Head-First Habit

Shrewd Professor Donald Anderson Laird of Colgate University who, besides pursuing a scientific study of sleep, is consulting psychologist to the Order of Sleeping Car Conductors, recently asked the American Medical Association the following question:

"Is there a rational physiological explanation for having a Pullman passenger's head in the direction of motion either for sleep or when awake? Most persons in riding on a train prefer to sit facing forward. But in sleeping in a berth the head is by choice placed toward the front of the train. In ambulances it is also routine for the head of the patient to be at the front of the conveyance. This brings to mind the practice of Charles Dickens and other Victorian notables of carrying a compass and having the hotel bed placed with the head to the north. . . ."*

The A. M. A., through its Journal, gave him the following answer: "Man is used to the type of visual change or sensation produced by approaching an object, since his eyes are directed forward. In consequence, many people are affected by dizziness, nausea and vomiting with the eyes open in a fast moving conveyance such as a train. But there is no evidence, rational or experimental, indicating that a person sleeps better or more comfortably in a moving conveyance when the head is directed toward the direction of motion. . . . "The only possible influence on the body that could be affected by the position of the head in a moving conveyance would be the action of gravity on the blood flow or tension on the viscera, but most of the traveling speeds are insufficient to have any appreciable effect in this regard. . . . For the present, therefore, it appears that placing the head in the direction of motion on a train, ambulance or even ships at sea is purely a habit or tradition. . . ."

Last week Professor Laird, whose sleep experiments have lately included producing anemia of the brain in some Colgate students, added the following to the A. M. A.'s explanation: "We still have to discover a definite scientific basis for the practice of sleeping head forward on trains. . . . Hemastatics may justify head forward position, since with the head forward the fluid inertia of the blood would cause it to accumulate in the splanchnic (abdominal) pool and thus render the brain relatively anemic. This would increase drowsiness and assist in going to sleep in the noisy and vibrating berth, but would not necessarily make the sleep one whit more refreshing, in fact, possibly the exact opposite."

*-Dickens and a generation after him slept heading toward the north because they thought that they might suffer harm while lying criss-cross to the earth's magnetic field. To insulate themselves from that imagined magnetic effect people stood their beds on glass, "nonconducting" casters.

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