From Full Moons to Baldness

March 22, 2004 — -- We've all grown up hearing all sorts of wives' tales. Some of them seem to make good sense, but a lot turn out to be just nonsense.

We've investigated 10 more commonly held beliefs in our latest myth-busting segment — some that you suggested to us on our "20/20" Web site.

Here's what we found out.

MYTH #10 — A Full Moon Causes Strange Things to HappenE-mail suggestion from Pamela Bartlett of Danvers, Mass.

Lots of people believe that when the moon is full, weird things happen.

Nurses told us their hospital becomes "like a zoo," and police officers told us there are "more lunatics out on the street" during a full moon.

Mitchell Lewis, an astrologer, said, "I warn everybody to be careful around the three days of the full moon."

People pay him for advice like that.

So many people believe the moon changes us, yet Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine points out that some 36 studies have been conducted on whether there's a full-moon effect. They found nothing.

"No more emergency room visits. No more babies born. No more psychiatric admissions, nothing," Shermer said.

This is embarrassing to me, because in 1984, I reported that a study of murders in Dade County found that more murders were committed during full moons than at any other time.

"Researchers went back, re-analyzed the data, and discovered that there's nothing unusual going on. It's pure chance," Shermer said.

Why do so many of us think weird stuff happens when the moon is full? Because our memory is faulty. We look for patterns, and if we find one, it stays in our brain.

Shermer explained it this way: "We don't remember the unusual things that happen on all the other times, because we're not looking for them. These things go on all the time. And there's no full moon. … We remember the hits, we forget the misses."