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