watery mirages we observe on freeways during hot summer days, illusory correlations can fool us into perceiving phenomena in their absence.

Illusory correlations result in part from our mind’s propensity to attend to—and recall—most events better than nonevents.  When there is a full moon and something decidedly odd happens, we usually notice it, tell others about it and remember it. We do so because such co-occurrences fit with our preconceptions. Indeed, one study showed that psychiatric nurses who believed in The Full Moon Effect wrote more notes about patients’ peculiar behavior than did nurses who did not believe in this effect.  In contrast, when there is a full moon and nothing odd happens, this nonevent quickly fades from our memory.  As a result of our selective recall, we mistakenly perceive an association between full moons and the bizarre events and call we attend.

Putting aside this modern explanation that dispels The Full Moon Effect we are left wondering how the theory got started in the first place.  One intriguing idea for its origins is put forth from psychiatrist Charles L. Raison.  According to Raison, The Full Moon Effect may possess a small kernel of truth in that it may once have been genuine.  Raison conjectures that before the advent of outdoor lighting, the bright light of the full moon deprived people who were living outside (including many who had severe mental disorders) of sleep.  Because sleep deprivation often triggers erratic behavior in people with certain psychological conditions, such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression), the full moon may have been linked to a heightened rate of bizarre behaviors.  Raison and his colleagues’ referred to this as a “cultural fossil.”

Despite the all the studies and Chapman’s theory on Illusory Correlation Full Moon shifts still seem to bring more chaos adventure than the rest of the month.