Lateralized sleeping positions in domestic cats
48 comments
·June 26, 2025Fluorescence
pugworthy
My boy Henry will always choose my right side, tucking under my arm and his head on my chest. Which is him in a "leftward" position then.
He'll work out some kind of arrangement if I'm laying on my left side and he can't lay on his left, but if I'm lying on my back it's always to the right.
It makes you wonder about cat-person compatibility based on the person's preference for how to lie down and the cat's preference.
bobbyi
That could be habit if she got used to one side rather than brain asymetry
kjkjadksj
All the cats I’ve had have a preferential side to sitting on the lap or being carried around. Trying to do it the other way the cat would either fuss and reorient or be so awkward and clumsy in the wrong orientation, akin to trying to use ones non dominant hand.
wbl
I feel this publication could have used many more figures
fyrn_
I agree, obviously purely for the scientific value of the sleeping cat pictures of course..
em-bee
i want the list of all 408 videos to verify the data and reproduce the results.
oskarkk
The list of links is in the Excel file in the attachments, so it should be reproducible.
bigiain
"Hello Ma'am, we're from the government. We're here for your cat, the one in the YouTube video. We need it to attempt to reproduce scientific research."
Isamu
>To address this question, we analyzed 408 publicly available YouTube videos featuring a single cat in a clearly visible sleeping position while lying on one side, with an uninterrupted sleep duration of at least 10 seconds and full-body visibility from head to hind legs.
408 videos, showing bias towards leftward pose. They claim to have removed the mirrored videos from their samples.
bombcar
YouTube videos of sleeping cats could have a left-leaning bias!
I wonder how you’d structure a proper study on this. Probably obtain a random selection of cat owners (slaves?) first.
null
jfengel
I should take some data. I've got enough cats to border crazy-cat-lady territory. I had the impression that they sleep in random positions -- basically, whatever shape they were in when the urge to nap came upon them.
I'll keep an eye on them and see if they have a preference that I'd missed. It won't be all that useful -- if nothing else, the specific preferred sleeping places of my house could have more to do with my layout than any underlying mechanism in the cat. But I'd kinda like to know if there has been something staring me in the face all this time and I just didn't put it together.
amelius
Did they check if the outcome is different on the southern hemisphere?
comrade1234
I think this is the opposite for lions? I'm only going by the fact that the Buddha is shown sleeping on his right side all of the time and that this is called the lion pose (not the same as the yoga lion pose). He slept on his right side in the same way male lions sleep on their right side.
(I first learned this because I was researching why when I meditated on my right side I would sometimes have hallucinogenic visions, but not on my left side - it was a surprise to come across this fact about the Buddha)
ChrisMarshallNY
They literally got paid to watch cat videos on the Internet.
thealistra
The author declared no competing interests, but I bet they are a certified cat lover and therefore biased
iainmerrick
They're secretly funded by Big Cat.
a_e_k
This is hilarious. While I work, one of my cats loves to share my desk chair and sleep between me and the backrest (forcing me to sit closer to the front edge). I've noticed she favors lying on her left flank there, and she is, in fact, sleeping behind me like this right now.
(Anecdotal, but +1.)
On the other hand, she's one of a bonded pair and I'll sometimes see her and her sister sleeping curled next to each other with more varied chirality. Maybe a trusted friend outweighs this effect?
dhosek
That does fit with the hypothesis of the paper.
comrade1234
Wow. Is this really a Cell article? Congrats to the authors.
Publishing in cell gets you a tenure track.
dog436zkj3p7
No, it’s a Current Biology article, a good journal from the Cell Press family of journals, but not quite Cell.
Metacelsus
Cell Current Biology, not the main journal Cell
wiredfool
I prefer chirality for cats, they sleep either clockwise, counterclockwise, or possibly corkscrew.
throwawayoldie
This is objectively the best paper of 2025 so far, according to the metric of number of adorable kitties depicted.
This matches my kitty.
I noticed her preference because if I lie on my left-hand side, she is a very happy little spoon and uses my arm as a pillow.
If I lie on my right-hand side, kitty is confused. She will take extra preparatory rotations hoping that one more turn will be enough for the problematic situation to resolve. After some hard stares, maybe an annoyed huff, she will reluctantly curl-up as a face-to-face non-spoon.