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VOLUME XXXV | NOV 2019
The Need for Sleep in the Adolescent Brain

Li Wei Chen
Sleep is a basic need. Mounting evidence suggests this is particularly true during adolescence, a developmental period involving substantial changes in the brain regions supporting cognition, learning, and emotion. Although sleep loss is a normative psychosocially and biologically driven developmental process, it occurs alongside behaviors that characterize adolescence, including deepening cognitive sophistication, improved emotion regulation, and intensifying social cognition, calling into question how sleep may impact these developmental milestones.