Meryl Horne

Okay.

All right, so it was done by Professor Horacio de la Iglesia at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Have you ever howled at the moon?

That's true.

So he's done fieldwork in Argentina, where he's from, with a group of indigenous people, the Tobacom, who are living in a really remote area with no electricity.

And he was curious whether living in these conditions, the moon might be affecting their sleep.

Their sleep?

Yeah.

So he asks people to wear a device on their wrist, sort of like a Fitbit, but fancier, that tracks their sleep.

25 people agreed to do this.

And then he plotted out all of this sleep data next to the lunar cycle to see if there were any patterns.

Yeah, and he did see that on the days leading up to a full moon, people were sleeping less.

Huh, that's a pretty big effect.

On average, it was about a 45-minute difference.

And Orazio thought that it was probably the brightness of the moon that was doing this.

Yeah, right.

Particularly for this community.

It's that bright out there.

Oh, wow.

So then Horacio decides to look at places that weren't rural, like cities.