Overnight growth? No, but I grew ~5 inches in one ~3 month period (over a summer). I didn’t have any memorable “growing pains”, either.
I have a potted asparagus fern that, when I bought it, had several stalks that were each about 8 to 10 inches long. I came downstairs one morning, and one of those stalks (or perhaps a new stalk, I’m not sure) was suddenly about 18 inches long. A few weeks later, a second long stalk appeared. I was astonished! It genuinely appears to have happened overnight.
On the contrary, it’s the only meaningful way to do it. If I’m wondering whether someone’s grown, I’m wondering if they’ve gotten taller. I don’t care if the change in height is due to ligaments, cartilage, or bone: I just want the bottom line. Is he taller, or not?
Interesting. Apparently I grow 1/2" or more every night. How come I’m not a lot taller? I should be over 600 feet tall now, there must be something wrong with your logic.
No… because if we measure you at the same time each day, we’ll record the same height. If we measure at random times during the day, we’ll see lots of “noise” that still centers around the same height +/- 1/2". If we do multiple measurements per day, we’ll see the highest numbers in the morning and lower numbers later in the day.
Your point boils down to “there’s lots of daily variation other than growth” and that’s not a critique of the concept of measuring height, just a commentary on how important our measurement protocols are.
I understand that. The methodology described above for measuring growth has lots of room for error. Height is based on the length of bones, plus the gap between bones because of the softer tissue there. And those gaps can vary greatly in a variety of ways that could appear to be sudden and consistent growth in a 24 hour period, but is actually the result of cumulative growth in the bones over a longer period of time, and is only revealed due to a change in posture such as straightening of the spine.
If it’s just from posture, then you’d expect that those sudden growths would be accompanied by nearly the same number of sudden shrinkages, that would cancel out the growths.
No. The child is growing, just not overnight. The growth will exhibit in the posture change, and won’t revert because the child is going to continue growing. There is no doubt that children grow over time. What is at question is whether they can grow 1/2 inch taller overnight, and the methodology above isn’t going to accurately measure that. It wouldn’t surprise me to see children at certain ages grow 1/2 inch taller in a week, maybe even less than a week, but 1/2 inch in a 24 hour period is going to require accurate measuring to prove.
Well there is this which claims to document that growth is indeed very chaotic on short time scales and in ranges that exceed measurement error noise.
This 2010 article seems to be the most up to date review:
So yes growth does occur in chaotic mini-spurts.
That sounds like a better way to measure growth.
Anecdotal: When I was a kid, I had what I was told were growing pains, and I remember a few times that first thing in the morning and lasting through the school day I felt taller. No one measured my height, damn it.
But I also remember once in a while waking up in the morning and not opening my eyes because as soon as I’d do so I’d lose the impression/hallucination that I was as big as the universe or very, very small (which I could control but knew at the time wasn’t real). I was eight to 10 years old.
Magic words of poof poof piffles
Make me just as small as Sniffles.
That worked, but only in comic books.
That works out to roughly a little less than a millimeter and a half per day, assuming you grew at a steady rate.
If you didn’t, then it’s likely that you grew a measurable amount over some night-time period.
On the contrary, measuring length changes overnight to check for “growth” is a stupid way to try and measure growth overnight.
Cell division at the epiphyseal plate does not take place rapidly enough to create a bone length difference in 8-12 hours that is measurable by attempts to measure total length of a human being. Postural changes, changes in turgor of intravertebral discs, and the mechanics of measuring length itself all create a background noise against which the actual bone length difference would be lost.
The time of day of measurement would make a difference as well.
It’s true that if you are wondering if someone has grown, you are wondering if they got taller. But you are mixing up that concept with the concept that if someone has gotten taller, they must have “grown.” And the second concept is not correct. We get taller (longer) during brief intervals such as overnight but the amount we get longer is not a reflection of the amount we have grown. In fact, the amount of length change unrelated to “growth” is so large compared with the amount of length change related to growth that any conclusion of growth overnight based on length measurement is completely invalid.
Eleven years.
Good times here, right?
The time of day of measurement wouldn’t make a difference, because you’d be controlling for that. It’s really easy to do so: Compare each measurement only to other measurements made at the same time of day. As for the rest of the noise sources, you control them away as much as you can, and just average large numbers of data points to take care of the rest. Just like you’d do in any other science.
If posture is the only complaint, you could also come up with a measurement system that is independent of posture. For example, the length of certain bones in the legs would give you some useful data about growth that would not vary as much as total body height. You could even conceive of a measurement system that used X-rays, ultrasound, whatever, to measure all the internal bones and gaps between bones.
(PS: I’m not sure I buy into large growth spurts overnight, just so I’m clear on that. I just don’t think that measuring growth on a daily scale is an insurmountable obstacle if you set up the right procedures, use a large enough sample set and are willing to crunch through the statistics.)
You have a foam rubber tube. It’s between 2 and 4 feet long, irregular but maybe averaging 8-10 inches in diameter, and it stretches. Inside are a bunch of wooden blocks connected end to end with some stretchy and compressible pieces of foam rubber. A few blocks are as much as six inches long, most are less than inch long. The connecting pieces of foam are all less than an inch long. There’s one big block at one end. The tube is shaken around and tossed on the floor. How long is the tube? Every day the tube and it’s contents grow a little, imperceptible amounts except for random days where the growth is measurable, but the cumulative growth of all the blocks and all the foam is never more than 1/2 inch. How do you tell from the varying length of the tube how long it is on any one day, or if the cumulative growth reaches 1/2 inch in any one day?
The “high frequency growth measurements” reference from the article already cited:
The figure showing sample growth curves show what these micro spurts look like: periods of no growth sometimes as long as 28 days long interspersed with priods of gradual growth and periods of steep growth over a few days.
Total growth measurement daily is possible to perform accurately, has been done, and documents growth often in excess of 0.3 cm in 24 hour periods and more than 1 cm in a 2 to 3 days.
So then, less than 1/2 inch in a 24 hour period.
Yes, in that study at least. It must be noted that Lampl’s study (full article behind wall), was restricted to infants. It found up to 2.5 cm in 3 day periods and up to 1.65 cm (0.64 inch) in 24 hour periods: