题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
云南省昆明市黄冈实验学校2017-2018学年高一下学期英语第三次月考试卷（含听力音频）
One half of the brain remains on high alert during the first night of sleep in a new space.
Over the course of three experiments on 35 young, healthy volunteers, researchers measured brain activity during two nights of sleep. They found that part of the left side of the brain remained more active than the right side only on the first night, specifically during a deep sleep stage.
“When you sleep in a new place for the first time, a part of one side of the brain seems to stay awake, so you could wake up faster if necessary,” said senior study author Yuka Sasaki of Brown University.
While this may be bad news for business travelers who regularly make brief overnight trips, it may not be as troublesome for people who go away for longer periods of time, Sasaki added by email.
To see how being in a strange place affects sleep, Sasaki and colleagues performed a series of lab tests on their subjects.
When they stimulated（刺激） the left side of the brain with sounds in the right ear during deep sleep on the first night, that led to greater possibility of waking and faster action upon waking, than if sounds were played in the left ear to affect the right side of the brain. On the second night, there wasn't any difference in reactions to tests between the left and right sides of the brain, even during deep sleep. This suggests that there is a first-night-only effect specifically in one side of the brain during deep sleep, the authors conclude.
One limitation of the new study is its focus on healthy volunteers, which means the results may not apply to people with sleep disorders, the authors note.
While it's possible that the findings may explain poor sleep among frequent travelers, the study wasn't designed to test whether these “first night effects” continue to happen to people every time they hit the road, said Patrick Finan, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
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