Bursting, also known as burst firing, is a very diverse general phenomenon of neuronal activation patterns in the central nervous system and spinal cord in which periods of rapid action potential spiking are followed by periods of quiescence much longer than typical inter-spike intervals. Bursting is thought to be im- -portant in the operation of robust central pattern generators, neural code transmission, and some neuropathologies such as epilepsy. Bursting research, both directly and in relation to how it participates in other neural phenomena, has been very popular since the beginnings of cellular neuroscience and is closely related to the fields of neural synchronization, neural coding, plasticity, and attention.
