Have trouble sleeping on your first night in a new place?
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“We know that marine animals and some birds show unihemispheric sleep, one [brain hemisphere] awake and the other asleep”, said coauthor Yuka Sasaki of Brown University, in a press statement.
They consistently found that on the first night in the lab, a particular network in the left hemisphere remained more active than in the right hemisphere, specifically during a deep sleep phase known as “slow-wave” sleep.
Do you feel less well-rested after crashing at a friend’s place?
Slow wave sleep, rather than REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, was the main parameter that the team focused on because it acts as a direct measurement of the depth of an individual’s sleep. Because even if you’re sprawled out on a king sized bed, fitted out with Egyptian cotton sheets and the world’s comfiest matress, you spend the entire night tossing and turning, drifting in and out of fitful sleep, and end up waking up feeling much worse than you would if you’d just stayed at home.
Scientists explain what underlies the “first-night effect”, phenomenon that poses an inconvenience to business travellers and sleep researchers. So, if you’re planning a trip, your best bet may be to schedule your most demanding activities after the first day, once you’ve gotten the chance to sleep with your whole brain.
Some birds have been found to literally sleep with one eye open and one side of the brain awake when they’re in a unsafe setting, and some marine mammals have similar abilities, the authors note.
One of the primary measures of the FNE is the length of time an individual takes to get to sleep; this was shown to be dependent on the degree of asymmetry between the hemispheres. It turns out, human brains are not the first to have developed such a habit. In other words, their left brains remained half awake throughout the night.
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A new study has suggested that the reason we fail to sleep well in new places is down to a residual survival instinct.
