Kindling

Kindling = easily combustible material for starting a fire (Webster's Dictionary) .

In Neurology

Def: The tendency of some regions of the brain to react to repeated low-level electrical stimulation by progressively boosting electrical discharges, thereby lowering seizure thresholds.

The phenomenon of kindling in epilepsy was first discovered accidentally by Graham Goddard in 1967 when studying the learning process in rats which included electrical stimulation of the rats' brains at a very low intensity, too low to cause any type of convulsion.

Goddard and others later demonstrated that it was possible to induce kindling chemically as well (Hargreaves, 1996.)

Kindling is a widely used model for the development of seizures and epilepsy in which the duration and behavioral involvement of induced seizures increases after seizures are induced repeatedly.

It is used by scientists to study the effects of repeated seizures on the brain.

In the kindling model, seizures begin to occur spontaneously after repeated subconvulsive stimul.

The seizure that occurs after the first electrical stimulation lasts a short time and is accompanied by a small amount of behavioral effects compared with seizures that result from repeated stimulations.

The lengthening of duration and intensification of behavioral accompaniment eventually reaches a plateau after repeated stimulation.