Half Your Brain Stands Guard When Sleeping in a New Place

It sounds like the brain will only sleep as deeply as it's safe to. That lines up more with the results in the article than the notion that it's directly about how many times you've been in that location before. When you're in charge of a boat, you have to be alert for any danger. When you're a fireman on duty, you have to be ready to hop into your pants. When you're in a strange sleep lab and covered in biosensors, you're going to be creeped out and on-edge.

A baby is for life but maybe when it's new and our responsibility, then our brain changes or starts (or does not turn off) certain mechanisms too.

I was thinking more about "my room", I've moved because job reasons 3 times in my life, and I always start renting a room in the new place.

First day is always the same, clean up (just in case) and try to make it feel like my room, personally.

Always sleep well, but with the time, sleep better when certain "things" are fixed to my taste in the room.

I think this maybe even hard-coded in our ADN. Because to be here, our ancestors did search and modify many caves.

haha ... I have a similar story. One example, my mother-in-law was living with us at the time and she offered to take the baby for a night to give us a night's rest. Her room was downstairs, ours was upstairs. First time the baby woke up (as usual), my eyes popped open the moment her cries rang through the house, after about 20 seconds she hadn't stopped or otherwise sounded like she got picked up, I ran downstairs and had her in my arms before my mother-in-law even woke up (the bassinet was literally next to her bed).

Aside from that, before and after they've grown up, I'm a pretty heavy sleeper :)

I sleep walked with our first baby. I don't sleep walk normally and as far as I know this was the first only time period when I did. Apparently my wife would tell me to get the baby and I would do it in my sleep with absolutely no recollection after of having done so.

Oh totally. My wife seems immune to his stirrings on the baby monitor. Without fail, no matter the time of night, I will wake up even if he silently stands up in the crib. Yhe only time I sleep hard now is when someone else is watching him.

I don't have a child, but this happened after buying a house, and living alone. I went from dead to the world sleep, to hearing everything happening in the house. Even ten years later, I still sleep significantly lighter.

According to my dad it doesn't go away.

When I got old enough to go out places with my friends and come home later at night (past 11, for example) my dad said it took a couple years before he could fall asleep without hearing the garage door open, and he's a deep sleeper who's never had any issues sleeping anywhere.

We've joked he's going to miss his own funeral because he's slept in.

Maybe because hotels are usually "standard" and therefore fall in the bucket of "sleep as usual" ?

On the other hand, I very much identified with the article. For the first night or so in a new place, I commonly don't sleep well even if there aren't obvious travel-related factors (jet lag, shifted sleep hours, etc.) I adjust pretty quickly for the most part, but it commonly takes a day or two.

I always sleep badly the first night camping. After that I sleep really well, and it doesn't matter if the tent is in a different location or the weather changes or whatever.

I have similar great sleep when camping. There are lot of factors that may be involved.

Exercise. When camping, I'm typically much more active during the day than my usual routine. This is especially true if I'm on a hiking trip, walking several miles each day. But even if we've setup a stationary camp, all of the little activities add up to a lot of movement.

Lack of distractions/schedule. When camping, I typically just go to bed when I get tired, which is usually soon after it gets dark, and I wake up naturally, not to an alarm clock, typically with the sun.

Cool, dark, and quiet. It's usually cool at night, very dark, and relatively quiet. That contributes to great sleep regardless of the environment.

I've also had some of my worst sleep when camping. A couple of times when it was way, way colder than expected. It's hard to sleep when you're shivering. But mostly the problem is when it's too hot. I sleep terribly when it's warm, and I think that's true for many people.

I also think it matters whether you're camping solo or in a group. When you're with a group, I think you instinctively feel safer, but I've had some bad nights camping solo. One night especially sticks out in my mind. I'd seen a black bear and a cub earlier in the day, across a stream. They were a safe distance away and probably didn't care about me at all. But all night, whenever I heard a noise, I'd spring up and question for the thousandth time if I hung my food far enough away. It's amazing how large and menacing an opossum or deer can sound walking through the underbrush. But the next night when I met up with my companions, I had the best sleep ever. :)

Perhaps you think you sleep better camping because you are usually so tuckered out from walking around in the outdoors.

Re: Camping.

Evolution? Genuine question.

Re: Camping

Maybe more oxygen rich environment?

For me, camping usually meant being somewhere over 10,000ft AMSL. My altitude sickness manifests as insomnia. So, my first night was always a -- nearly literal -- nightmare.

My first night in any hotel is almost always terrible. But on subsequent nights I sleep like a baby.

> As a coping mechanism, I learned somewhat to "half-sleep", where I would close one eye and relax that side while continuing to do things using the other eye.

That is intriguing. Can you share some techniques on doing this? If I try to close one eye only, my brain would be full engage just to keep the one eye closed.

I find myself doing that when very tired or under significant social stress, but you're right, the structure of the brain can't support that interpretation directly.

I imagine that your brain could easily be experiencing it as a cue for self-trained rest states, so I don't want to misunderstand your experience as identical to my own, especially if you're doing it for 2-4 hours a stretch. My own interpretation of what is going on when I do it has been that it simply reduces (a) cognitive load (maybe) and (b) unnoticed eyestrain (more likely) by eliminating any attempt at depth perception.

This puts my morning, one-eyed phone gazing in context. It definitely feels harder to get that right eye open for the first 1-2 minutes of being awake when I've been roused by my alarm. When I've had a more natural waking, I definitely don't rely on this crutch nearly as often.

Is this a cultural difference ?

An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people (the hotel staff + anyone caring to social engineer) has full access to the door key and I rely on an unfamiliar security system to warn me when things go awry (fire, blackout, water leak etc)

The only places I would feel less safe would be a night train or a taxi in the middle of nowhere.

Agreed. The hotels I stay in are generally very similar in terms of room-structure, amenities, etc. I suspect that my subconscious doesn't register a new hotel room as a new experience, but rather as an old, familiar, and safe one.

I bet that someone's very first experience sleeping in a hotel would yield a poorer quality than their 100th one.

The funding information is in the paper:

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2816...

"This work was supported by grants to T.W. and Y.S. (NIH R01MH091801, R01EY019466, and NSF BCS 1539717). This work also involved the use of instrumentation supported by the NCRR Shared Instrumentation Grant Program and High-End Instrumentation Grant Program (specifically, grant numbers S10RR014978, S10RR021110, and S10RR023401)."

Thankfully you can usually find this info:

> This work was supported by grants to T.W. and Y.S. (NIH R01MH091801, R01EY019466, and NSF BCS 1539717). This work also involved the use of instrumentation supported by the NCRR Shared Instrumentation Grant Program and High-End Instrumentation Grant Program (specifically, grant numbers S10RR014978, S10RR021110, and S10RR023401). This research was carried out in part at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital, using resources provided by the Center for Functional Neuroimaging Technologies, NCRR P41RR14075. Part of this research was also conducted using computational resources and services at the Center for Computation and Visualization, Brown University. [0]

[0]: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)3...

I suspect that your mind doesn't register a new hotel room as a brand new experience, but rather as a familiar one. I bet the very first time someone sleeps in a hotel, their sleep quality is inferior to the 100th time, say. Even though not all hotel rooms are identical, the ones I generally stay in are similar enough that I doubt I subconsciously experience them as a strange new place.

As a consultant in a big 4, I travelled 250+ days last year.

And I always slept like a baby. In flights, in hotels etc.,

Either we adjust or we are self selected in the first place. Maybe both.

Taking many short flights for work practically forced me to learn to sleep sitting up even during the day if I was not fully rested. Many of my colleagues and frequently flying friends can do it too. But some people seem unable to do it. I found that once I understood I could do it, there was no further practice needed. Like riding a bicycle that half your friends always fall off.

In the past year I have slept in approximately 200 different beds. About once a month I do wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that something is very wrong. Sometimes I don't understand why there is no wall next to the bed, or why there is a window there. This feeling is acutely unpleasant, even alarming. But it goes away and I go back to sleep. It doesn't seem to drag my sleep quality down.

I spent the past month travelling, sleeping someplace new almost every night. Did not get used to it. I had maybe 4 hours of sleep per night. Still, I was awake during the day and I had more functional hours to use for exploring, so it didn't bother me. Last night sleeping in my own bed was the first time in a very long time that I've had a full 8, but I don't notice any cognitive difference.

The number of subjects doesn't really matter all that much. You can get a statistically significant result with a single subject under the right circumstances. This doesn't happen much in biology and the social sciences, but it happens all the time in physics. The best example is how the precession of Mercury (one "test subject") confirmed general relativity.

What matters is how likely it was that the result you got simply arose by chance. This can only be measured relative to some a priori probabilistic model. If the odds of the result having arisen by chance (the "null hypothesis") is low, then you can confidently "reject the null hypothesis" and conclude that something else must have happened. Of course, the statistics can't tell you what that "something else" was. That requires an explanatory theory.

The problem is that the probabilistic model is also kind of arbitrary. For example, suppose you flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads every time. That odds of that happening by chance are, naively, one in 2^10. But that is only true if you only do the experiment once. If you have, say, 2^8 people flipping coins, then the odds of someone seeing 10 heads in a row is one in four. Parapsychology experiments and stock-trading schemes often fall into this trap.

This is a general problem with "big data". The more data you have, the more likely you are to see things happen by pure chance that are intuitively unlikely.

It's opposite for me. I have hard time sleeping at someone else's house. I have to lay down for hours before I get to sleep. I get best sleep in my own room.

It probably varies by experience. I know I used to have trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places, but then there was a period of my life where I was moving, traveling, and visiting people a lot, and sleeping in a lot of guest beds or couches. It got a lot easier for me to sleep in new places after that.

Sometimes change triggers benefits like these. But I also know that I'm way more subject to allergic reactions when not in my bed. No matter how dusty or dirty is my room, it's always worse at someone else's place.

Perhaps, then, this isn't measuring sleep in any different place (a hotel room, a friend's house), just sleep in a weird, inhospitable place like a lab with weird stuff strapped to your cranium to measure your brain activity.

> sleep like a baby

In which case you confirm research findings, as babies tend to sleep light, wake up every few hours, then cry.

In all seriousness I doubt you can self asses this. Maybe I've miss-skimmed, but nothing in the article mentions about how participants felt, but rather how easy it was to wake them up.

Yeah, I guess in some weird way Hotels are different from a 'new (unpredictable) place' ...

Perhaps its the quality of your bed/mattress at home..

Maybe you need a better mattress at home, or better better noise insulation

I would imagine that someone trekking through Nepal has experience with backpacking and finding themselves in a new place in the outdoors. A few people in this thread that have mentioned camping say they sleep better while camping. No idea if thats because they go to the same place to camp every time though.

Completely off-topic!

Should be submitted as it's own article.