(Courthouse News photo / Bill Girdner)
(CN) The moon has played an outsized role throughout human civilization. To the soothsayers of old, the moon was a sign of good fortune and bad. It promised hope and threatened despair. But more realistically, scientists now know it can affect how much sleep a person gets.
New research shows that oscillations in the lunar cycle may have a noticeable effect on a person’s sleep pattern. Even in brightly lit urban areas where the moon’s phase can only be detected by peering upwards, sleep patterns changed measurably in proximity to the full moon. Sometimes by up to 90 minutes.