This episode of the “Sleep Review Conversations” podcast is a preview of SLEEP 2017, which meets in Boston this year from June 3rd through 7th. We’ll hear from Glen Greenough, the conference chairperson; Emerson Wickwire, a sleep specialist chairing a session on value-based sleep; Thomas Kilduff, winner of the Distinguished Scientist Award; and Neils Rattenborg, winner of the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award.

Hosted and produced by Rose Rimler, associate editor of Sleep Review

Run time: 41:09

Transcript Below

Rose Rimler, Sleep Review associate editor (RR): Hello and welcome to Sleep Review Conversations, a podcast from healthcare media company Allied 360. Today we have something special: a sneak peak at SLEEP 2017, which is the 31st annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. That’s a partnership between the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society. SLEEP 2017 will be held in Boston from June 3rd through June 7th at the Hynes Convention Center.

We’re going to start off with an overview of the conference from program committee chair Dr. Glen Greenough, who will tell us about trends to watch out for, must-see events, and how sleep professionals party.

Let’s start with a little bit of an overview on size. How many people do you expect to attend this year, and what kinds of professions do they represent?

Greenough: Sure. About 5,500 this year. We’ll have physicians, researchers, psychologists, nurses, some sleep medicine technologists, industry folks, so it’s a good mix. There’ll be 130 companies exhibiting at the meeting as well.

RR: Can you tell me a little bit about how the conference is organized? It looks like there are post-graduate sessions and general sessions. What’s the difference between those two types of sessions?

Greenough: Sure. The post-graduate sessions are courses that you would have to register for. Their cost is separate from the general registration fee. They generally have a clinical focus, and it’s a specific course so you want to learn more about, for example, restless legs or pediatric sleep medicine or we have a course called Trends, which is looking at latest trends in sleep medicine. You have either half-day or whole-day courses that you spend focused on that topic. The general sessions are what are included in your registration fee, and then there are a wide variety of types of sessions that we have. We have sessions where people are presenting the latest research. We have clinical workshops where people are going over how to do, for example, telemedicine, how you set that up in your practice or things like that.

RR: Will there be opportunities to earn continuing education credits?

Greenough: Yeah, so you have to register separately but the CME for physicians, CE for psychologists, and anyone else can get a letter of attendance. I think you can earn around 38 credits.

RR: Some people listening may have attended last year or in previous years. How does this year’s conference compare to previous years?

Greenough: The overall format is pretty similar. We’ve got post-graduate courses on the weekend before and in the main session, so the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday mainly. Also some on Sunday. The content changes a lot from year to year. We’ll look at what the latest trends are, what’s going on in research, what’s going on clinically. For example, new practice parameters have come out on the medication treatment of insomnia, so we’ll have a session focused on those. There’ll be a lot of new information.

RR: Yeah, and it seems like this is a field that’s moving along at a pretty fast clip. I can imagine that from year to year there is going to be a lot of big changes in the content that’s presented.

Greenough: Yeah, we’re a young field. We were only recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties in 2005, so it’s young and growing.

RR: I’ve been to a number of conferences but there are a few events I’ve seen on the schedule for the SLEEP meeting that I don’t think I’ve seen before. For example, the ASM is hosting something called the Learning Lounge and the Society Booth. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit more about what those are going to be.

Greenough: Sure. The Learning Lounge is meant to be a kind of relaxed atmosphere for discussion on various topics and there’s usually an assigned topic for that particular Learning Lounge on that day. They have, I want to say…How to set up a DME in your practice, how to implement telemedicine, so some very practical ones. It allows you to get a little more of a discussion and get information in that way moreso than you would, say, in a formal lecture where you can’t really have a back and forth.

It allows for that interaction in a more kind of smaller scale and allows for that back and forth. That’s a nice thing. The Society Booth basically allows for the ASM staffers to communicate with the attendees. You can find out about ASM products, those kinds of things. They’ve got a program this year they’re calling the Sleep Trail, as kind of a way to get people to go to certain events and visit certain vendors. If you collect all the stamps on the Sleep Trail then you get entered to win a large screen TV.

RR: Not a smart mattress or something like that?

Greenough: Yeah, I know. No, maybe we should, but we’re more interested in the TV’s I guess.

RR: Then I saw on the schedule there’s something called the Lunch Debates. How does that work?

Greenough: I like the Lunch Debates a lot. They’re basically, we try to take a controversial subject. Partly because we’re such a young field there are areas that we don’t know the answer to things. We’ll try to pick a person who can represent one opinion and then another person to represent the con opinion. We have them have a debate for the attendees. Lunch is provided. They can sit and have their lunch and listen to the debaters discuss a controversial topic within sleep medicine. Once again it’s another different kind of format. Rather than just hearing one person talk about a topic, you can kind of hear a back and forth which can kind of be a little more stimulating, allows time for questions at the end as well. You get your lunch at the same time. That is a ticketed event as well. You have to purchase those to go separately.

RR: Do you have any idea of what some of those topics might be?

Greenough: Let me see. This year: Is sleep testing needed for straightforward sleep apnea? Another one is: Sleep need, what is it? Can it be quantified? Another one is a more basic science one, the synaptic basis of function, shy versus synaptic enhancement of sleep. I’m not even sure what that means. Yeah, that’s more focused for the Ph.D’s. Yeah, so for the more clinical folks like myself would be the: Sleep need, what is it and can it be quantified? And when sleep apnea is very straightforward, do you need to even test for it? Can you just treat it?

RR: Are there any speakers this year that you think are going to be particularly interesting, some can’t-miss talks?

Greenough: Our keynote, Craig Heller, who’s in California, and he’s going to talk about interactions between sleep and circadian rhythms in health and disease. He’s very well known and we think he’ll appeal to both the researchers and the clinicians, so that’s one of the reason why he was selected for the keynote. Another one that’s kind of topical is Mark Rosekind is going to speak from the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration on enhancing transportation safety, and that’s a big issue in sleep medicine. People who are pilots or truck drivers and being sleepy and making sure that our transportation system is safe. Then Susan Redline is receiving the Thomas Roth Lecture of Excellence, and she’s going to talk about the influence of genomics and the environment on sleep apnea, so what role the environment versus your genes play in sleep apnea, which is the primary disorder we treat.

RR: That’s pretty broad from applications to basic science.

Greenough: Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing about this meeting that I think is exciting for me, is that the Sleep Research Society, which are real basic scientists, and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which represents primarily clinicians, get together and have a meeting. It’s nice that I can still go to a meeting and learn about basic science stuff in my field and don’t have to go to a different meeting for that, so it’s all in one place.

RR: You mentioned that … I don’t remember the exact number you said of exhibitors that are coming to showcase products and services.

Greenough: More than 130.

RR: More than 130?

Greenough: Yeah.

RR: Okay. And have you noticed any trends to watch out for this year?

Greenough: Telemedicine is a big one. That’s probably the rising trend now. People are trying to branch into telemedicine, so those vendors are showing up there as well. There’ll be standard vendors who do CPAP and certainly the medications that we use will be there, but the growing area I guess is the telemedicine.

RR: The AADSM meeting, that meets just before the AASM meeting and actually overlaps a day or two. Do you have any advice for someone who wants to attend both conferences about how to navigate that overlap?

Greenough: What I try to recommend to everybody who’s going to a meeting like this, whether you’re going to two or one, is look at the program ahead of time and plan it out. Because it’s hard sometimes on the fly to figure out where you want to be when, and so it’s nice if you have a little roadmap of some talks that you really don’t want to miss. Because otherwise it’s very easy in the whole social aspect of it chatting with people to kind of forget to go to some of the talks. There’s also the app that the AASM uses as a good way to search for talks as well, so that can be helpful if you don’t want to use the paper program.

RR: There’s an app specific to this conference?

Greenough: Yeah, so there’ll be a SLEEP 2017 app that’ll be downloadable for the meeting.

RR: You touched on this a little bit but I wanted to ask you if you have any advice for early career scientists or clinicians or first-time attendees who have never been to this conference before, and maybe you have some advice on how best they navigate everything that’s going on.

Greenough: I think making sure to go to the plenary session is an important thing. Don’t forget to visit the posters. I think some of those people end up caught up going to the sessions, but the poster sessions which are in the evening are a nice way to one, get more information but two, you can talk one-on-one with the researchers and that’s a nice way to make connections and also find out more about a topic. The AASM is hosting a resident fellow meet-and-greet for early career clinicians, and the SRS, the Sleep Research Society, hosts a trainee day and has a trainee hospitality suite. Those are things that trainees could get involved with. Meet other trainees as well and other people who are interested in the same things they are.

RR: What about fun? Are there opportunities to socialize and network built into the conference?

Greenough: Yeah. I think a lot of us spend a lot of time having big dinners with friends and reconnecting. A lot of that’s kind of on our own in the evening. The AASM has implemented the sleep trail as a means to try to get people to interact with certain sites as well and try to make that a fun competition. Then I think being in Boston, people will hopefully take advantage of the site, and I think it’s usually a very popular site and it’s a fun city to visit. Yeah, so I guess that’s the fun of it. Despite being on our free time, people end up still talking shop quite a bit. But it’s fun to talk about it with people from other parts of the country and see if they’re sharing the same struggles or have the same opportunities that you do in your location.

RR: I’m curious, I’ve never been a conference like this. I’m curious what sleep specialists are like when they get together. Are you guys rowdy? Ever get kicked out out of a bar or out of a hotel?

Greenough: The staffers say there’s just a lot of blue button-downs and khaki pants as their description of us as a group. We do have our rowdy elements at times I think. Physicians in general tend to be a little more conservative group than most.

RR: So most likely you won’t get kicked out of Boston and told never to return. The conference will be held there again.

Greenough: Yes, yes. I went to college in Boston so I don’t think it will be quite like on the same par with my college years.

RR: I know that these meetings have to be planned out pretty well in advance. Do you have an idea of where next year’s meeting will be?

Greenough: Yeah. It’s usually two years out you know where the meeting’s going to be, so next year’s Baltimore.

RR: Baltimore. Okay.

Greenough: Yeah.

RR: Do they ever meet on the West Coast?

Greenough: Yes, and we did Seattle recently. The last one was Denver.

RR: Well, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. I really appreciate it, and I think I’m going to be at that meeting so maybe I’ll see you then.

Greenough: Great, yeah. If you see me, say hi and I hope you enjoy the meeting.

RR: Thanks so much.

Greenough: All right, thank you.

RR: Bye. Thanks, Dr. Greenough, for that great overview. Now we’re going to be zooming in quite a bit and focusing in on one of the sessions that will be held this year.

I’m here with Emerson Wickwire, PhD, professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and director of the insomnia program there. Dr. Wickwire will be chairing a session on value-based sleep from 2:45 to 4:45 on Tuesday, June 6th. Dr. Wickwire has been kind enough to join us today and give us a bit of a sneak peek on that session and also an overview of the topic. Dr. Wickwire, thanks so much for joining us.

Emerson Wickwire: Thanks so much, Rose. Delighted to be here.

RR: Let’s start with the most obvious question. What is value-based sleep?

Wickwire: Rose, sleep medicine is at a crossroads with rising healthcare costs on the one hand, and value-based sleep is our ability to demonstrate dramatic value to the multiple constituencies whom we serve: patients, payers, the public, employers. This is necessary for our field to survive, thrive, and grow, and that’s what our panel discussion is all about.

RR: You used the term discussion. Does that mean there’s going to be some back and forth with the audience or is it going to be more like a panel on stage discussing among themselves? Or will there be some opportunity for the audience to participate?

Wickwire: That’s a great question, and the answer is all of the above. There are seven expert panelists, I’m happy to tell you who those are, who have kindly agreed to participate in what I think is going to be one of the most exciting and well-received sessions in the entire conference. The panelists range from experts in industry and health policy to the insurance payer perspective, directors of global health programs to very senior and experienced sleep medicine educators.

Each of the panelists will represent a different perspective on barriers to advancing the field of sleep, what is the perceived value from each of these perspectives, what are the barriers to increasing access to sleep in each of those specific domains, and what are recommendations for the audience members to increase their ability to demonstrate the value of sleep. There will be brief presentations from each of the seven panelists. I will be moderating the discussion. Following the brief presentations there will be Q & A from the audience as well as from other panelists themselves. We’re really hoping to cover a lot of ground and to ensure that all attendees are going to have their questions answered regardless of what their specific area of interest is.

RR: Now, value-based medicine, that’s a broader trend. It’s not just within the field of sleep medicine. Can you talk a little bit about why it’s important for sleep clinicians to know about value-based medicine?

Wickwire: Having built and managed a comprehensive community-based sleep medicine center, I’m particularly sensitive to the challenges that practitioners, and especially sleep center medical directors, face. On the one hand they need to be mindful of their patients’ experience and customer service, if you will, kinds of issues. They need to partner with and negotiate with and work with end guidelines provided by payers. Often providers have very, very little say in these guidelines. They also need to be mindful of the perspective of referring providers.

Just as a very quick example, for a private practice sleep medicine physician, he needs and she needs to be aware of the patient experience and what the patient wants, what is the value of sleep from the patient perspective. The clinician needs to be mindful of the value from the payer perspective, because that’s who helps keep their lights on, and they also need to be mindful of the value of sleep from a referring provider perspective. Because that is generally their largest flow of new patient referrals. These are the kinds of perspectives that we’ll address in the panel.

RR: What do you hope that people who attend the panel discussion will come away with? What are some of the core ideas that you want to explain, or maybe some practical tips that you hope people who come and take part in the session will walk away with?

Wickwire: Well, really three objectives. First, we want everyone to appreciate the fact that sleep medicine is advancing on multiple fronts. As I mentioned, for example, Dr. Chris Lettieri, who is the director of Army Global Health at the Pentagon, will be able to speak to how is sleep perceived within the military and what is the value of sleep. Now, that’s a very high-level perspective, but it’s one that’s directly related to the perspective of the private practitioner. Because soldiers, for example, are concerned not only with clinical sleep disorders, but also with sleep in human performance.

Most adults are concerned not only with clinical sleep disorders, but also with quality of life and let’s say workplace productivity. In addition to speaking to where sleep fits in from a global health perspective, Dr. Tilak Verma, who is the medical director at the Tufts Health Plan, will speak to how insurers are perceiving sleep and how sleep medicine clinicians can demonstrate value from sleep in their relationships with payers. Dr. Nancy Collop, past president of the AASM, will speak to playing well in the sandbox and how sleep medicine fits in in a large, complex healthcare system.

Dr. Sairam Parthasarathy will speak about sleep medicine in health services research, because as we begin to think about population health and advanced population health, we need to be able to identify the entry points and value levers for sleep. Dr. Natalie Hartenbaum, past president of the American Academy of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, will speak to how employers perceive health and wellness initiatives. She’s also done several very impressive sleep-related projects in the workplace. Dr. Steven Scharf is going to speak to sleep medicine education and how do we make sure that sleep is incorporated more broadly in medical curricula and on and on. It’s really going to be a wonderful panel, and I hope that everyone listening will come and join us.

RR: Is this the first time that this topic has been discussed at one of these meetings or has it come up in previous years?

Wickwire: Increasingly these kinds of discussions regarding the future of sleep medicine have been discussed. For example, the AASM spearheaded, along with other leading stakeholder societies, the Future of Sleep Medicine Summit in Chicago several years ago that I attended. Increasingly the writing is on the wall that we need to adapt and adjust in order to survive and thrive in the new healthcare landscape. One of our panelists, Dr. Liesl Cooper, who is the vice president of Market Access and a trained health economist at ResMed, will be able to speak, for example, to national health policy and payment models that are going to trickle down to impact the individual sleep provider and the clinician and the sleep disorder center. Increasingly the topics are addressed. This will be the widest ranging and, I would argue, the most comprehensive. Certainly you have an all-star panel.

RR: Yeah, it certainly sounds like a wide-ranging discussion and sounds like it’ll be great. Dr. Wickwire, thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Wickwire: Rose, thanks so much for the opportunity, and we hope to see everyone Tuesday afternoon at 2:45. Safe travels to Boston.

RR: Every year the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society hand out awards for distinguished research, education, and careers. Next let’s hear from two of this year’s award winners. First up is Thomas S. Kilduff, Ph.D., who received the Distinguished Scientist Award for original and sustained scientific contributions made over a career. Dr. Kilduff is currently the director of the Center for Neuroscience at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. The following is an excerpt from our conversation about his work.

I was looking at some of your work. You’ve had a really interesting career. You started off researching hibernation in ground squirrels. Is that right?

Kilduff: That’s right.

RR: How did you transition to researching sleep in humans?

Kilduff: Believe it or not, it’s not that far of a change. When animals enter hibernation in the fall … First of all, one of the misconceptions about hibernation is animals go down and lower their body temperature in the fall and they don’t wake up again until the spring, but in fact that six, seven-month period defines a hibernation season. During that period of time animals will repeatedly lower their body temperature and then warm up again for about a 24-hour or less period and then re-enter.

Over the course of the hibernation season they may go through 20 of these cycles or so. The lab in which I did my graduate work showed that as animals are entering hibernation, they are selectively doing it by increasing the amount of slow-wave sleep that they have and reducing the amount of REM or rapid eye movement sleep. That suggested that… was among the lines of evidence that suggested hibernation is a regulated phenomenon and it may be, in essence, an extension of slow-wave sleep.

RR: The discovery of hypocretin or orexin, that’s probably your most widely-known contribution to the field so far. Was it also the most exciting for you personally? Did you know that you were on to something really interesting when you did that research?

Kilduff: Well, not initially, but as time went on that was certainly the case. I’ve got to acknowledge at this point some of the … I was very fortunate to stumble into this project, I have to say, when I was on sabbatical at the Scripps Research Institute in the laboratory of Greg Sutcliffe. I was a researcher at Stanford University at the time, but you may know that there is this process that if you have put in a period of time in academics you’re allowed to take a sabbatical. I took a sabbatical year and I went down to Sutcliffe’s lab to learn a particular technique.

This technique was being applied even before I got to Sutcliffe’s lab, to isolate new messenger RNA’s that were expressed in the hypothalamus. I stepped into this project after some of the very difficult work had been done at the early stages, and they had a number of what we called anonymous clones to identify. There was this one clone that had a very specific localization to a region of the hypothalamus that had been shown in the rat brain, the rat hypothalamus. Basically I worked on that for a year with other folks in Greg Sutcliffe’s lab.

We certainly knew based on the localization that whatever this was going to be that turned out to be hypocretin, that it was going to be special, but we were uncertain what the function was. We thought because there was localization in the hypothalamus that it probably had more to do with feeding than anything else. Because it was found in an area of the hypothalamus that anyone who had taken Psych 101 courses knew that when you lesion that area of the hypothalamus, rats in particular would become obese. Once we found out more about the structure of this messenger RNA and figured out what neuropeptides it could encode, we then injected those neuropeptides into the brains of rats and never really saw an increase in feeding.

Shortly after we published this work, another group led by Masashi Yanagisawa at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center described the exact same peptides. They, on the other hand, found that when they injected their peptides in the brain they saw an increase in feeding. The only difference was we were doing our experiments at a different time of day than they did. We did our injections just before the lights went out, so that’s animals’ normal active period. Whereas Yanagisawa’s lab really at that time didn’t have a background in terms of sleep or circadian biology. They would do their injections at the beginning of the researchers’ work day, which for a rat is the major sleep period.

RR: So it would keep them up, and they would be eating at strange times of day?

Kilduff: Exactly. The peptides we now know as the hypocretins or the orexins have this profound wake-promoting effect in rodents, and that’s most evident of course when you give the animals the peptide early in the work day or the animal’s inactive period. In retrospect it’s not surprising that they saw these animals, that they thought the peptide had an effect for increasing food intake. Because if you compare the amount of food that those animals who were injected with the peptide ate versus the control animals, who were injected with a vehicle and went back to sleep, it’s obvious that the increased food intake is a secondary effect due to the fact that the animals were just awake longer.

RR: There are a lot of topics that you could be discussing when you present your lecture at SLEEP. Do you know what you’re going to be focusing on?

Kilduff: Well, there is a symposium … In addition to the lecture I’m giving there, I have a symposium the prior day on another project we work on called trace amine-associated receptor 1 or TAAR1. This is a receptor that very little is known about, but the reason it’s relevant to the rest of our discussion is that with my colleagues here at SRI International, we found that using drugs that are produced by a pharmaceutical company that activate this receptor may be a new pathway for treatment of narcolepsy. We have multiple mouse models now of narcolepsy, some that involve degeneration of the hypocretin neurons, and of course those animals have cataplexy just as the gene knockout mouse that I mentioned earlier have.

We over the years have tested many different pharmaceutical agents on cataplexy in these mice, and to see which ones would mitigate cataplexy and which ones exacerbate it. This is very similar to work that was done in the narcoleptic dogs years ago by the Mignot group. We have identified that this new receptor that I mentioned, TAAR1, seems to hold promise as a new therapeutic pathway for treatment of narcolepsy. Because I had the symposium the day before my lecture, the program committee has asked me not to talk about TAAR1, or to de-emphasize what I talk about TAAR1. Instead I’ll primarily talk about our recent work on the hypocretin system… and a little bit less on TAAR1.

RR: Have you been to this meeting in prior years?

Kilduff: Oh, yeah. I joined the Sleep Research Society when I was a student in the 1980s. In addition to the thrill of going to a scientific meeting and learning new information, I’ll also be seeing a lot of old friends so it’s always a good meeting to go to.

RR: Well, thank you so much and congratulations on your award.

Kilduff: Thank you.

RR: Next we’ll hear from another award winner, Neil C. Rattenborg, PhD, who is leader of the Avian Sleep Group at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. Dr. Rattenborg was awarded the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award by the Sleep Research Society this year. He spoke to Sleep Review about his most recent research published last year in the journal Nature Communications, and about how his work in birds could translate to humans.

Rattenborg: People have suspected for centuries that some birds fly non-stop for days, weeks, months, maybe even longer. Several recent studies have confirmed that many birds do this. They fly non-stop for long periods of time. This has been shown with GPS trackers and various other devices. Once we were pretty sure that some birds could fly for long periods of time, the obvious question was: Well, when do they sleep? Or do they sleep at all during these long flights? Until recently we didn’t have the technology we needed to be able to actually record sleep in a bird flying in the wild. What we did was we … A colleague of ours had developed a small EEG or brainwave data logger that was small enough for a bird to carry on its head while flying out in the wild. We attached this to what are called frigate birds.

These are very large, black seabirds. As a seabird they’re a bit strange because they actually cannot land on the water. If they land on the water they get wet and then they can’t take off and then they drown. Despite living over the ocean, they can’t land on the ocean. Yet they go out and fly over the ocean for weeks or months at a time. We went to an island where these birds were nesting, caught them, put the device on their head and then let them go, and then we waited for one to two weeks. Then when they came home we caught them and took the little EEG recorder off of them and looked at what they were actually doing while they were flying out over the Pacific Ocean. We found many exciting things. First of all, we showed for the first time that birds could sleep while flying.

What was interesting is previously most people had expected that they had to sleep with just one half of their brain at a time. What we found was that although that was the typical type of sleep, they could also sometimes sleep with both halves of the brain and still keep on flying.

People often might ask or might think, “Well, this kind of research is interesting, but what can it really tell us about sleep in general and perhaps sleep in humans?” I can give an example of how this work can influence our understanding of human sleep. It relates to the work I did during my PhD dissertation. During that study we showed that when ducks are sleeping at the edge of a group, that they spend more time sleeping with half their brain at a time.

When they’re sleeping this way they direct the open eye away from the other ducks, as if watching for approaching predators. That’s interesting and nice and all. Well, just last year a group published a paper that was directly motivated by this study of ducks, and they were interested in understanding why people have problems sleeping during the first night in a new environment. They wondered if there was something going on similar to what I had shown in the ducks. They compared sleep in humans on their first night in the laboratory to that on the second night. Surprisingly they found on the first night there was an asymmetry in how deep the two halves of the brain were sleeping. Both were sleeping but based on EEG activity, one was sleeping deeper than the other.

They took this a step further and they presented sounds to the ear connected to the deep sleeping half of the brain and the ear connected to the lighter sleeping half of the brain. When the sound was presented to the lighter sleeping half, they were more likely to wake up. Then on the second night the asymmetry was gone. This suggests that although we can’t sleep, strictly speaking, unihemispherically, we show something like it and we use it under a situation that is to some extent similar to what the ducks did. That perhaps when we sleep in a new environment we perceive greater risk, and so we sleep more asymmetrically, and this allows us to have a better chance of detecting bumps in the night.

RR: To hear the rest of my conversations with Dr. Rattenborg and Dr. Kilduff, visit sleepreviewmag.com and click on “resources,” where you’ll see all our podcasts. You’ll also find our other conference preview for the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, which immediately precedes the SLEEP meeting in Boston.

That wraps up our conference preview. Thanks so much for listening, and visit us in person at the meeting at booth #1427 on the exhibit floor. See you there.