We tend to think of history as a collection of abstract facts that have no bearing on the “real world,” but everything connects across the timeline. Big, world-changing events don’t just change things when they happen; they send out shock waves that reverberate into the present. Like William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

10 Espionage And Sedition Acts

When Woodrow Wilson declared war in 1917, he gave a speech before congress warning of the disloyalty of many Americans. To deal with those who wanted to undermine the war effort, Wilson advocated “a firm hand of repression.”

Thus, Wilson enacted the Espionage and Sedition Acts to prosecute people who threatened “national defense.” The acts granted the government the power to censor newspapers and movies as well as jail those who resisted the draft and made it federal crime to slander the Constitution. The government imprisoned thousands during Wilson’s administration.

Cooler heads never really prevailed. By 1919, the Supreme Court decided that the laws were not in violation of the First Amendment and freedom of speech, and their use continues to this day. They were most recently employed to imprison Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, and they would be used to put Edward Snowden behind bars if he were to be captured.

9 Iron Harvest

Farmers in France, Germany, and Belgium are still at risk of becoming casualties due to the amount of munitions launched during World War I. When they plow their fields, they’re still dredging up tons of unexploded weaponry, and sometimes the bombs go off. Entire teams are dedicated to finding these weapons and disarming them before that happens. People like Michael Colling even have to wear gas masks, as if the war never ended.

In 2012, Belgium uncovered 105 tons of munitions, including poisonous gas. They call the haul, like a macabre crop grown in Hell, the “iron harvest.” In 2004, one site in Germany yielded 3,000 unexploded bombs. Those hauls are only a drop in the bucket. During World War I, 1.4 billion shells were launched. People still occasionally die. The Great War is still claiming lives.

8 Champagne

You may have, at some point, heard a snob proclaim, “Champagne is only champagne if it comes from the Champagne region in France.” Here’s why:

The French regions that could produce champagne were effectively destroyed during World War I. To ensure that champagne would remain exclusively French, a clause was added to the Treaty of Versailles, stipulating that the entire world wouldn’t be able to call any sparkling wine “champagne.” The countries that ratified the Treaty of Versailles agreed.

This stipulation remains at work today, though not completely as intended. If you’re in the US, you may have noticed that a lot of cheap wine is still called “champagne.” This stuff is made in the United States. In the US, you can a get terrible hangover from “champagne” instead of “sparkling wine” because the Senate never ratified the Treaty of Versailles. The US remains technically exempt from the clause.

7 The Red Zone

Some towns in France were so destroyed and contaminated that the French government seized an area of land larger than Paris and deemed it uninhabitable.

Several towns in the Champagne-Ardenne region experienced some of the war’s most devastating fighting. The people that lived there fled, and the towns succumbed to the guns of August. The ground was contaminated, and there were too many unexploded bombs. People didn’t return after the war.

On April 17, 1919, the French government bought the land and declared it uninhabitable. Henceforth, it was to be known as the “Zone Rouge,” a place fit for military training and nothing else. People have returned to some of the towns as the ground became safer, but a large strip of land is still considered impossible for human life.

6 The Hungarian Diaspora

The Treaty of Trianon was the peace agreement established between the Allies and Hungary in 1920, and like all of the treaties dealing with Central and Southern Europe, there was the messy issue of what to do with the losing side’s land. Breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire meant dividing the land among the various nations that used to make up the empire.

Hungary really lost hard in the deal. Roughly two-thirds of its territory was given to surrounding countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The unintended consequence of this is that millions of Hungarians are in other countries. The Hungarians who found themselves outside their borders did not assimilate into the new nations and essentially created Hungarian exclaves.

Hungary’s solution to this problem today is basically to recreate the Hungarian Empire. They’re creating countries within countries by granting full citizenship, including voting rights, to hundreds of thousands of Hungarians in places like Romania. This has brought the two countries to the brink of war as recently as 2013. It has also promoted the rise of far-right demonstrations chanting “Down with Trianon!” a century after the fact.

5 Debt

World War I was expensive, so much so that Britain went from the world’s creditor to a debtor nation in just four years. No one could have predicated just how devastatingly expensive the war was and how long it would take to pay back all the borrowed money.

Germany was famously stuck with the bill for World War I with the reparations and “war-guilt” clause in the Treaty of Versailles. The country has only recently paid off its debt. They made their final payment of $94 million to the Allies in 2010. They weren’t alone, either. Britain finally paid off its £1.9 Billion debt in 2015.

4 ISIS

ISIS wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for World War I. In fact, the organization makes of point of saying how they will be destroying all of the World War I treaties that created the modern Middle East.

Keep in mind that all of the current nation-states in the Middle East did not exist before 1914. They were (mostly) part of the Ottoman Empire. When it started to look like the Allies would win, the UK and France (again, mostly) decided how they would carve up the new land and add it to their empires. This included the Sykes-Picot agreement.

France and Britain brokered a secret treaty during World War I about who would have what in the Middle East. In the agreement, they decided to create Iraq and Syria and add these newly created territories to their empires. The trouble is that they didn’t take into account how the people living there would feel.

Destroying these borders is now a huge part of the ISIS agenda. In 2014, in one of ISIS’s first videos, they filmed a bulldozer knocking down a chuck of dirt between Iraq and Syria, and then the camera panned down to a sign that said, “End of Sykes-Picot.”

3 Divided Ireland

At the outbreak of World War I, Ireland was part of the UK, but by the end of the war, the Irish had started their own Brexit. Typically, historians have treated the Easter Uprising of 1916 as the origin of modern Irish problems and violence, and it could not have happened without the conditions facilitated by World War I.

Participation in the British military helped to widen the cracks between Irish loyalists and republicans. Northern Ireland fought and died for Britain, and they weren’t about to join Irish nationalists and republicans, who, in their view, weren’t joining or joined for the wrong reasons. Ulster loyalists also supported the conscription of Irishmen, while republicans, nationalists, and Roman Catholics violently resisted.

Things came to a boiling point on Easter 1916, when James Connolly and a group of volunteers stormed Dublin, occupied the General Post Office, and declared the Irish Republic. This event set the tone of violence that would dominate Ireland throughout the 20th century and up until the present day.

2 Pilates

Pilates, the popular fitness fad that has swept the suburbs, was actually born in a World War I internment camp. Joseph Pilates, a native of Germany, moved to England in 1912 to work as a defense instructor for Scotland Yard. Two years later, the war broke out, and the British rounded up thousands of German nationals, whom the British believed represented an enemy threat.

While interned as a potential German saboteur, Joseph developed a method of exercise that could be performed inside the camp. He rigged together what was on hand to enable others to perform effective exercise with little more than their body weight. It worked well and was a hit, and he eventually moved to the US in 1926. He brought his fitness system along with him and opened a studio in New York City. From there, it spread throughout the country.

1 Passports

Papers for travel weren’t always a common necessity. They mostly existed for sailors to pass through ports. By the end of the 19th century, railroads had made travel so popular and easy that Europe simply abolished any legal paperwork that might have been required for travel. From the 1860s to 1914, borders were essentially open.

World War I changed everything. Free and open travel was simply not a reality for nations at war, and the UK was the first to set up the system we recognize today. The British Nationalist and Status Alien Acts of 1914 gave birth to the modern passport. It was a piece of paper with a picture and other identifying criteria encased by a cardboard cover. Besides some minor changes made in the 1920s, these passports became the template for all international travel. Other than increased sophistication in technology, they haven’t really changed.

We may experience delusions (strong beliefs that conflict with rational evidence or reality) when our brains try to understand the distress we associate with mental illness. Many of us think that delusions are as individualized as our fingerprints. But the truth is that our brains shape our delusions from the technologies and cultures of our time.

Delusions go in and out of style, just like clothing and hairstyles. Delusions can be sold and even exported to us from other cultures. Unfortunately, we can’t always count on our doctors for guidance because they’re often as delusional as we are.

10Cultural Influences

Our cultures provide the background material to understand and tell our stories, including the narrative for our delusions. The people who treat us—whether doctors, priests, or shamans—also help to form our delusions by defining the symptoms of mental illness.

“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire‘—a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict,” medical historian Edward Shorter explained to the New York Times. “In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak, or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs, patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight, and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”

For example, some Southeast Asian men may suffer from koro, the belief that their genitals are shrinking, even though there’s nothing wrong physically. In the Middle East, individuals with zar are believed to be possessed by spirits, which may cause attacks of shouting, laughing, and singing as part of their feelings of detachment.

Our mass delusions are influenced the same way. For example, repressed nuns suffered many mass delusions from the 15th to the 19th centuries. When combined with popular beliefs in demons, strict religious discipline often triggered hysterical fits in these women, including swearing, exposing and rubbing their genitals, and thrusting their hips as though having intercourse. Priests claimed to exorcise the demons, although some nuns were jailed or burned at the stake.

From the 18th through the early 20th centuries, extreme working conditions caused abnormal movements, convulsions, and neurological symptoms for groups of workers in Western factories.

As the 20th century progressed, mass delusions switched more to anxiety symptoms over environmental and war-related fears. After poison gas killed 90,000 people in World War I, Americans became obsessed with the fear of gas. In the early 1930s, dozens of people in rural Virginia were convinced that someone had sprayed harmful gas in their homes at night. After serious investigation, authorities found that the real sources ranged from passing flatulence to chimney flues that had stopped up.

Fear of anthrax after the 9/11 terror attacks also sparked many false alarms in the US population. For example, one student and teacher claimed to have chemical burns on their forearms after they opened a letter in October 2001. However, nothing unusual was found in the envelope.

9Technological Influences

Although the loneliness, alienation, and other anxieties that cause delusions aren’t new, the way they’re expressed varies over time to mirror cultural changes, including technology. Before the late 19th century, delusions of being controlled or persecuted usually centered on witchcraft and the supernatural. That changed when new technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, electricity, X-rays, lasers, and the Internet became popular.

People don’t usually go back in time with their delusions unless an earlier era is fixed in their minds for some reason. So delusions today are mainly about being controlled or persecuted through computers and the Internet, not through radio waves as in the 1940s.

One 2010 study showed that prolonged Internet use can trigger unexpected psychotic episodes. In three separate cases, women 30–50 years old with no serious psych issues developed delusions and hallucinations from using the Internet many hours every day. Each woman had been unhappy in a previous intimate relationship but was now involved in a strictly online relationship with a man. Over time, these women lost touch with reality. One of them believed she could feel her online love physically touching her, even though she’d never met him in person. All of the women required antipsychotic medications to stop their delusions and return to normal functioning.

In another case, a man was convinced that his computer was used to implant thoughts in his head and to poison him through his keyboard.

Long ago, new materials were the technologies of their time. For example, the glass delusion gained steam in Europe until it became especially popular in the 1600s. It seemed to start with French king Charles VI, who was paranoid about betrayal and assassination. At times, he would have spells where he wouldn’t move. Convinced he was made of glass, he was afraid he would break. He also wrapped his body in blankets to stop his buttocks from shattering. Some psychologists believe this represents a fear of fragility or social humiliation. In a rare case from the 1960s, a young man in the Netherlands told the BBC that people looked through him like glass in a window. “You [don’t see the glass in the window]. But it is there,” said the man. “That’s me. I’m there, and I’m not there. Like the glass in the window.”

8Media And Entertainment Influences

Whether or not the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast by Orson Welles actually caused the panic and mass delusion that’s been alleged over the years, we have seen delusions shaped by topics in the media or entertainment.

In 2008, the first case of climate change delusion was reported by doctors in Australia. Believing the world faced almost certain eco-destruction, their patient, a young man of 17, wouldn’t drink water because he felt guilty that doing so would kill millions of people. Immediately, there was a public outcry, with some people accusing the media of causing this man’s delusion by sensationalizing climate change. One blog ran the headline “Al Gore Is Literally Driving People Crazy.” But we’ve already seen that people’s delusions are a way to express their anxieties using stories that reflect the times in which they live.

Entertainment also fuels a lot of delusions. Some people believe they’re characters in computer games. Others are convinced they have romantic relationships with or are being persecuted by popular stars.

The Truman Show Delusion (TSD), named after an American movie about a man who finds out that his entire life is a reality TV show, narrates old anxieties of persecution and control in a modern story. With so much of our lives recorded without our knowledge or permission, and so many people who want to be on reality shows, some people now have delusions that they’re starring in their own reality shows.

“[Patients feel] as though their family perhaps were reading from a script, there were cameras everywhere at all time[s], they had no privacy,” psychiatrist Dr. Joel Gold told NPR. “And this was obviously—for most—very, very disturbing. For a small minority, there was an excitement about it, that they were the most famous person on Earth. But eventually, even for those people, it became unbearable.”

Gold notes that TSD is unusual in at least one important way. While most delusions are focused on one unreal area of life, such as alien abduction, TSD encompasses the patient’s whole world. Nothing is real to them.

7The Export Of America’s Delusions

Ethan Watters argues in his book Crazy Like Us that the US has exported its approach toward mental illness to other countries. That happens even when American definitions of illness don’t fit the other culture’s symptoms.

Although one antibiotic may cure the same bacterial infection anywhere in the world, that approach may not work when treating mental illness. Watters questions if we’re helping or harming patients if we don’t recognize the different customs that define our delusions and treat them accordingly.

“This does not mean that these illnesses and the pain associated with them are not real, or that sufferers deliberately shape their symptoms to fit a certain cultural niche,” writes Watters. “It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits, and predispositions—the idiosyncratic cultural trappings—of the mind that is its host.”

After the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, American psych experts rushed to help. They assumed the Sri Lankans would exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But that was at odds with the native culture. “It was not the nightmares or flashbacks that most of the population was concerned with,” trauma expert Gaithri Fernando told the New York Times. “The deepest psychological wounds for Sri Lankans were not on the PTSD checklists; they were the loss of or the disturbance of one’s role in the group.”

Where Americans saw damage to the mind, Sri Lankans saw damage to their social groups. American psychology professor Ken Miller observed similar results in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Guatemala. PTSD symptoms didn’t fit the war-related trauma that occurred in those countries. To export American psychiatry to certain countries, developed or not, may be as much of a cultural mismatch as sending Namibian witch doctors to treat American patients after the 9/11 terror attacks.

If anxiety about changes in the world produces delusions for some people, are American psychiatrists making the problem worse by insisting on changing the way other cultures define and cope with their stressors? As we’ll talk about shortly, American ideas of psychiatry don’t always equate to better treatments and outcomes for patients. They’re not always done in the best interests of the patient, either.

6The Doctors Who Diagnose Us Are Also Delusional

Some doctors may believe that they evaluate and treat mental illness objectively. That’s especially true of some US practitioners, who believe that other countries have cultural delusions but US doctors treat real brain diseases with a scientific approach.

However, US doctors are just as culture-bound and delusional in their approach to mental illness as everyone else. With all their expensive machines to view the brain and medications to alter brain chemistry, they simply don’t recognize it. As Ethan Watters writes, “All mental illnesses, including depression, PTSD and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness.”

As we saw with Sri Lanka, Western doctors think they understand what life events trigger mental illness, and they’re convinced that they know how to treat it. Some American doctors also believe that it’s good to talk about personal traumas, analyze them, and vent emotionally. There’s a belief that we’re mentally fragile. But many cultures, including some in more developed countries like Australia, simply don’t share those views, which can make American treatments ineffective at best.

That’s not to say that the US hasn’t made any advances in treatment that would help patients in other countries. But it often seems that US doctors have closed their minds to alternative methods of dealing with mental illness.

5Better Outcomes In The Developing World

Beginning in the early 1970s, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted three international studies of schizophrenia patients that lasted about 30 years in total. The results showed that the relapse rate for schizophrenics in Europe and the US was as much as 67 percent higher when compared to developing countries.

That led to widespread debate as to what happened. One theory is that schizophrenia patients are treated more kindly and are better kept within social groups in some developing countries. Anthropologist Juli McGruder studied schizophrenics and their families in Zanzibar, where people with delusions are believed to be possessed by spirits. “Muslim and Swahili spirits are not exorcised in the Christian sense of casting out demons,” McGruder told the New York Times. “Rather they are coaxed with food and goods, feted with song and dance. They are placated, settled, reduced in malfeasance.” The patient is seen as having a temporary illness, not a new identity. When the illness goes into remission, the patient can function in society again, at least for a while.

Meanwhile, Western cultures value control over self and circumstances to such a degree that mental illness directly opposes that view. Unlike developing countries that accept spirit possession, family members in Western cultures expect their loved ones to get better through force of will. Patients feel more isolated and are less likely to go back to work. Their mental illness is often seen as permanent.

Some researchers believe that the WHO studies were conducted incorrectly. They also feel that the outlook for schizophrenia patients in developing countries has worsened considerably in recent years. They’re calling for new research.

Other studies show that different medication usage accounted for the outcomes in the WHO studies. Those researchers concluded that limiting the use of antipsychotic drugs works better in the long run for schizophrenia patients in all countries.

Even so, none of the studies appeared to show that Western medicine produced clearly better results for their schizophrenia patients.

4The Sale Of Mental Illness

At least one reason the US is so intent on exporting its definitions and treatments of mental illness, including delusions, is drug company profits. One of the best examples happened in Japan at the turn of the 21st century, when drug companies convinced the Japanese public that they suffered from mild depression, which was called kokoro no kaze, or “cold of the soul.” Of course, drug companies provided expensive antidepressants as the cure.

Until then, the Japanese medical community had only dealt with major depressive disorders. With a suicide rate double that of the US, Japan obviously had mental health problems. The average length of a hospitalization for mental illness was around 390 days, far more than the US average of under 10 days. Officially, mild depression didn’t exist in Japan. But after the drug companies rolled out their media campaign, doctor visits for depression soared almost 50 percent in just four years.

”I could take you all over the world, and you would have no difficulty recognizing severely depressed people in completely different settings,” psychiatry professor Arthur Kleinman told the New York Times. “But mild depression is a totally different kettle of fish. It allows us to relabel as depression an enormous number of things.” It’s hard to know where moodiness ends and depression begins. So it’s quite possible that the Japanese began to define conditions that weren’t even diseases as mild depression. They were told repeatedly that drugs were the cure.

One 39-year-old man, Naoya Mitake, was put on different rounds of antidepressants for about two years to treat insomnia and fatigue. He had been convinced by drug company educational campaigns that his feelings had a chemical basis that could only be treated by drugs. But it never completely worked for him. Then he accidentally found his own cure: fasting.

As Japanese psychiatrist Yutaka Ono explained to the New York Times, “[The drug companies] ran a very intense campaign about mild depression where a beautiful young lady comes out all smiles and says, ‘I went to a doctor and now I’m happy.’ You know, depression is not that easy. And if it is that easy, it might not be depression.”

Still, antidepressant sales quintupled in Japan between 1998 and 2003, shortly after the marketing campaigns began.

3Our Relationship With Our Delusions

Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann examined the way patients with psychotic disorders interacted with the voices (auditory hallucinations) they heard as part of their conditions. In the US, voices were characterized as threatening and harsh. In Ghana and India, the voices were often considered benign, even playful.

Luhrmann thinks that American doctors should pay more attention to both auditory hallucinations and cultural differences in psychiatric diseases. “Our work found that people with serious psychotic disorder in different cultures have different voice-hearing experiences,” she said. “That suggests that the way people pay attention to their voices alters what they hear their voices say. That may have clinical implications.”

In a study of 60 adults with schizophrenia—20 each from Ghana, India, and the US—Luhrmann found that people in all three countries heard good and bad voices, whispering, and an unidentified source of hissing. However, the striking difference came in the interpretations of their experiences. All the US patients had negative experiences that they considered to be brain disease symptoms. They viewed voices as a hateful, violent bombardment. It often felt like war to them.

About half of the Indian patients heard relatives advising them to complete tasks. Sometimes, they interpreted the voices as playful or entertaining. Most of them did not describe their hallucinations as part of a brain disease. The same was true for the Ghanaian patients. In their culture, it’s believed that spirits can talk, so they didn’t characterize voices as a psych problem. Half of them reported their experiences in a positive manner. Plus, 80 percent thought they had heard from God.

Luhrmann believes these different reactions reflect the patients’ cultures. Americans value independence, individuality, and control, but Ghanaians and Indians define themselves through their relationships with other people. This suggests beneficial new approaches to treating schizophrenia, such as naming patients’ voices and forging relationships with them.

“The problem is not hearing voices,” Dr. Marius Romme, founder of advocacy group Intervoice, told The Atlantic, “but the inability to cope with the experience.” Romme’s colleague, Dr. Dirk Corstens, also believes we must limit the medication prescribed for patients with psychosis because it often does more harm than good.

2A Dispute About Chemical Imbalance

Drugs to treat psychosis are some of the best-selling medications in the US. However, evidence continues to show that these drugs are not treating a chemical imbalance that causes mental illness. In fact, the first drugs prescribed for mental illness—Thorazine, Miltown, and Marsilid—were actually developed to combat infections. When they were found to quiet mental symptoms, researchers observed that they also affected brain chemistry. The drugs weren’t created to treat abnormal brain chemistry. The theory of chemical imbalance was created to explain the use of the drugs. Decades of additional research have failed to confirm the chemical imbalance hypothesis with different classes of drugs to treat mental illness.

Even so, the more important question is whether the drugs work. By reviewing the published results of clinical trials to treat depression, Irving Kirsch, a UK psychologist, initially found that placebos worked about 82 percent as well as antidepressant medications. But his most important finding was that drug companies can bury the results of tests they don’t like. So they can keep testing until they get the results they want to publicize. Kirsch concluded that the drugs showed no significant clinical difference than placebos in treatment. Even though there was a small statistical difference, it just wasn’t enough to matter in terms of actual treatment.

He also found that drugs that weren’t antidepressants—such as sedatives, thyroid hormones, stimulants, opiates, and even certain herbal remedies—did just as good a job in relieving depression symptoms as antidepressants. When he looked at high doses of placebos that had side effects, he observed the same results. So he concluded that the presence of side effects may make patients believe that drugs are doing a better job for them than placebos without side effects.

Kirsch’s study is just one review of a complex topic, and no one should decline medication because of it. But it raises questions about the efficacy of medication, and others should conduct further research on the subject.

1The Eventual Fading Away Of Our Delusions

In Western society, we’re often convinced that our scientific approach to mental illness makes us more sophisticated than the mental health practitioners from other cultures and times. This arrogance leads us to look at earlier treatments with a mixture of ridicule and sadness.

We now have the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), known as the “Bible of psychiatry.” It lists symptoms of disorders that are considered to be psychiatric illnesses in the US. So, in a way, it defines what our society views as normal and abnormal behavior—what can let us roam free and what can put us on medication or even get us locked up.

However, the DSM isn’t as objective as we’d like to believe. US psychiatrist Daniel Carlat explains that psychiatrists have received the most money from drug companies for many years because “our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.” Carlat also says that he makes 80 percent more per hour by prescribing drugs rather than talk therapy, so he only prescribes drugs.

“Patients often view psychiatrists as wizards of neurotransmitters,” he says, “who can choose just the right medication for whatever chemical imbalance is at play. This exaggerated conception of our capabilities has been encouraged by drug companies, by psychiatrists ourselves, and by our patients’ understandable hopes for cures.”

Psychiatrists ask patients about their symptoms to see if they match any conditions in the DSM. The more matches, the more drugs that may be prescribed. It’s a way of labeling patients that makes us feel cared for and makes money for the medical community. But according to Carlat, that doesn’t necessarily mean he has any idea what he’s doing.

If that’s the way our culture is defining delusions, we can only hope they will fade away sooner rather than later. It also raises the question of how future generations will view our delusions and the doctors who treated them.

The moon has been associated with a wide variety of superstitions across cultures, even if there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it; far cooler satellites exist right in our solar system. From its use in the occult to dating advice on Instagram, many people believe it to be much more influential in our daily lives than it really is, even if study after study has proven that it’s really not.

Among all the chatter about lunar phases affecting your third dates and the moon being the literal devil, we forget about the real, bizarre effects it has on life on Earth. Many creatures – including us – respond to the lunar cycle in weird ways. While some of them are learned responses over millennia of evolution, we simply have no explanation for the others.

See Also: 10 Changes The Earth Would Suffer If It Had No Moon

10The Menstrual Cycle Mimics The Lunar Cycle

If you spend some time in the crazier parts of the Internet, you’d come to associate the moon with a lot of weird stuff. Of course, a lot of it isn’t based on any scientific evidence—much like most of the Internet – as the moon is nothing but a cold mass of rock in a perpetual orbit around our planet.

Some of those theories, though, may not have been as far-fetched as we thought, as science is gradually finding out. Take the one about the menstrual cycle being in tune with the lunar cycle, which has been a guiding belief for cults throughout history. It could be dismissed as medieval superstition, though there’s quite a bit of scientific evidence backing it. A few studies have found definitive links between the lunar and menstrual cycles. According to one, women also go through increased levels of hormones around the full moon.

While we’re not sure why that could be, we can refer to some experts guesses. Charles Darwin believed that the menstrual cycle – on average – coincides with the monthly moon cycle for a reason. It backed his then-nascent theory that we first came from the ocean, as this proves that we adjusted our reproductive clocks according to the lunar tides at some point. We’re no experts, but that makes sense to us, as the average span of the menstrual cycle does almost-perfectly coincide with the lunar cycle.

9 Lemur Sex

We can all agree that we’ve massively exaggerated moon’s influence on animals in the past, even if anecdotal evidence does suggest that wolves have a personal problem with it. While it’s true that scientifically speaking, the moon has little to do with most animals, though it does have some weird effects on a handful of them.

Lemurs, for example, have been found to be much more active during the full moon than usual, covering larger distances and generally being more out and about.

They’re so dependent on the moon that they essentially shut down on darker nights or lunar eclipses, though we can’t really explain why. One line of reasoning says that it’s because of the level of light available during the different phases of the lunar cycle. That could be true, though if so, why didn’t other diurnal animals evolve in a similar way?

8 Our Sleep Cycle

We all go through bouts of bad sleep every now and then. It could be caused by a variety of factors, like stress, weather, location of the house etc. While it’s almost always something you can detect and fix, sometimes, it’s caused by nothing. We can’t really answer for all cases of bad sleep here, but for anyone going through irregular sleeping patterns around specific times of the month, we’d suggest looking at the moon.

A researcher from the University of Basel found that there is some scientific basis to the long-time belief that the moon has something to do with our sleeping pattern. According to his research, people took five minutes longer to sleep during a full moon, and their sleep time also reduced by 20 minutes on average. Lower levels of melatonin were also reported during full moons, as well as reduced brain activity.

7 Crimes

The moon has always been associated with aggression and crimes, though we’ve never really understood why. Many independent and isolated cultures have described the moon as an omen of chaos that fills everyone with restlessness and rage, blaming their most primitive urges on a rock hanging in the sky.

While there was never any scientific proof to back this claim, some recent studies suggest that the moon may actually have some effect on our collective psyche. Or at least how we patrol our streets after dark, according to one study done by the Sussex police. They concluded that there is a definite rise in crimes during full moons, though admitted that they don’t understand why, as they’re cops and not psychologists. That’s not the only case, either; higher incidents of crime and violence on full moons have been reported around the world.

6 Crisis Calls

With the list of reasons to get worried growing by the day, it’s hard to keep track of what’s making you stressed. It’s a normal side effect of routine life, and isolating the root causes of is essential for day-to-day productivity and healthy relationships. Sometimes, though, there really is nothing you can do, as the reason you’re stressed is the damn moon.

According to a study based on the call records of a crisis center, there’s a disproportionate rise in the number of calls during new moons, suggesting that the moon maybe doing something to stress us out. Surprisingly, it was only true for women, as men actually made less calls during that time.

5 It Affects Lions’ Hunting Patterns

Not that we’d advise you to do anything of the sort, but if you ever find yourself lost in a lion’s natural habitat, there are few things you can do to stay alive. Other than misguidedly trying to fight it and making a run for it, you’re really out of options. It’s an even bigger problem—according to science at least – if it’s the day after a full moon.

As a study published in PloS ONE found, African lions are much more aggressive in the days after the full moon, as well as more likely to attack people. While it may seem like arbitrary behavior at first, it makes sense and goes with the lion’s hunting style. They don’t actually need a lot of light to hunt, and on top of that, a full moon makes it easier for the prey to sense danger and run away, resulting in reduced food output.

The days immediately after the full moon are prime lion hunting time, as they compensate – perhaps reflexively – by killing more prey and just generally being more menacing than usual.

4 Animal Bites

Animal bites are a side effect of co-existing with a diverse array of species. From birds to snakes to big cats, we’ve been bitten by almost every type of animal there is. While it may cause serious conditions in some cases, we realize that’s there’s nothing we can really do to stop it. Animals biting us all the time is as much a part of life on Earth as rain.

Weirdly enough, animal bites are apparently not as random as we thought, and may have some mysterious connection with the moon. One study found that cases of animal bites were significantly higher on the days of the full moon, though they don’t quite understand why. It wasn’t just one type of animal either, as they studied 1,621 cases of bites from a variety of animals, which means that it’s not a species-specific phenomenon.

3 Its Weird Effects On Plants

As we’re finding out, the moon has some wholly bizarre effects on animals and humans, though it’s not restricted to us. As growing research is finding out, it also has a significant impact on our chlorophyll-filled friends; the plants. Many studies have found relationships between the lunar cycle and the growth of plants, and we haven’t been able to explain all of them.

One study found that root growth in a specific plant from Africa, A. thaliana, is regulated by the lunar tides, as the growth was found to be thicker and faster at the highest phases of the tide. Previous studies have found that leaf movement in some plants may be related to the lunar tides, too.

2 It Makes Cats And Dogs More Prone To Injuries

As we discussed earlier, pets and other animals are more prone to biting during a full moon, for reasons that may not be fully known to us. If we talk about the most common animals around us, though – cats and dogs – their relationship with the moon has an added dimension; a full moon makes them more prone to injuries, too.

Published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, the study found that the number of emergency room visits for cats and dogs was noticeably higher around the full moon. While it was something veterinarians have always suspected and anecdotally claimed, this was the first study to confirm it. We still don’t know why it happens, though.

1 The Moon’s Relationship With Bipolar Disorder

The moon has always been suspected to mess around with our mood and mental state. It may not have ever been proven by science, but people have claimed to be more depressed and anxious during the full moon for a long time. That may seem like superstition to most, though if one study is anything to go by, there may have been some truth to it.

Conducted by researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, the study’s aim was to ascertain whether the lunar cycle has anything to do with the various mood spells among bipolar patients. To their surprise, they found a direct correlation between the cycles of the moon and the sleep and mood cycle of the subject. They perfectly – and mysteriously—coincided with each other, including, and especially, the phases of mania. It confirmed the findings of an earlier study done on the subject, which came up with more or less the same results.