16 ms·

Half Your Brain Stands Guard When Sleeping in a New Place

501 points by stared 11y ago

gonchs 11y ago
As a nomad who has been living in over 30 Airbnb flats for 2 years, I had this feeling in the past but I don't feel this anymore. Any place I go to feels "normal" to me the minute I step inside.
stared 11y ago
And the paper: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)30174-9 http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)3...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Cyph0n 11y ago
Given that this behavior was studied decades ago, why has it taken so long to record the brain's activity when sleeping in a new place? Is neuroscience that new of a field such that relatively obvious findings are publishable in top journals? Or am I oversimplifying the results acquired in this study?
jdimov9 11y ago
Not my experience at all. In hotels I tend to sleep like a baby, often better than I do at home.
- azazqadir 11y ago
  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.
  - lucb1e 11y ago
    In response to both parents of this comment, my first reaction would be that "of course" it's personal: maybe your bed at home is not that great, or a neighbouring mine makes sounds that don't register consciously anymore but still keep you up. But then again, in my experience it is a personal thing beyond a person's environment. I know people of both kinds and the location does not seem to matter. It's often the case in non-exact science studies that the results are difficult to reproduce. Besides the obvious "they're not called exact", it's interesting. What is this caused by? Would, in this example, some people lack the 'feature' of sleeping with half a brain?
  - wojt_eu 11y ago
    Well I sleep great at hotels too but less so as a guest at someone's house. I suspect it's because I lock myself in a hotel room and can expect not to be disturbed. It becomes my private space.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  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.
  - arethuza 11y ago
    Like jdimov9 I find that new places seem to make me sleep more soundly. I did a fair amount of backpacking when I was younger (mostly in Scotland) which, almost by definition, includes sleeping in lots of different places - both in tents, bothies and sometimes bivouacs. I wonder if the association of being physically tired (carrying a pack all day up/down mountains) and new places caused an association with good sleep? One odd association that I have is the sound of rain on an umbrella makes me drowsy - I've spent a lot of time sleeping in tents listening to rain!
- agumonkey 11y ago
  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.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >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. That is because of the different "dust/allergen" load in the different places -- to the one in your room you have adjusted already since ages.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      'load' I don't know, but quality surely. Animals, materials, climate, cleaning level will probably change what lies around.
- Edd314159 11y ago
  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.
  - amelius 11y ago
    Yes, but if true, this finding could also invalidate other research related to sleep.
  - zamalek 11y ago
    > just sleep in a weird [...] place I find that changing my orientation on the bed results in a significant improvement. I suspect that it might have something to do with the location of the window.
    - shogun21 11y ago
      I don't know if there's research backing this up, but sleeping in a bed that isn't aligned with a wall is incredibly nerve-racking. I was moving furniture around late at night and decided to just go to sleep with my bed askew. Terrible night sleep.
  - abovemind 11y ago
    I've taken part in a number of sleep studies and I can say from experience that sleeping with electrodes strapped to your head does make it very difficult to get any sleep. The worst part was the feedback loop of feeling that I have to sleep, or else this study will be useless; then those feelings contributing to more sleeplessness.
    - DougWebb 11y ago
      I've done some sleep studies too, and had the opposite experience. I was suffering from sleep apnea, which makes it impossible to sleep well. The electrodes during the sleep study were weird, but for much of the night (especially after the first night of study) they were running a CPAP at various levels to determine what I needed to keep my airways open. I slept better than I had in months. I've been using the CPAP ever since, and now I sleep very well most of the time. I fall asleep in just a few minutes (used to lie awake for hours) I sleep all night through, and I often wake up a few minutes before my alarm goes off.
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  > 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.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > but rather how easy it was to wake them up. If this really happens, then I guess I'll need to switch to a nomadic lifestyle. It's impossible for me to wake in the morning at home (so I'm always late in the office), but I have no trouble getting up early when on delegation abroad, sleeping in a hotel...
    - sbarre 11y ago
      I used to have your problem, and switched to an alarm setup that uses a very small motion sensor attached to my pillow designed to wake me during a designated 30-minute window when it "feels" that I'm in the lightest sleep (based on movement etc). Speaking anecdotally, it works for me, and I wake up feeling more rested and less groggy. I use this one: https://hello.is/ https://hello.is/
      - piyush_soni 11y ago
        I've heard the Mi Band does exactly that (haven't tried myself).
        etatoby 11y ago
        It does and it's very good at it. I bought a Mi-band specifically as a vibration alarm clock, as it's cheaper than any other such thing on the market, it follows you around, being strapped to your wrist (so you can always feel the vibration when the time comes) and has this useful feature where it monitors your movements and tries to wake you up in your light sleep. If you have a regular weekly wakeup schedule you only need the app once, to program the band over Bluetooth, then you can just wear it as a night accessory and charge it every few months. I use it in combination with those yellow spongy ear plugs, to get a bit of silence (locking the door to my bedroom, so that any intruder would hopefully make enough noise to wake me up through the ear plugs) but I suppose there are many use cases.
- piyush_soni 11y ago
  Yeah, I guess in some weird way Hotels are different from a 'new (unpredictable) place' ...
- scrrr 11y ago
  Perhaps its the quality of your bed/mattress at home..
- tamana 11y ago
  Maybe you need a better mattress at home, or better better noise insulation
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Related personal story: I have severe obstructive sleep apena (OSA), and I went for several years before it was diagnosed. During this time, it was not unusual for me to get very little sleep many days in a row. 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. I wouldn't consider it sleeping just on one side of the brain, but there was definitely something different going on. I found that 2-4 hours of that would help my overall wakefulness. Fortunately I had my condition addressed, but it would have been interesting to see if over time I would have developed into a full sleep-wake state of consciousness.
- yitchelle 11y ago
  > 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.
  - cableshaft 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure I have sleep apnea as well, and I've done something similar. I will often let my right eye stay closed while I'm getting ready for work, or going places that aren't work, and that seems to satisfy part of my brain that demands sleep otherwise. It actually takes some effort to keep my left eye closed, but for some reason its super easy to keep my right eye closed and takes pretty much no effort at all. So it might be a biological thing. I also struggled to keep my left eye open enough to put contacts in it back when I bothered using contacts.
    - solipsism 11y ago
      This is amazing. My initial response to this was, "That's weird, I haven't experienced that." But, thinking back to being a teenager and getting little sleep because I was up on the internet all night, I remember taking a shower and getting ready in a state of half-consciousness.. and I remember closing one eye.
eva1984 11y ago
For me it is true, at least for the first 2 days. I was thinking it is because I was excited
blowski 11y ago
I'd like to know who funded the research. The Economist also reported it, and explicitly made the point that a hotel chain can use this in their marketing. Where we normally think of unique as being a good thing, this promotes consistency, so it's better to always stay in the same hotel chain instead of using Airbnb or whoever is cheapest on hotels.com.
- arethuza 11y ago
  The funding information is in the paper: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2816%2930174-9 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)."
- nmjohn 11y ago
  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)30174-9 http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)3...
kevindeasis 11y ago
Every time I sleep in a new place I've always wondered why I can't sleep more than 5 hours. However, when I'm sleeping in Inn, Hotels, etc. I can sleep comfortably. I wonder what the reasoning might be for those situations
- christophilus 11y ago
  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.
  - kevindeasis 11y ago
    Interesting, that's a good thought
kinai 11y ago
@hotelpeople A hotel is a safe environment and probably is usually associated with positive experiences. No wonder you sleep better there ;) I am the same
- hrktb 11y ago
  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.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    >An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people [...] has full access to the door key // Do you normally sleep in an especially secure room? There seems as much likelihood that a hotel staff member would "break" in to my hotel room as someone would break in to my home. It's marginally easier for staff but then they stand to lose their livelihood, are much more likely to be caught, et cetera. Do you leave a door propped against the door handle, or a handle alarm, or anything, to mitigate your feelings of exposure?
    - hrktb 11y ago
      I feel it might be different depending on where you live, but in Japan/France I always have a inside lock that prevents someone to unlock the door from the outside. In Japan it was a door chain, in France you leave the key in the door and it blocks external keying. Also you'll have to pass the building gates before reaching an appartment. It's not infailable, but it's significantly more protected than any standard hotel room. More than anything I remember unintentionally screwing hotel keys by having them with other devices, and the hotel front would reprint them pretty easily without asking anything more than the room number and the registered name.
      - 11y ago
sanatgersappa 11y ago
but what if you have only half a brain to begin with?
shepik 11y ago
But the human brain was shaped during a time when nights were dark and full of terrors, Rattenborg says. Lol, Game of thrones quote.
fareesh 11y ago
Can confirm anecdotally that this is true for me - although this seems to be specific to cases where it's somebody's home and not a hotel room.
polvs 11y ago
Other interesting brain tricks, illusions and biases: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-information-graphics-reveal-your-brains-blind-spots https://www.propublica.org/article/how-information-graphics-...
- metasean 11y ago
  Completely off-topic! Should be submitted as it's own article.
spoiledtechie 11y ago
If anyone has a baby, I feel this is what its like having a new born at your home for the first year. I slept HARD before I have ever had kids, but for some reason, that first year, I slept very lightly and would wake up to a cry.
- Smircio- 11y ago
  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.
  - tamana 11y ago
    So you have secondary monitoring to verify that you wake up "without fail"?
- txutxu 11y ago
  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.
- CodeCube 11y ago
  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 :)
morgante 11y ago
Like many others in this thread, I sleep very well in hotels. Usually better than at home. My best sleep comes when I'm camping though. This is definitely not a comfortable or familiar environment, but I still sleep very well and feel refreshed in the morning. That being said, I usually sleep terribly in friends' houses or AirBnBs.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Maybe because hotels are usually "standard" and therefore fall in the bucket of "sleep as usual" ?
  - MicroBerto 11y ago
    My theory is that hotels often have thick doors and very solid locks and deadbolts. Plus the added "security" of the front desk... Makes it feel more secure.
    - developer2 11y ago
      >> Plus the added "security" of the front desk... Makes it feel more secure. For me, there's also the fact that you are one unit out of very many within the hotel. Even if someone is going to be bold enough to break into a hotel room in the more "public environment", the odds are fairly low you'd be the victim from a pool of hundreds of rooms. Your stay is also brief, so you don't have a routine schedule a would-be criminal has time to study. Plus there's typically not going to be much worth stealing out of a hotel room anyway (wide screen TV, computers, etc). I've always felt fairly safe in large apartment/condo buildings. I've never lived on the ground floor, so it feels like the odds of someone entering the building (or climbing the outside), coming to my floor, and choosing my specific unit to break into are quite low. You're very unlikely to be targeted by outside strangers; and there is a much smaller pool of people who live in the building capable of targeting you. Three years ago I moved into an apartment with a street-level door. Basically a neighbourhood of townhouse-like buildings. It's been almost two years since I was burglarized while at work. I still don't sleep well anymore, with the ever-present feeling of dread that a nighttime home invasion is coming any day now. I can't leave the apartment for longer than 30 minutes at a time without expecting to come home to another completed burglary. I can't afford to move yet, but I can't wait for the day I go back to doubling my current rent to live in a higher class, 100+ dwelling building. I will probably never buy a house. As I get older and save for a down payment, I'm sure it will be for a condo. I don't care for condo associations with their politics and fees, and the fact you only own or semi-own a section of an entire building. But I would never feel safe in a house where I have only a single door sitting between myself and my things, and an entire city full of parasitic people.
linhchi 11y ago
True for me, also if sleeping w a new person. I sprung up from bed, said smth i couldnt remember, and just like that passed out again when a friend got in the room in my sleep. Weird.
ommunist 11y ago
Looks like we are not that far from the dolphins.
dschiptsov 11y ago
Oh, really? What if I am trekking in Nepal for 20 days, each time sleeping in a new place, at different altitude?
- castis 11y ago
  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.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    I sleep worse the first night. Then I sleep like a baby the rest of the trip. Because I'm worn out by the end of the day, and a bomb going off wouldn't wake me up.
Taylor_OD 11y ago
What about long term travelers? Do people who travel the world get "used" to this and adjust?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- tequila_shot 11y ago
  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.,
- Kluny 11y ago
  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.
- jzwinck 11y ago
  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.
randomgyatwork 11y ago
I can not sleep if there isn't a door that I can lock / control. Stranger around, ever worse. Probably same reason I can't fall asleep in a public place, like on the train etc.
robg 11y ago
Sasaki says that brain response is involuntary and there's nothing people can do to prevent it, even if they've just flown in for a big presentation the next morning. Really hope she was misquoted there and especially since it's not a quote. There's is no evidence or tests in this study to support this claim.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
How about taking sleep aid?
solipsism 11y ago
I think there may be some subtleties here. Like many others, I've experienced great sleep in hotel rooms, or as a guest in homes that set me up very comfortably. That said, I definitely have noticed I remember my dreams much more frequently if I'm not in my own bed. Whatever my subjective evaluation of the quality of the sleep, it seems like something different is going on in my brain when I'm in unfamiliar surroundings. Maybe the effect shown in this study explains that.
diegoloop 11y ago
Once I decided to turn around on my bed by sleeping by putting my head where I usually put my feet... That was one of the most awkward weake up and dreaming experience I've ever had
Jabbles 11y ago
Would anyone with deep statistical knowledge be able to comment on the validity of results based on an experiment involving 11 people? http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2054006051/2060445893/mmc1.pdf http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2054006051/2060445893/mmc...
- lisper 11y ago
  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.
  - Jabbles 11y ago
    None of that is relevant to this experiment or my comment. And I disagree that the number of subjects doesn't matter. It matters enormously, precisely because this is a biology experiment.
    - lotharbot 11y ago
      > "I disagree that the number of subjects doesn't matter." you're asking for people with deeper knowledge than you for their help, and then disagreeing with them? I get it -- you're skeptical because of sample size. But recall that "sample size" isn't necessarily the number of test subjects, but the number of measurements, as the comment about Mercury demonstrates. Moreover, a strong signal can be detected even from a small sample size; a coin flipping the same way 11 times in a row could be mere chance, but a roulette wheel hitting the same number 11 times in a row should not happen in the entire history of the universe by mere chance. It's not just the number of measurements, but the significance of each one, that matter for statistical confidence. Sure, you could get an even stronger signal with a larger sample size. But that doesn't mean "a study of 11 people" is necessarily insignificant or too small of a sample. It might be too small, or it might be enough to have a very high degree of certainty.
nicwolff 11y ago
This is a familiar feeling to me as a sailor; when cruising, every place is new, and at anchor I'm never fully asleep the way I am on land. Any little sound, or the cessation of any regular sound I've gotten used to, and I'm up like a shot with the flashlight trying to identify it. Even the relatively slow rotation of the boat around the anchor as the wind shifts is enough to bring me awake thinking "what changed?"
- wierdaaron 11y ago
  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.
  - mercer 11y ago
    My grandfather often took the engine room night shift on 'mud barges'. He'd just sleep and any change in sound that might indicate an issue would wake him up instantly. He likes to joke that he got rich sleeping.
justifier 11y ago
Unfamiliar seems the wrong word I tell people you need a place you can trust Both wholly from a safety perspective to quelch this brain patrol But also to trust your environments' behaviour For instance, does your brain trust your phone on the night stand to leave your sleep uninterrupted? Or will it always be monitoring for familiar signals similarly, can you trust your hotel to have consistent environment, or did you request a wake up call that your brain will be looking out for?
joonap 11y ago
I tend to sleepwalk when sleeping in a new place for the first time. I wonder if this could be related to it.
rcthompson 11y ago
This seems to have potentially important implications for people who fly across the country the night before a big presentation. Maybe they should be leaving 24 hours earlier.
perseusprime11 11y ago
Great! Now I can tell my wife why I don't like to sleep at her parent's :)

501 points by stared 11y ago

As a nomad who has been living in over 30 Airbnb flats for 2 years, I had this feeling in the past but I don't feel this anymore. Any place I go to feels "normal" to me the minute I step inside.

stared 11y ago

And the paper: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)30174-9 http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)3...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Cyph0n 11y ago

Given that this behavior was studied decades ago, why has it taken so long to record the brain's activity when sleeping in a new place? Is neuroscience that new of a field such that relatively obvious findings are publishable in top journals? Or am I oversimplifying the results acquired in this study?

jdimov9 11y ago

Not my experience at all. In hotels I tend to sleep like a baby, often better than I do at home.

azazqadir 11y ago
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.
- lucb1e 11y ago
  In response to both parents of this comment, my first reaction would be that "of course" it's personal: maybe your bed at home is not that great, or a neighbouring mine makes sounds that don't register consciously anymore but still keep you up. But then again, in my experience it is a personal thing beyond a person's environment. I know people of both kinds and the location does not seem to matter. It's often the case in non-exact science studies that the results are difficult to reproduce. Besides the obvious "they're not called exact", it's interesting. What is this caused by? Would, in this example, some people lack the 'feature' of sleeping with half a brain?
- wojt_eu 11y ago
  Well I sleep great at hotels too but less so as a guest at someone's house. I suspect it's because I lock myself in a hotel room and can expect not to be disturbed. It becomes my private space.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
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.
- arethuza 11y ago
  Like jdimov9 I find that new places seem to make me sleep more soundly. I did a fair amount of backpacking when I was younger (mostly in Scotland) which, almost by definition, includes sleeping in lots of different places - both in tents, bothies and sometimes bivouacs. I wonder if the association of being physically tired (carrying a pack all day up/down mountains) and new places caused an association with good sleep? One odd association that I have is the sound of rain on an umbrella makes me drowsy - I've spent a lot of time sleeping in tents listening to rain!
agumonkey 11y ago
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.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >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. That is because of the different "dust/allergen" load in the different places -- to the one in your room you have adjusted already since ages.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    'load' I don't know, but quality surely. Animals, materials, climate, cleaning level will probably change what lies around.
Edd314159 11y ago
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.
- amelius 11y ago
  Yes, but if true, this finding could also invalidate other research related to sleep.
- zamalek 11y ago
  > just sleep in a weird [...] place I find that changing my orientation on the bed results in a significant improvement. I suspect that it might have something to do with the location of the window.
  - shogun21 11y ago
    I don't know if there's research backing this up, but sleeping in a bed that isn't aligned with a wall is incredibly nerve-racking. I was moving furniture around late at night and decided to just go to sleep with my bed askew. Terrible night sleep.
- abovemind 11y ago
  I've taken part in a number of sleep studies and I can say from experience that sleeping with electrodes strapped to your head does make it very difficult to get any sleep. The worst part was the feedback loop of feeling that I have to sleep, or else this study will be useless; then those feelings contributing to more sleeplessness.
  - DougWebb 11y ago
    I've done some sleep studies too, and had the opposite experience. I was suffering from sleep apnea, which makes it impossible to sleep well. The electrodes during the sleep study were weird, but for much of the night (especially after the first night of study) they were running a CPAP at various levels to determine what I needed to keep my airways open. I slept better than I had in months. I've been using the CPAP ever since, and now I sleep very well most of the time. I fall asleep in just a few minutes (used to lie awake for hours) I sleep all night through, and I often wake up a few minutes before my alarm goes off.
dzhiurgis 11y ago
> 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.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > but rather how easy it was to wake them up. If this really happens, then I guess I'll need to switch to a nomadic lifestyle. It's impossible for me to wake in the morning at home (so I'm always late in the office), but I have no trouble getting up early when on delegation abroad, sleeping in a hotel...
  - sbarre 11y ago
    I used to have your problem, and switched to an alarm setup that uses a very small motion sensor attached to my pillow designed to wake me during a designated 30-minute window when it "feels" that I'm in the lightest sleep (based on movement etc). Speaking anecdotally, it works for me, and I wake up feeling more rested and less groggy. I use this one: https://hello.is/ https://hello.is/
    - piyush_soni 11y ago
      I've heard the Mi Band does exactly that (haven't tried myself).
      - etatoby 11y ago
        It does and it's very good at it. I bought a Mi-band specifically as a vibration alarm clock, as it's cheaper than any other such thing on the market, it follows you around, being strapped to your wrist (so you can always feel the vibration when the time comes) and has this useful feature where it monitors your movements and tries to wake you up in your light sleep. If you have a regular weekly wakeup schedule you only need the app once, to program the band over Bluetooth, then you can just wear it as a night accessory and charge it every few months. I use it in combination with those yellow spongy ear plugs, to get a bit of silence (locking the door to my bedroom, so that any intruder would hopefully make enough noise to wake me up through the ear plugs) but I suppose there are many use cases.
piyush_soni 11y ago
Yeah, I guess in some weird way Hotels are different from a 'new (unpredictable) place' ...
scrrr 11y ago
Perhaps its the quality of your bed/mattress at home..
tamana 11y ago
Maybe you need a better mattress at home, or better better noise insulation

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Related personal story: I have severe obstructive sleep apena (OSA), and I went for several years before it was diagnosed. During this time, it was not unusual for me to get very little sleep many days in a row. 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. I wouldn't consider it sleeping just on one side of the brain, but there was definitely something different going on. I found that 2-4 hours of that would help my overall wakefulness. Fortunately I had my condition addressed, but it would have been interesting to see if over time I would have developed into a full sleep-wake state of consciousness.

yitchelle 11y ago
> 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.
- cableshaft 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure I have sleep apnea as well, and I've done something similar. I will often let my right eye stay closed while I'm getting ready for work, or going places that aren't work, and that seems to satisfy part of my brain that demands sleep otherwise. It actually takes some effort to keep my left eye closed, but for some reason its super easy to keep my right eye closed and takes pretty much no effort at all. So it might be a biological thing. I also struggled to keep my left eye open enough to put contacts in it back when I bothered using contacts.
  - solipsism 11y ago
    This is amazing. My initial response to this was, "That's weird, I haven't experienced that." But, thinking back to being a teenager and getting little sleep because I was up on the internet all night, I remember taking a shower and getting ready in a state of half-consciousness.. and I remember closing one eye.

eva1984 11y ago

For me it is true, at least for the first 2 days. I was thinking it is because I was excited

blowski 11y ago

I'd like to know who funded the research. The Economist also reported it, and explicitly made the point that a hotel chain can use this in their marketing. Where we normally think of unique as being a good thing, this promotes consistency, so it's better to always stay in the same hotel chain instead of using Airbnb or whoever is cheapest on hotels.com.

arethuza 11y ago
The funding information is in the paper: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2816%2930174-9 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)."
nmjohn 11y ago
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)30174-9 http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)3...

kevindeasis 11y ago

Every time I sleep in a new place I've always wondered why I can't sleep more than 5 hours. However, when I'm sleeping in Inn, Hotels, etc. I can sleep comfortably. I wonder what the reasoning might be for those situations

christophilus 11y ago
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.
- kevindeasis 11y ago
  Interesting, that's a good thought

kinai 11y ago

@hotelpeople A hotel is a safe environment and probably is usually associated with positive experiences. No wonder you sleep better there ;) I am the same

hrktb 11y ago
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.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  >An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people [...] has full access to the door key // Do you normally sleep in an especially secure room? There seems as much likelihood that a hotel staff member would "break" in to my hotel room as someone would break in to my home. It's marginally easier for staff but then they stand to lose their livelihood, are much more likely to be caught, et cetera. Do you leave a door propped against the door handle, or a handle alarm, or anything, to mitigate your feelings of exposure?
  - hrktb 11y ago
    I feel it might be different depending on where you live, but in Japan/France I always have a inside lock that prevents someone to unlock the door from the outside. In Japan it was a door chain, in France you leave the key in the door and it blocks external keying. Also you'll have to pass the building gates before reaching an appartment. It's not infailable, but it's significantly more protected than any standard hotel room. More than anything I remember unintentionally screwing hotel keys by having them with other devices, and the hotel front would reprint them pretty easily without asking anything more than the room number and the registered name.
    - 11y ago

sanatgersappa 11y ago

but what if you have only half a brain to begin with?

shepik 11y ago

But the human brain was shaped during a time when nights were dark and full of terrors, Rattenborg says. Lol, Game of thrones quote.

fareesh 11y ago

Can confirm anecdotally that this is true for me - although this seems to be specific to cases where it's somebody's home and not a hotel room.

polvs 11y ago

Other interesting brain tricks, illusions and biases: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-information-graphics-reveal-your-brains-blind-spots https://www.propublica.org/article/how-information-graphics-...

metasean 11y ago
Completely off-topic! Should be submitted as it's own article.

spoiledtechie 11y ago

If anyone has a baby, I feel this is what its like having a new born at your home for the first year. I slept HARD before I have ever had kids, but for some reason, that first year, I slept very lightly and would wake up to a cry.

Smircio- 11y ago
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.
- tamana 11y ago
  So you have secondary monitoring to verify that you wake up "without fail"?
txutxu 11y ago
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.
CodeCube 11y ago
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 :)

morgante 11y ago

Like many others in this thread, I sleep very well in hotels. Usually better than at home. My best sleep comes when I'm camping though. This is definitely not a comfortable or familiar environment, but I still sleep very well and feel refreshed in the morning. That being said, I usually sleep terribly in friends' houses or AirBnBs.

ekianjo 11y ago
Maybe because hotels are usually "standard" and therefore fall in the bucket of "sleep as usual" ?
- MicroBerto 11y ago
  My theory is that hotels often have thick doors and very solid locks and deadbolts. Plus the added "security" of the front desk... Makes it feel more secure.
  - developer2 11y ago
    >> Plus the added "security" of the front desk... Makes it feel more secure. For me, there's also the fact that you are one unit out of very many within the hotel. Even if someone is going to be bold enough to break into a hotel room in the more "public environment", the odds are fairly low you'd be the victim from a pool of hundreds of rooms. Your stay is also brief, so you don't have a routine schedule a would-be criminal has time to study. Plus there's typically not going to be much worth stealing out of a hotel room anyway (wide screen TV, computers, etc). I've always felt fairly safe in large apartment/condo buildings. I've never lived on the ground floor, so it feels like the odds of someone entering the building (or climbing the outside), coming to my floor, and choosing my specific unit to break into are quite low. You're very unlikely to be targeted by outside strangers; and there is a much smaller pool of people who live in the building capable of targeting you. Three years ago I moved into an apartment with a street-level door. Basically a neighbourhood of townhouse-like buildings. It's been almost two years since I was burglarized while at work. I still don't sleep well anymore, with the ever-present feeling of dread that a nighttime home invasion is coming any day now. I can't leave the apartment for longer than 30 minutes at a time without expecting to come home to another completed burglary. I can't afford to move yet, but I can't wait for the day I go back to doubling my current rent to live in a higher class, 100+ dwelling building. I will probably never buy a house. As I get older and save for a down payment, I'm sure it will be for a condo. I don't care for condo associations with their politics and fees, and the fact you only own or semi-own a section of an entire building. But I would never feel safe in a house where I have only a single door sitting between myself and my things, and an entire city full of parasitic people.

linhchi 11y ago

True for me, also if sleeping w a new person. I sprung up from bed, said smth i couldnt remember, and just like that passed out again when a friend got in the room in my sleep. Weird.

ommunist 11y ago

Looks like we are not that far from the dolphins.

dschiptsov 11y ago

Oh, really? What if I am trekking in Nepal for 20 days, each time sleeping in a new place, at different altitude?

castis 11y ago
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.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  I sleep worse the first night. Then I sleep like a baby the rest of the trip. Because I'm worn out by the end of the day, and a bomb going off wouldn't wake me up.

Taylor_OD 11y ago

What about long term travelers? Do people who travel the world get "used" to this and adjust?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tequila_shot 11y ago
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.,
Kluny 11y ago
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.
jzwinck 11y ago
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.

randomgyatwork 11y ago

I can not sleep if there isn't a door that I can lock / control. Stranger around, ever worse. Probably same reason I can't fall asleep in a public place, like on the train etc.

robg 11y ago

Sasaki says that brain response is involuntary and there's nothing people can do to prevent it, even if they've just flown in for a big presentation the next morning. Really hope she was misquoted there and especially since it's not a quote. There's is no evidence or tests in this study to support this claim.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

How about taking sleep aid?

solipsism 11y ago

I think there may be some subtleties here. Like many others, I've experienced great sleep in hotel rooms, or as a guest in homes that set me up very comfortably. That said, I definitely have noticed I remember my dreams much more frequently if I'm not in my own bed. Whatever my subjective evaluation of the quality of the sleep, it seems like something different is going on in my brain when I'm in unfamiliar surroundings. Maybe the effect shown in this study explains that.

diegoloop 11y ago

Once I decided to turn around on my bed by sleeping by putting my head where I usually put my feet... That was one of the most awkward weake up and dreaming experience I've ever had

Jabbles 11y ago

Would anyone with deep statistical knowledge be able to comment on the validity of results based on an experiment involving 11 people? http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2054006051/2060445893/mmc1.pdf http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2054006051/2060445893/mmc...

lisper 11y ago
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.
- Jabbles 11y ago
  None of that is relevant to this experiment or my comment. And I disagree that the number of subjects doesn't matter. It matters enormously, precisely because this is a biology experiment.
  - lotharbot 11y ago
    > "I disagree that the number of subjects doesn't matter." you're asking for people with deeper knowledge than you for their help, and then disagreeing with them? I get it -- you're skeptical because of sample size. But recall that "sample size" isn't necessarily the number of test subjects, but the number of measurements, as the comment about Mercury demonstrates. Moreover, a strong signal can be detected even from a small sample size; a coin flipping the same way 11 times in a row could be mere chance, but a roulette wheel hitting the same number 11 times in a row should not happen in the entire history of the universe by mere chance. It's not just the number of measurements, but the significance of each one, that matter for statistical confidence. Sure, you could get an even stronger signal with a larger sample size. But that doesn't mean "a study of 11 people" is necessarily insignificant or too small of a sample. It might be too small, or it might be enough to have a very high degree of certainty.

nicwolff 11y ago

This is a familiar feeling to me as a sailor; when cruising, every place is new, and at anchor I'm never fully asleep the way I am on land. Any little sound, or the cessation of any regular sound I've gotten used to, and I'm up like a shot with the flashlight trying to identify it. Even the relatively slow rotation of the boat around the anchor as the wind shifts is enough to bring me awake thinking "what changed?"

wierdaaron 11y ago
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.
- mercer 11y ago
  My grandfather often took the engine room night shift on 'mud barges'. He'd just sleep and any change in sound that might indicate an issue would wake him up instantly. He likes to joke that he got rich sleeping.

justifier 11y ago

Unfamiliar seems the wrong word I tell people you need a place you can trust Both wholly from a safety perspective to quelch this brain patrol But also to trust your environments' behaviour For instance, does your brain trust your phone on the night stand to leave your sleep uninterrupted? Or will it always be monitoring for familiar signals similarly, can you trust your hotel to have consistent environment, or did you request a wake up call that your brain will be looking out for?

joonap 11y ago

I tend to sleepwalk when sleeping in a new place for the first time. I wonder if this could be related to it.

rcthompson 11y ago

This seems to have potentially important implications for people who fly across the country the night before a big presentation. Maybe they should be leaving 24 hours earlier.

perseusprime11 11y ago

Great! Now I can tell my wife why I don't like to sleep at her parent's :)