Are people more active during a full moon?

A.M.

Randolph

A. Many people have the notion that the moon influences human behavior, and that accidents and homicides are more likely to occur when the moon is full. In fact, the word lunatic means ``mad,'' or ``moonstruck,`` and comes from the Latin word ``luna,'' for moon.

The idea appeared to gain some credence in 1978 when Miami psychiatrist Arnold Lieber published a book called ``The Lunar Effect.'' Lieber wrote that he had tracked homicides in Miami and Cleveland and found rates were higher during times of the full and new moon. He came up with a theory of ``biological tides,'' suggesting the moon exerted a pull on the water within the human body and therefore altered behavior.

It looks like Lieber's findings might have been a statistical artifact. No one has been able to replicate the findings.

``Of all the research I've read, there's no indication of any effect,'' says Dr. John Palmer, a professor of physiology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst who studies, among other things, the way lunar rhythms affect marine organisms.

Astronomer Nick Sanduleak of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland put another nail in the coffin of the theory with a 1985 paper titled: ``The Moon is Acquitted of Murder in Cleveland.'' He says Lieber's notion of biological tides was implausible because of ``the infinitesimal tidal action the moon has on an object as small as a human.''

He also reviewed homicide data for Greater Cleveland and found no parallel between full moons and killings.

Palmer studies fiddler crabs, a species whose mating system clearly is affected by the moon's phases. The animals mate in the darkness of the new moon and the females release their eggs during the high tides of a full moon. During the early 1980's, Palmer and colleagues set out to determine if there was any lunar rhythm to human mating. They found none. In a paper published in the journal Human Biology, Palmer reported that people were most likely to feel romantic not during a full moon -- but on Sundays, possibly because that's the day when most people's the workload is lightest.