The Role of Sleep in Emotional Learning

The slow waves that we didn't know what their function was when we fall asleep are actually sweeping through and cleaning our brains from the debris that builds up across wakefulness. We can see evidence of volatile emotions, but it's hard to get from mechanistic studies because animals have a difficult time telling us how they're feeling like humans. It's fairly problematic to deprive people of sleep too much, especially children where it's so obvious. Sleep is really important also for a lot of developmental steps that have critical time windows.