Philip Low, Ph.D.

The Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical & Computational Biology - CNL
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Founder & CEO, NeuroVigil, Inc.

"A New Way to Look at Sleep."

In my talk, I will dispel several myths about sleep. First I will show that some birds, zebra finches, though they are devoid of a neocortex, can nevertheless produce sleep patterns which in terms of their spectral structure and circadian distribution are strikingly similar to mammalian sleep.

Then I will move to humans and show that human sleep and waking stages can be reliably and automatically identified using a new computed map of brain activity throughout time produced using a single channel of EEG. In particular, waking and REM sleep have completely distinct signatures in this map. We should thus no longer think of REM sleep as a "paradoxical" state with "awake-like" EEGs as we have for over 50 years. We reveal an algorithm (Sleep Parametric EEG Automated Recognition System, SPEARS) that can reliably score sleep using a single channel. This obviates the need for human scoring based on 40 year old rules while at the same time minimizing the number of electrodes necessary to monitor sleep patients. I will discuss the potential of sleep signals as biomarkers for both disease states and CNS drugs. Finally, I will introduce a new human sleep state and EEG derived, not DNA derived, biomarkers for genetic similarities.

These results have been validated using manual scoring and computational techniques using data collected and evaluated by different personnel, in different recording environments in the United States (UCSD-VA) and in Germany (MPI-Munich).