![]() ![]() For nearly three-quarters of the Toba-Qom participants, researchers collected sleep data for one to two whole lunar cycles. The communities differed in their access to electricity during the study period: One rural community had no electricity access, a second rural community had only limited access to electricity - such as a single source of artificial light in dwellings - while a third community was located in an urban setting and had full access to electricity. Using wrist monitors, the team tracked sleep patterns among 98 individuals living in three Toba-Qom Indigenous communities in the Argentine province of Formosa. “And although the effect is more robust in communities without access to electricity, the effect is present in communities with electricity, including undergraduates at the University of Washington.” “We see a clear lunar modulation of sleep, with sleep decreasing and a later onset of sleep in the days preceding a full moon,” said de la Iglesia. The pattern’s ubiquity may indicate that our natural circadian rhythms are somehow synchronized with - or entrained to - the phases of the lunar cycle. They saw the oscillations regardless of an individual’s access to electricity, though the variations are less pronounced in individuals living in urban environments. The research team, led by UW professor of biology Horacio de la Iglesia, observed these variations in both the time of sleep onset and the duration of sleep in urban and rural settings - from Indigenous communities in northern Argentina to college students in Seattle, a city of more than 750,000. 27 in Science Advances, scientists at the University of Washington, the National University of Quilmes in Argentina and Yale University report that sleep cycles in people oscillate during the 29.5-day lunar cycle: In the days leading up to a full moon, people go to sleep later in the evening and sleep for shorter periods of time. But new research indicates that our planet’s celestial companion impacts something else entirely - our sleep. For centuries, humans have blamed the moon for our moods, accidents and even natural disasters.
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