A Further Investigation into the Mechanisms Underlying the Kindling Phenomenon

Abstract

For many of us who work on the kindling phenomenon, there is often some ambiguity about our intentions. Are we investigating a learning model or an epilepsy model? Most neuroscientists would agree that claims of a relationship between epilepsy and learning are risky, to say the least. Consequently, we usually play it safe by using terms such as neural plasticity, or we focus on kindling as an epilepsy model. There is at least a little psychologist in all of us however, and that part of us would like to “solve” learning. We have been rather disappointed by recent data that seemed to us to be inconsistent with a learning model view of the kindling. In this paper we will review some of the work that led to an increasing skepticism about the validity of kindling as a learning model, and then we will describe some of our most recent work. This work, we believe, suggests that it may be premature to give up on the relevance of kindling to learning.