BBC Focus Magazine

[Liam Sheppard]

no not the Police album..

I was wondering what evolutionary/social benefit menstrual synchronisation has. Or is it a fallacy?

Would Pleistocene man live in a small family group? would the women of this group sync their cycles so that only a potentially endangering trail of blood would only be left behind once a month?

would it be some sexual reason?

or so that babies are born at the same time? benefitting the survival in some way? so that all women are producing milk at the same time, so they can nurse other children. Or incase of death of mother or child etc?

just a ponderisation

[M Paul Lloyd]

Well according to Mrs.MPL (retired midwife and Nurse of 38 years service and mother of two daughters) menstrual synchronization is a bit of a myth really.
It was reported way back in the early 1970's that groups of women living in close proximity, such as in military barracks, prison, care homes, convents or whatever apparently displayed synchronized menstrual cycles. However Mrs. MPL has never witnessed this except when two women coincidentally have a period and make much of same and indeed from a scientific point of view the very existence of menstrual synchrony has never been established, with all studies investigating same having been considered controversial at best.

So I'm inclined to think its a bit of a mute point Liam, sorry for the 'Sting' in the tail..... .

[Liam Sheppard]

mute point or moot point MPL? heh heh, wink!

Hmmm, interesting... I thought it may be a myth but there was quite a lot of anecdotal evidence online..

[M Paul Lloyd]

Oh dear my spelling is letting me down again, sorry about that.

But anecdotal evidence isn't really evidence at all is it? Especially 'online' anecdotal evidence...? surely?

No, I may well be biased but I'm going with almost four decades of professional observed experience as my source of reference.

[Liam Sheppard]

like (pointy thumb)

[Healerman]

Just for the record, syncronicity is a "meaningful coincidence".

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance and that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described in this terminology by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s.

I'm still trying to work out how to get me, syncronicity and a winning lottery ticket in the the same spatio-temporal locus.


Back on the original topic, recent studies have shown no synchronisation of menstrual cycles in closed female communities, and the original 1971 study that brought this idea into the public eye shows that its statistical methods were flawed, and once this has been corrected for, the "phenomenon" goes away.