I am wondering why small kids ( even a few years old) fall down from the bed while changing their position but bigger children /adults do not, no matter how much they move while sleeping?
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If you close your eyes, can you move your arms so that your fingertips touch each other?
That capability is called “proprioception”, the ability to know where your different bodyparts are in space. Even when you’re a sleep your brain has a fundamental understanding of where you are and where your body parts are.
Young kids, being kind of clumsy in every way, has a much less well developed sense of proprioception. So they do stuff like fall over or fall out of bed when they’re asleep.
For the same reason they don’t wet the bed, the body learns to control itself better over time.
Adults move around a lot less. And on those rare occasions when you move so much that the first part of yout body goes over the edge, it immediately wakes you up and you adjust your position – probably because your sense of surroundings and self-care is a lot more conditioned than as a child
Humans are capable of perceiving certain senses even while unconscious. Such as where you limbs are and if they are being supported properly.
This is likely a reflex our ancestors evolved to prevent them from falling out of trees
It is a learned behavior, kids don’t have it innately.
In addition to not falling off, people are surprisingly good at not shifting on top of a baby-sized thing in their sleep. This is one of the things that is very self-reinforcing in evolutionary terms: the people who can’t stop themselves rolling on top of a baby or into danger are less likely to leave surviving offspring.
I might roll to the left a bit, roll to the right a little bit, position shift, but I wont roll multiple times, so generally my starting position prevents me from falling off.
Of course adults don’t fall down from the bed. That totally has not happened to me in a very long time because I’m an adult… yes… 🙄
I will add we do fall out of bed! When I was in basic training it happened a lot. We were so beat and tired that the brain was just dunzo. A lot of people falling out of bed during the night.
Becaue my better half is a freaking spider monkey…. or maybe a black hole with crazy gravitational pull. I couldn’t fall out if I wanted to….
I have fallen out of bed more times as an adult than I can count, although not often at home, from my own bed. It mostly happens when on vacations. The most comical incident was when I became wedged between a bed and the wall, had to yell for help, and the worst was when I hit the side of my head on a marble topped nightstand, which required a trip to the emergency room.
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