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> was a similar reduction in sleep on those nights in many of the undergraduates in Seattle, a large city where artificial light drowns out moonlight and studen

> was a similar reduction in sleep on those nights in many of the undergraduates in Seattle, a large city where artificial light drowns out moonlight and students often have no idea when the full moon even is. Can someone who actually lives in Seattle weigh in on whether the article was right to so quickly dismiss moonlight as the explanation? I live in a suburban neighborhood near a sports stadium where the lights are on either all night or at least as late as I ever stay up. Between street lights, the stadium, and bright LEDs from my neighbors, light pollution is high enough that I can't see most constellations, just a scattering of a few dozen stars at most on a good night. And yet I can always tell when the full moon is out because it shines like a beacon around the edges of my blackout curtains in a way that none of the artificial light in the neighborhood does. I've never lived in downtown Seattle (or any large downtown), but I'm having a hard time imagining light pollution so bad that a full moon would be completely imperceptible at even an unconscious level. It seems to me that even subtle changes in light levels are a much more likely explanation than humans having gravitational senses.

news_to_me 2y ago
There's also a lot less visible sky in a lot of places in a city—it only takes four or five stories to limit your view and block the moon a lot of the time. And in my experience, it's less the brightness of lights than the sheer volume of light from a city that reduces the apparent brightness of the moon and stars. I'm always amazed how you can see the halo of a city over the horizon at night just from its lights.
- lolinder 2y ago
  But has that been your experience with the full moon specifically? That thing is surprisingly bright—I'm thinking less about direct visibility of the orb than I am about just the general illumination in the area. And again—the effect size is much smaller for the urban group than the non-urban groups, so I'm not suggesting that the light is starkly noticeable if you're not looking for it, just that it's probably detectable by the human eye and processed from there unconsciously. In my mind you'd have to literally be unable to detect the difference in light between full moon and no moon (with a sensor with similar sensitivity to our eyes) before speculating about human gravitational senses becomes a rational move. We know we have eyes, and we know that what they're wired up directly to frequently surprises us.
seizethecheese 2y ago
I live in the urban part of Seattle. The moon was full the other night and I definitely noticed. With that being said, the effect is not as noticeable than in areas with no light pollution.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Right, I would definitely expect it to be a lower impact. I've spent nights in rural Wyoming and the full moon makes a huge difference there compared to my suburb, and I'd assume a similar effect going from suburb to downtown. The weird thing about this piece is that the data explicitly shows that the effect size is much smaller for the urban population than for the rural, which suggests that the mechanism that triggers it is duller for them but not absent. Going from "it's Seattle" to "so the moon is invisible" to "so maybe humans can sense gravity" was a set of violent enough leaps of logic to leave my head spinning.

news_to_me 2y ago

There's also a lot less visible sky in a lot of places in a city—it only takes four or five stories to limit your view and block the moon a lot of the time. And in my experience, it's less the brightness of lights than the sheer volume of light from a city that reduces the apparent brightness of the moon and stars. I'm always amazed how you can see the halo of a city over the horizon at night just from its lights.

lolinder 2y ago
But has that been your experience with the full moon specifically? That thing is surprisingly bright—I'm thinking less about direct visibility of the orb than I am about just the general illumination in the area. And again—the effect size is much smaller for the urban group than the non-urban groups, so I'm not suggesting that the light is starkly noticeable if you're not looking for it, just that it's probably detectable by the human eye and processed from there unconsciously. In my mind you'd have to literally be unable to detect the difference in light between full moon and no moon (with a sensor with similar sensitivity to our eyes) before speculating about human gravitational senses becomes a rational move. We know we have eyes, and we know that what they're wired up directly to frequently surprises us.

seizethecheese 2y ago

I live in the urban part of Seattle. The moon was full the other night and I definitely noticed. With that being said, the effect is not as noticeable than in areas with no light pollution.

lolinder 2y ago
Right, I would definitely expect it to be a lower impact. I've spent nights in rural Wyoming and the full moon makes a huge difference there compared to my suburb, and I'd assume a similar effect going from suburb to downtown. The weird thing about this piece is that the data explicitly shows that the effect size is much smaller for the urban population than for the rural, which suggests that the mechanism that triggers it is duller for them but not absent. Going from "it's Seattle" to "so the moon is invisible" to "so maybe humans can sense gravity" was a set of violent enough leaps of logic to leave my head spinning.