American researchers have found out why people do not fall asleep well in a new place for themselves, for example, staying overnight with friends or in a hotel. It turns out that this phenomenon is dictated by ancient evolutionary mechanisms that force one of the brain hemispheres to be active during sleep in an unusual place in order to minimize the possible risks of an attack.
“We know for sure that some birds and marine animals have asymmetric brain activity, that is, they can put only one of the two hemispheres to sleep. A person does not have such asymmetry, but there is a similar miniature system that is activated during sleep in a new place,”says Yuka Sasaki, a researcher at Brown University.
The study by scientists led by Sasaki was to observe the brain activity of sleeping people using modern neuroimaging technologies. It turned out that during sleep in an unfamiliar place, the hemispheres show different activity. For reasons still unclear, the left hemisphere of the brain turned out to be much more active than it should be during normal sleep. The left hemisphere, in particular, showed an increased response to sound stimuli during the experiment. Observations of volunteers sleeping in a new place for the second and subsequent times showed that over time, the activity of the hemispheres becomes uniform. The study authors note that to compensate for this effect, you can try grabbing your pillow when going to sleep in a new place.