
Half Your Brain Stands Guard When Sleeping in a New Place - stared
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/21/474691141/half-your-brain-stands-guard-when-sleeping-in-a-new-place
======
nicwolff
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
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
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.

------
spoiledtechie
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.

~~~
overcast
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.

~~~
xeromal
I struggled with sleeping when I moved to a new state years ago. I still am a
little anxious when I sleep and I have my sleep regiment down to the minute in
order to get a solid night's rest.

I think sleep has some innocence until you lose it and afterward it changes
permanently. It has in my life so far.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _I think sleep has some innocence until you lose it and afterward it changes
> permanently._

Yeah, it's called 'getting older'.

~~~
mirimir
I'm older than many here, I suspect. And I use modafinil and coffee. But if
I'm tired enough, and I know that I have enough slack, I have no problem
sleeping. Indeed, if it's quiet enough, I can still sleep for 12 hours or
whatever.

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

~~~
MicroBerto
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
>> 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.

~~~
solipsism
Shouldn't an entire suburb full of houses identical to your own yield the same
peace of mind? Do you think being separated by walls instead of air makes a
difference mentally?

~~~
pyre
When you're on the ground floor you are more likely to be targeted than when
you're on the 40th floor.

~~~
morgante
Oh no! You might get "targeted." How scary!

This thread has been really illuminating for me. I didn't realize so many
people were so afraid of "criminals" that they can't even get good sleep.

~~~
developer2
Have you ever been burglarized by someone unknown and uncaught? The violation
is extremely personal. These people watch you for days or weeks to ensure they
know your routine. They know when you leave for work, and when you come home.
They know you don't work Fridays.

It could be a neighbour you've said hello to dozens of times, watching from
their window. It could be a stranger who finds it worthwhile to sit in their
car watching your home. You'll never know.

Either way, they've invested time in observing you, and have specifically
chosen you as their target. Yes, it makes you "targeted". When you come home
to your back door broken open, and find $5000 worth of shit missing, and every
drawer in your home opened and sifted through? When you can't possibly even
know exactly what's missing. A month after the incident, you're still finding
new things that were taken from you.

It's not just about the stolen property. It's your entire personal space
ripped apart. It's a form of psychological rape. Hope you get to experience
that some day.

~~~
morgante
> It's a form of psychological rape. Hope you get to experience that some day.

Wow.

I can understand why you might feel emotional about a robbery. I imagine it's
very invasive.

Given that, I cannot imagine why you would wish it on someone else.

My point was that it's an irrational fear: you're likely not going to get
robbed and it's not worth spending a bunch of time worry about it.

~~~
developer2
>> you're likely not going to get robbed

You realize I posted as someone who _has_ been through that? "Likely not going
to get robbed" doesn't apply, as it's already happened. And if it happens to
have been one of my neighbours who committed the crime? Great, next time they
see a large box delivered to my place, they know I'm ripe for another round.

I don't really want to compare being burglarized to sexual rape, as obviously
the latter is much more damaging. But would you even dare telling a woman that
was raped once that she's being irrational because she's terrified every time
a man walks 5 steps behind her on the street?

Do I really want you to have to experience it? No. That was a reactionary
remark for making light of a victim's mental state.

~~~
morgante
> But would you even dare telling a woman that was raped once that she's being
> irrational because she's terrified every time a man walks 5 steps behind her
> on the street?

Yes. It is irrational, because the likelihood of rape from a random stranger
is actually extremely low.

I'm not disputing the pain of your experience. It likely was very traumatic.

However, just because something was very painful doesn't mean it's rational to
live your life in fear of it happening (when its probability is low). I
likewise recognize that being the victim of a terrorist attack is traumatic,
but it would still be irrational to avoid planes for that reason.

~~~
pyre
> Yes. It is irrational, because the likelihood of rape from a random stranger
> is actually extremely low.

This is when averaged across the entire population. A 14 year old girl walking
through a "bad neighbourhood" alone at night doesn't necessary carry the same
risk of rape that a 6-foot tall, bulky body builder does.

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

------
DanielBMarkham
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
> 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
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
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.

~~~
Mo3
... me too! And since I read about it in this thread, I also have sleep apnea
and ADHD. Very interesting :)

------
jdimov9
Not my experience at all. In hotels I tend to sleep like a baby, often better
than I do at home.

~~~
Edd314159
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.

~~~
abovemind
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
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.

~~~
MicroBerto
Offtopic, but have a look into myofunctional therapy. Get better at nasal
breathing and you'll be amazed at the results. Life changing.

~~~
kdamken
Thanks for the recommendation - I've recently realized that I have a lot of
trouble breathing through my nose, I'm going to look into this.

~~~
MicroBerto
An ENT may be able to help if it's a physical problem. Tongue placement at the
roof of your mouth is paramount though. It will help open the nasal sinus. If
you can't put your tongue up there, you may be tongue tied, and can look into
a frenectomy to untie it. A myofunctional therapist will then help you learn
how to properly strengthen and hold your tongue in the right place, as well as
swallow properly.

It might sound crazy, but mouth breathing is linked to ADHD and all kinds of
issues, likely due to lower nitric oxide levels and less stimulation of the
pituitary gland. Expect the field to grow in the next decade. Lots of us are
now having problems because of the reduction of breast feeding, amongst other
things.

~~~
kdamken
Thanks for the info - seeing an ENT is also on my todo list. I never realized
this was an issue until recently, but looking back I've always been a mouth
breather.

One night a few weeks ago I tried the method of taping my mouth shut before
going to sleep. I woke up the next day feeling super sick and lightheaded,
presumably due to lack of oxygen. There definitely seems to be an issue with
my nose breathing.

~~~
MicroBerto
Yes, taping is a great strategy but if you have bad tongue placement or just a
physical nasal airway restriction, you might not be ready. ENT is your first
stop, in my experience. Schedule it up!

------
kinai
@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
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
>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
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.

~~~
morgante
Serious question: are you really so afraid of the tiny possibility of someone
breaking into your room while you're sleeping that you can't sleep well in
hotels?

If that's true, I seriously wonder how you ever get in a car.

~~~
hrktb
I sleep decently in most conditions (I can sleep in parks for instance), it's
more that hotels feel inherently 'public'. It's a place owned by someone else,
maintained and cleaned by employees, ruled about under a company's rules. If I
had to put it in a bucket, it would go with shopping mall bathrooms, train
compartiments or compamy shower rooms.

As a sign of that you wouldn't leave valuable stuff on an hotel room table
while you're out, as you would in your house.

~~~
morgante
> As a sign of that you wouldn't leave valuable stuff on an hotel room table
> while you're out, as you would in your house.

Speak for yourself.

I routinely leave my most valuable possession (my laptop) in hotel rooms. I'm
not paranoid.

------
justifier
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?

------
blowski
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.

~~~
nmjohn
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...](http://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(16\)30174-9)

------
kevindeasis
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
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
Interesting, that's a good thought

------
randomgyatwork
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.

------
diegoloop
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

------
Cyph0n
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?

------
Jabbles
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/mmc...](http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2054006051/2060445893/mmc1.pdf)

~~~
lisper
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
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.

~~~
ASpring
> And I disagree that the number of subjects doesn't matter. It matters
> enormously, precisely because this is a biology experiment.

It's ironic that you say this so definitively when you were the one asking for
help interpreting the statistics originally.

Lisper is completely correct. Given a large enough effect size, detecting
significant differences in a small population is very possible.

The statistics are sound. The assumption we should be questioning is where the
subjects came from and if they are actually representative of the population
that we are extrapolating this result to.

~~~
conceit
What Lisper said may be correct, however he really doesn't mention the
application of the null-hypothesis in this experiment. To a skeptic it would
seem the null hypothesis might be susceptible to the confusion of correlation
and causation.

Edit:

The correct interpretation is that the model, the foundation of the null
hypothesis, didn't fail yet.

Part of this model is backed by more experiments: _" The reason that we
focused on SWA is that it is the only sleep characteristic that reflects the
depth of sleep"_ [1].

The model doesn't consist of a single variable. 11 people choosing the same 7
numbers out of 49 by chance is rather unlikely. The null hypothesis would
include that there are only 11 people picking, that they don't cheat, and that
random chance is indeed a thing. If now 11 people would indeed all choose the
same, then the experiment could be repeated, e.g. to show that they are
cheating or to increase the significance.

[1] [http://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2816...](http://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2816%2930174-9)

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

~~~
jzwinck
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.

------
robg
_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.

------
gonchs
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.

------
solipsism
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.

------
eva1984
For me it is true, at least for the first 2 days. I was thinking it is because
I was excited

------
rcthompson
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.

------
linhchi
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.

------
fareesh
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.

------
ommunist
Looks like we are not that far from the dolphins.

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

------
perseusprime11
Great! Now I can tell my wife why I don't like to sleep at her parent's :)

------
shepik
But the human brain was shaped during a time when nights were dark and full of
terrors, Rattenborg says.

Lol, Game of thrones quote.

------
rokhayakebe
How about taking sleep aid?

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

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

~~~
castis
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
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.

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

~~~
metasean
Completely off-topic!

Should be submitted as it's own article.

