Why Do We Still Believe in 'Lunacy' During a Full Moon?

The full moon has been associated with aberrant behavior for centuries. (Credit: Aron Visuals/Unsplash) It's sometimes called the "Transylvania effect." In the dark sky, the clouds shift, revealing the full moon's eerie silver gleam, and the people on Earth below go mad. It's a story that gets repeated by doctors, teachers and police officers. The science, though, says something different. Blaming the full moon for strange behavior is a time-honored tradition. In the first century AD, the