TY - JOUR T1 - The temporal paradox of Hebbian learning and homeostatic plasticity JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/116400 SP - 116400 AU - Friedemann Zenke AU - Wulfram Gerstner AU - Surya Ganguli Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/22/116400.abstract N2 - Hebbian plasticity, a synaptic mechanism which detects and amplifies co-activity between neurons, is considered a key ingredient underlying learning and memory in the brain. However, Hebbian plasticity alone is unstable, leading to runaway neuronal activity, and therefore requires stabilization by additional compensatory processes. Traditionally, a diversity of homeostatic plasticity phenomena found in neural circuits are thought to play this role. However, recent modelling work suggests that the slow evolution of homeostatic plasticity, as observed in experiments, is insufficient to prevent instabilities originating from Hebbian plasticity. To remedy this situation, we suggest that homeostatic plasticity is complemented by additional rapid compensatory processes, which rapidly stabilize neuronal activity on short timescales. ER -