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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 20 2017, @02:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the to-sync-or-not-to-sync dept.

A team of researchers made up of the group behind the fertility app Clue and a group at Oxford University have tested the popularly held notion that when women live or work in close proximity for a span of time, they find their menstrual cycles begin to sync with one another. But as researchers note in their article on the Clue website, such notions appear to be completely false.

It is a commonly held notion that women who live or work together, or just spend a lot of time together, find their menstrual cycles syncing. There was even a study done in 1971 by Harvard researcher Martha McClintock tracking the menstrual cycles of female colleges students sharing a dorm. But, as the researchers with this new effort note, no other studies have found it to be true, and McClintock's work has been discredited. But sill the myth persists. To perhaps put an end to the debate, the researchers conducted a test trial with women who use the Clue app—1500 women responded to their request for assistance in a trial and out of those, 360 pairs of women were selected for inclusion. Each were in a close relationship with another woman over an extended period of time. Because the app helps women track and share their period information, the data was already available; all that was needed was for the users to share it with the researchers.

The researchers looked back three menstrual cycles for each of the pairs to see if any alignment was occurring and report that 273 of them actually had cycles that diverged—just 79 were seen to converge. They note that women who were living together were no more aligned than the other pairs. This, they insist, is further proof that the entire idea is a myth with no basis in reality.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:05AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:05AM (#496725)

    Anyone that believes that what? pheromones or whatever magic makes women sync may as well believe in the invisible hand of the market or just god because it is all pure magic and you where dumb to even think that it could be true

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by butthurt on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:34AM (2 children)

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:34AM (#496785) Journal

    Which part of the idea do you find silly?

    - we can sense the odour of other people's bodies
    - our bodies can respond to others' odours
    - this can happen unconsciously
    - we don't understand it fully

    Oh, you did say it's the whole idea. Effects that are somewhat similar have been studied and, supposedly, observed (Wikipedia has citations for these):

    In women, the sense of olfaction is strongest around the time of ovulation, significantly stronger than during other phases of the menstrual cycle and also stronger than the sense in males.

    [...]

    Studies have suggested that people might be using odor cues associated with the immune system to select mates. [...] lesbian women were not as responsive to male identified odors, while their response to female cues was similar to heterosexual males.

    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_odor#Humans [wikipedia.org]

    Asking scientists to refrain from studying phenomena that are incompletely understood is tantamount to calling for an end to science. Of course you didn't quite say that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:42AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:42AM (#496788)

      I agree we should just believe in stuff without evidence.
        up until I was about 15 saw auras around everything, I choose to believe that I had a magical ability to sense the true nature of chairs, not that there was something funny with my brain that led to sever depression and panic attacks, no it is because I magically lost the ability to sense the true nature of chair, presumably because I was dirty and had sex.

      • (Score: 1) by butthurt on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:22PM

        by butthurt (6141) on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:22PM (#496835) Journal

        > I agree we should just believe in stuff without evidence.

        The original poster was addressing people who "[had thought] that it could be true" which isn't the same.