But the second night, the two hemispheres were similar, as has been seen in previous brain studies.
On the first night, the amount of slow wave activity in the left hemisphere of the sleepers’ brains was significantly lower than in the right hemisphere. Each participant was hooked up to several instruments that measured activity levels in four networks within each hemisphere of the brain. They started by inviting a group of subjects to sleep in the laboratory for two consecutive nights. Tamaki and her team focused on the deepest form of sleep, called slow wave sleep, which is when we are most vulnerable.
WE DONT SLEEP AT NIGHT SERIES
“Usually researchers just throw away the data because the quality is so low, but we were curious what is going on in the sleeping brain on that first night.”ĭuring sleep, a person’s brain journeys through a series of stages, each of which has a distinct electrical signature and is associated with a different depth of sleep. “When a subject comes into a lab on the first night, it takes them longer to fall asleep, they wake up many times in the middle of the sleep session, and the duration of deep sleep is shorter than usual,” says the study’s lead author, Masako Tamaki. The grogginess may happen because one side of the brain forgoes sleep to act as a “night watch” capable of alerting us to potential dangers, a team from Brown University shows. This phenomenon, though, might be an evolutionary advantage in disguise, a new study in Current Biology suggests. This tendency to sleep poorly on the first night in a new setting, known as the “first night effect,” is well documented, but the causes have remained unclear. Yet, despite near exhaustion, you toss and turn, unable to nod off. You slide under bleach-white sheets, collapsing on a cloud of pillows. It’s your first night at a hotel after a long day a travel.
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