The mood-altering power of the Moon
Linda Geddes
Linda Geddes
Quote:After reading about Wehr’s research, Avery picked up the telephone to him, and they subsequently reanalysed the engineer’s data, finding that he too showed a 14.8 day-pattern in his mood cycles.
Further evidence for the Moon’s influence on these patients’ moods comes from the discovery that every 206 days, these otherwise regular rhythms appear to be interrupted by another lunar cycle – the one responsible for creating “supermoons”, when the Moon’s elliptical (or oval-shaped) orbit brings it particularly close to the Earth.
Anne Wirz-Justice, a chronobiologist at the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel, Switzerland, describes Wehr's data on this relationship between lunar and manic-depressive cycles as “believable” but “complex”.
“One has no idea what the mechanisms are,” she adds.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell