Chaotic mapping :)

The title sounds very geeky indeed and its meant to be so! (Bizu ... I hope you are reading this :P)
This is actually the answer to a certain day in Kgp life that perplexed me for a long time. It was the last day of end-sem exams of the 6th semester. It was late April and terribly hot ... with 40+ temperatures and 5 papers back-to-back. The last day was Data Communications and Operations Research, with each paper lasting 3 hours. As was the norm in Kgp, all the preparations were left for the last moment but this being the end sem, the volume of material to be studied was enormous. So, the evening before the last, when I came back from the 3rd paper, things looked bleak indeed. I had slept very little the previous night and the paper didn't go particularly well!
But the upside was that the ordeal will be over in 24 hours and the trip to Europe was just a fortnight away. So I prepared myself for a last stand against 2 formidable enemies. With so little time and so many things to study, the strategy was to go for pure mugga - no absorbing of concepts, just memorize everything from start to end (which was about 400 pages! for each subject). Given the volume of material, its natural to just focus on certain selected parts which are more likely to be asked in the exam .... the sorting took longer than usual and so when I actually started studying, the situation was almost desperate! It turned out that I didn't have time to sleep that night and my constant companion during the struggle was the burning fag. (I quit smoking after that day :)) I read an incredible amount of material that night (amounting to a total of about 4 months worth of class notes and 300 printed pages for 2 subjects) and I went to the exam quite confident but with a strange buzz in my head (due to lack of sleep).
First paper was Data Comm and the questions seemed familiar indeed but inspite of the familiarity, it turned out to be a disaster! It sounds strange but the questions seemed to be a continuum of familiar bits and pieces floating in an unknown ocean. I couldn't associate a particular topic to a particular chapter. In other words, I couldn't map a topic to a fixed chapter - hence the name of this article ... Chaotic mapping. But as it turned out the chaotic mapping was much more complicated than I thought.
Coming back to the present day .... now I'm at the Seoul National University, a new grad student at the EECS dept and one of the subjects that I have taken up has a rather exotic name - "Hyper networks of Learning and Memory". Put in simple terms, it tries to model human brain's learning capacities and memory functionalities using computational tools. During a particular lecture, the professor was discussion about long and short term memory and the importance of sleep in the development of long term memory. He said that during sleep, the short term memory (what we learned during the day) is mapped and organised into the long term memory which is retained for days or months and even years. And all of a sudden that day in Kgp flashed in my mind.
As it turned out, that given the amount to material I studied that night, my short term memory was overloaded. All the material was randomly placed in the short term memory and because I didn't' sleep that night, my brain had no chance of organising and transferring it to long term memory. That's the reason, I could not associate the questions to a particular chapter. Thus the chaotic mapping started actually at the neuronal level deep inside my short term memory! And the result ... - well, somehow managed to survive on my short term memory during Data Comm but my luck and the timer of the short term memory ran out during Operations Research Paper(the downside of the classic mugga effect :)). On top of that the lack of sleep found an ally in the extreme temperature and returned with a vengeance! The information that I stored previous night, was completely wiped away by the afternoon, my thinking abilities were clouded by the exhaustion and my brain circuitry went haywire. The situation was very much like that of strife torn country after the assassination of its dictator - in other words total Chaos! Luckily for me I managed to pass the paper inspite of this abysmal performance.
Later that evening, it was time for celebration ... the ordeal of the past few days were over and there was new hope in the things to come!