You will have experienced it; you are off on your holiday or perhaps for a business conference and you check into your hotel exhausted after your Travel and ready for a good night’s sleep but you wake on your first morning and don’t feel rested at all. This is what happens when you sleep in a new place, it is known as the “first-night effect” and researchers now believe they have uncovered the biological reason why it occurs.
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For the study researchers had subjects come into a sleep lab and stay there for seven nights. While they were they used electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and magnetic resonance imaging to measure coverage throughout the brain. Additionally, during sleep the researchers stimulated the brain with irregular beeping sounds played alternately into the right and left ears.
The results showed that on the first night the left hemisphere of the brain was more active than the right. When the beeps were played into the right ear (stimulating the left hemisphere) during the slow wave phase of sleep the subjects woke faster and went into action faster than if sounds were played in the left ear. This effect did not occur on subsequent night and not on the seventh night.
There were also no differences in responsiveness during other phases of sleep.
So this tells us that on the first night sleeping in a new place the left half of your brain is more active than normal as it is in a state of alertness and ready for trouble during your normal deep sleep phase. After that “adaptation night” however, which has to be factored into all sleep experiments, your brain relaxes and things return to normal.
