This did remind me of a study I read at university way back in the last century. A sleep study was done, and folks who slept head north had deeper REM turns and reported feeling more rested and better about their sleep overall than folks facing other directions.
They proposed it had to do with being more aligned with magnetic fields (floating with a river head first takes less effort than trying to float maintaining your body crosswise.) The trouble is the head south folks reported the worst sleep. So they concluded there was a key in the brain to orient you northward, like polarity in a magnet, and any sleep that defied that polarity would suffer.
It all seemed farfetched to me. Observations historically and in undeveloped countries, where folks could organize their beds and homes in any direction, seemed to show no preference for sleeping north. If it were biological there should be a pattern.
I proposed it has to do with cultural influence and the belief we form from maps and globes that north is always “up.” This becomes ingrained in our orientation of where we are in space, we “learn” where “up” is.
But maps are completely unrelated to where “up” is for any human anywhere in space. A map is just a convention, and North was arbitrary. Despite where you are on the map, “Up” is always over your head. And for most folks that can be anywhere from 30 to as many as 160 degrees from “North.”
However, there is also a physiological factor that makes humans averse to being “upside down. So the ingrained metaphor of a north oriented map influences the brain’s signals to a body’s feeling of where “up” is, even when lying down.
So, by living in a culture that drills into us “north is up,” sleeping with our heads to the north when we lay down assures the body it is not “upside down.” Conforming to this cultural norm merely allows a north sleeper to feel more relaxed, which physiologically can lead to more restful sleep.
This did remind me of a study I read at university way back in the last century. A sleep study was done, and folks who slept head north had deeper REM turns and reported feeling more rested and better about their sleep overall than folks facing other directions.
They proposed it had to do with being more aligned with magnetic fields (floating with a river head first takes less effort than trying to float maintaining your body crosswise.) The trouble is the head south folks reported the worst sleep. So they concluded there was a key in the brain to orient you northward, like polarity in a magnet, and any sleep that defied that polarity would suffer.
It all seemed farfetched to me. Observations historically and in undeveloped countries, where folks could organize their beds and homes in any direction, seemed to show no preference for sleeping north. If it were biological there should be a pattern.
I proposed it has to do with cultural influence and the belief we form from maps and globes that north is always “up.” This becomes ingrained in our orientation of where we are in space, we “learn” where “up” is.
But maps are completely unrelated to where “up” is for any human anywhere in space. A map is just a convention, and North was arbitrary. Despite where you are on the map, “Up” is always over your head. And for most folks that can be anywhere from 30 to as many as 160 degrees from “North.”
However, there is also a physiological factor that makes humans averse to being “upside down. So the ingrained metaphor of a north oriented map influences the brain’s signals to a body’s feeling of where “up” is, even when lying down.
So, by living in a culture that drills into us “north is up,” sleeping with our heads to the north when we lay down assures the body it is not “upside down.” Conforming to this cultural norm merely allows a north sleeper to feel more relaxed, which physiologically can lead to more restful sleep.