There’s A Scientific Reason Why We Have Problems Sleeping In A New Place
Many people have problems sleeping in unfamiliar surroundings, and there’s a scientific reason for this. In what is dubbed the “first-night effect,” half our brain stays awake, anticipating trouble from predators.
Many of us have experienced a bad night on the first night away on vacation or a business trip. The hotel bed might be exquisitely comfortable, but we still sleep poorly.
According to a report published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology, our brains are similar in some ways to those of birds and sea mammals, which often put half their brain to sleep while the other half keeps guard.
According to Yuka Sasaki, an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, the left side of our brains seems to be more awake than the right when sleeping in unfamiliar surroundings. This is why we feel so tired when waking up in the morning.
Reportedly sleep researchers discovered this “first-night effect” several years ago when studying test subjects in sleep labs. They concluded that during the first night in their lab, people slept so poorly the researchers didn’t take any of that night’s data into account.
Can’t sleep 1st night in a hotel? Don’t blame the lumpy mattress – it’s because half your brain is still awake https://t.co/ePjWKdLRyR
— The Sleep Council (@TheSleepCouncil) April 22, 2016
According to CBS News, Sasaki wanted to investigate this phenomenon further and wanted to know what is going on in the brain during that first night. She and a team of researchers ran a sleep experiment with 35 Brown University students, studying their brain wave patterns.
Reportedly, the research team measured what is called slow-wave activity, which appears in the brain during deep sleep. According to their findings, during the first night in the lab, slow wave activity in the students’ brains was greater in certain areas of the right hemisphere than it was in the corresponding areas of the left. However, they also found that after the first night in the lab, the difference went away and they had no problems sleeping.
In order to confirm that the left side of the brain was really more alert, the research team ran two other experiments. They first played a repeated standard tone to the sleeping students, followed by a single tone of a different pitch.
If playing the tone to someone who is awake, or sleeping lightly, the brain responds to what is dubbed this “deviant tone.” In the case of the experiment, the students’ brains did respond to the tone, but only in the left hemisphere.
Following this experiment the researchers played a sound which was loud enough to wake anyone who is sleeping lightly. They found the students in the experiment woke up faster when that sound was playing into their right ear, which is connected to the left side of their brain.
https://t.co/DmwuA9Uk8C Top News on Half Of Brain Keeps Awake During Sleep In New Places: Study https://t.co/mu8Oz4kJ0E
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Niels Rattenborg, leader of the avian sleep group at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, says this ability to rest only one side of the brain has never been demonstrated in humans before, but that many animals can do this.
“We’ve known for quite a while that some marine mammals like dolphins and some of the seals as well as many birds can sleep with one half of the brain at a time.”
Reportedly, Rattenborg ran an experiment some years ago using ducks as this subjects, that suggested at least one way this phenomenon provided an evolutionary advantage. Reportedly, he put several ducks in a row (yes, really) and watched them sleep.
What he found in his experiment was that ducks with a bird on either side of them obviously felt secure, as they put their entire brain to sleep and kept both their eyes closed. However, he noted the ducks at the end of the row tended to sleep with one half of the brain awake at a time, saying, “And when they did that they directed the open eye away from the other birds, as if they were looking for approaching predators.”
According to Rattenborg, in our case predators aren’t usually a big problem, but he figures the human brain was shaped during those times when the nights were dark and full of terrors.
“When we’re sleeping in a new environment and we don’t know how many predators are around, it would make sense to keep half the brain more alert and more responsive to bumps in the night.”
Sasaki added that using what she dubs the “night watch” to protect ourselves is involuntary in humans and regrettably there’s pretty much nothing we can do to prevent having problems sleeping in a new place on the first night. It’s all part of the human experience.
[Photo via Flickr by Kelsey | Cropped and Resized | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]
