Ever wondered why you never sleep so well when you’re in a different bed? Well it turns out there’s quite a lot of science behind it.
Scientists of sleep (yes, that’s a real job), Masako Tamaki and Yuka Sasaki from Brown University studied a number of brains as they were fast asleep and found that when sleeping in a new environment only half of your brain is actually asleep.
This is because our brains are in survival mode due to an inbuilt survival instinct.
Scientists have known for a long time that when we sleep in a different place than our bodies and brains are used to, we often wake up feeling a helluva lot more groggier than we should – however up until Tamaki and Sasaki’s study, we never knew why.
According to the indy100, the experiment found that people who were sleeping in an unfamiliar place were more likely to wake up to ‘deviant external stimuli’, or to put it in simpler terms – sounds that the brain may think are a threat.
Such threats could be anything from a spot of traffic outside, to the flicker of a light, or even a cats meow.
Sasaki said:
We know that marine mammals and some birds show un-hemispheric sleep. Our brains may have a miniature system of what whales and dolphins have
Apparently whales and dolphins have the same inbuilt system which means they can protect themselves from a threat quickly upon waking.
