General Discussion 1

Abstract

Schwartzkroin: A couple of comments related to Dr. Sutula’s presentation: First, I really applaud you on what I think is a provocative presentation. So let me be provocative in response and say that I think that it is dangerous to be searching too hard for common mechanisms, that that’s the way the field got in trouble at the very beginning when we started looking for a silver bullet that would explain everything, and that the field really exploded when we understood that epilepsy wasn’t epilepsy, it was the epilepsies. As an outsider to a kindling conference, I would say that kindling isn’t kindling, that these are in fact multiple and potentially very different kinds of phenomena that people are dealing with, and that there is kind of a common tool that they use to study them. I would draw the analogy to the advent of slice technology: slice is a technique. Is there a entity called kindling, or in fact is as, I perceive it to be today, that all the things that we are talking about at this kindling conference are exactly the same kind of issues that we deal with in any epilepsy or synaptic plasticity meeting, that they are in fact a set of overlapping problems that we need to deal with and kindling is a way, a technical way, of approaching that kind of question?